fn main() {
    println!("Hello World!");
}

Setting Up The Blog

For a while I have wanted to buy a domain and set up my own site on the internet to document learning. Spurred on by the new year motivation I have done exactly that; now being the proud owner of james-welsh.co.uk. Sadly jameswelsh.co.uk was taken and jameswelsh.com cost almost £15,000! This page is hosted on GitHub pages and is build using a basic static site generator Jekyll. At some point in the future I would love to build a blog page from scratch using Rocket and Yew; however in the interest of getting up and running in hours as opposed to weeks, negating the possibility that this blog dies before it is even built, I opted to get something working fast.

The process of getting to this point was actually relatively painless. I bought my domain name using Gandi before following GitHub’s docs on setting up a page using Jekyll. The last thing to do was to configure both the DNS settings and the GitHub Pages settings so that when people visit james-welsh.com they visit my GitHub page. I found the official documentation around this to be incredibly unclear and make the entire process seem more complex than it actually was. In the end all I had to do was to:

  1. Remove the Gandi parking page A record.
    @ 10800 IN A 217.70.184.38
  1. Add 4 new A records pointing to the GitHub server IPs.
    @ 1800 IN A 185.199.108.153
    @ 1800 IN A 185.199.109.153
    @ 1800 IN A 185.199.110.153
    @ 1800 IN A 185.199.111.153
  1. Remove the Gandi parking page CNAME record.
    www 1800 IN CNAME webredir.vip.gandi.net.
  1. Add your own CNAME record, where GITHUB_USERNAME is your GitHub username.
    www 1800 IN CNAME [GITHUB_USERNAME].github.io

And that’s it. Once you add a CNAME file to your git repo containing your address you have it all up and running. The only thing to note is that the DNS changes can take 24 hours to take effect so don’t worry if this takes a while.

I am aiming to publish a new blog post every Sunday. By Sunday the 16th of Jan there should be an initial post here on OpenGL!

Thanks for reading,

James Welsh