Day 2 - Up and running

GitHub

GitHub is where I am storing the code and, more importantly, its history. You can see all of the code I’ve committed to date on my account with the catchy account name of ppywmjr. If you want to do the same, you can go to GitHub to sign up. For everything I’m doing, it’s totally free.

Vercel

Signing up for Vercel is also free for a hobby account. To copy what I did, sign up using your new GitHub account and give Vercel the permissions it asks for. Then it will give you the option to clone a template. Choose Next.js. It will probably ask you for more permissions, and then it will give you the option to choose a repository name, I went for "mike-james-rust-personal-site", and then there is a button to create it.

Cloning the Next.js template on Vercel

Then you can sit back and watch as it creates the repository, builds the template app, and deploys it so a webserver. Follow the links to the dashboard and you will see the url of the website you have created. Awesome.

The newly created Next.js template website

So what?

Maybe you’ve made a website on something like Wix or WordPress before. On those website building platforms you can create a site in only a few clicks, so this seems quite similar, right? But fundamentally it is totally different thing. This way you are in control. For instance, if you try to add a PayPal button on a website building platform, they might charge you for it, or remove the html you’ve tried to sneak past their system. But if you take the approach we had done, all of the code to make the server is defined in the GitHub repository so you can change any of the code and define it in any way you wish. You really are in control.