How I leveraged GitHub, Hashnode, and Gumroad to build my website with a blog and a store..!!

After being in the software industry for almost 6 years, I finally created my own website in April last year. You must be wondering, why did it take so long to create a website?

Being a software developer, I wanted to build everything from scratch and somehow I never got to it.

Well, it's not like I did not try..!!

I tried a few times but left it midway because it just did not click. I wanted to build a website that has an integrated blog and can showcase all my work under one domain. All of it did not seem possible back then.

Back in 2016, I tried creating a blog with python-Django and I was able to successfully create one with markdown support. But then I got stuck somewhere with the deployment and the project never took off.

I also tried creating my portfolio on Angular 4 around 2017-18 and even got it deployed to a custom domain. But then, I really did not like the end result and eventually, that project also did not work out.

Somewhere around the start of the financial year 2022-2023, One of my tweets got viral and many people from media, social media started reaching out to me, and one constant feedback that I got was, that it was hard for them to get in touch with me because they could not find much information about me on the internet, and sending a Twitter message was the only way they could get in touch with me.

That is when I decided to work on my internet presence and build my own website. Finding time was a concern alongside a demanding job. So, I decided to create a static website with basic contact information.

I went to Google Domains and looked for available domains and finally decided to go ahead with https://nandan.dev.

I used Github-pages to host my landing page, and mapped it to my domain address. It is effortless to set up. You can follow the documentation provided by GitHub here.

Not just that, all my other projects hosted on GitHub will be shown under my domain. How cool is that? I am listing below a couple of projects that I have hosted. You can add as many pages as you wish :

• React Tic Tac Toe Game
• Angular Accordion

Next comes my blog, I am using Hashnode to publish my blogs and all my blogs are published under the subdomain https://blog.nandan.dev.

You can read more about setting up a custom domain for your Hashnode blog here.

And finally the store. I am using the Gumroad store to list my products and services (There aren't many as of now but I am working on it) and all my products are listed under the sub-domain https://store.nandan.dev.

You can read more about setting up a custom domain for your Gumroad store here.

Now that I have almost covered all the information about the process, let me give you some insight into how much time and money I have saved.

• I could set up all of it, in less than 2 days, by spending like 3 hours a day. So I practically saved a lot on development costs.
• My only expense to date is the amount I paid to buy the domain for one year, i.e. Rs. 399 (or $5) for one year.
• I do not have to pay any extra charges to create sub-domains, and I can practically create 100s of them. 500 to be precise.
• I spent Zero on hosting.
• I can publish unlimited posts under my blog.
• I can list unlimited products in my store and only a small percentage I have to share on each sale.

Now that you have all the insight and information you need. What are you waiting for ?? Stop procrastinating like I did for all these years and Go ahead and build your own ecosystem.

If you come across any issues and need any kind of assistance, drop a comment below or shoot me an email at [email protected] and I will try to help you out.

I am available for mentoring and tech consultation sessions on topmate.

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