GBG Site (formerly GBG Recipes) has been a project born out of university procrastination. I initially wanted a reliably accessible documentation of my recipes, especially so that my partner and friends could access them when they decided to bake/cook. I decided on a simple layout to ensure that readers wouldn't be too taken aback by having everything all in your face, all at once. Many recipe websites nowadays, and this may just be a comment on the current state of the WWW, are needlessly complex in such a way that can reduce readability. My Mum is particularly stunned by all of the pop-ups that make websites a wrestle to navigate, and as a result she avoids web-navigation like the plague. Why would you want to make it hard for the average viewer to take in and actually use your recipes?
One of the pet-peeves that I had as I just started to get into cooking at the start of university (curse the chair in the blatantly too-small-for-chairs kitchen I had at home), was that the recipe sites I was using for reference were often too wordy near the beginning. Lots of cooking technique was either taught to me by many Youtube chefs (Adam Ragusea, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Baking On A Budget alongside many others) or a technique that I wanted to come up with by myself using foundational knowledge of chemistry and pharmaceutical formulation (which highly complements food science - this gives me flashbacks to when I said "Baking is the chemistry of the home" in my university interviews.) Navigating through an author's life story tended to get in the way of scrolling to the ingredient ratios that I wanted in the first place. Combine this with cookie pop-ups, advertising and affiliate links, alongside the added concerns that what you are reading is AI generated, and I began to become disillusioned. I figured "Surely, I could do better." So I decided to DIY.
In school I had HTML and CSS classes, but definitely forgot the majority amongst studying pharmacy, so I just searched up any issues I had as I went along. I liked the idea of bare HTML and CSS; I was looking for the least amount of layers when it came to complexity and they managed to provide everything I required. I decided against making my website with popular open-source tools such as Hugo solely because I wanted the process of problem solving that comes with writing your own code.
My first iteration was hosted with porkbun.com, which is also the domain registrar that I use. This was okay, but it had issues with remembering the prior CSS file, despite me changing the contents and reuploading. This meant that I had to go back and rename my CSS document on every page, as this seemed to solve the issue, which was quite irritating to do this for every minor change. This pushed me towards self-hosting, which I wanted to do anyway at some point, but I struggled to understand how this could be done in a portable way. This changed when I discovered through my partner a wiki based on a presentation ran by FUTO software on self-hosting servers (the link leads to an archived form of the wiki as it is currently unavailable as of writing this.) This sparked inspiration within me to embark on a journey to host my website, as well as expand it to include a blog and RSS feeds so that site updates wouldn't need announcement via social media.
A lot of the technical details can be omitted, as they exist within the hyperlinked wiki, however this coming paragraph will detail anything of note within the process.