Where to start on the long journey to the website you are currently looking at? I guess at the beginning is as good a place as any.
The Idea
It all started, like many good ideas, with a few beers. Sitting outside one cold September evening 2020, obeying the then current Covid lockdown rules, myself and Alistair got talking about his allotment, some issues they were experiencing with emails and how it would be good to create a web site for the Allotment.
The main thing was it was to be as cheap as possible, preferably free.
Now, whilst I work in Information Technology, hosting, designing, building and maintaining websites is not something I had really done before. I had created a simple website some 15-20 years ago, and had a play around with Wix about 5 years ago. But putting together a website for an organisation…? And for free…?
“Let me have a look and get back to you” was my slightly drunken mutterings.
Initial Version
Free meant self hosting. But what to “Host” it on, and what to host “it” on?
Hundreds, if not thousands of internet searches later and I had settled on WordPress {of which I had zero knowledge) running in a Linux environment on a VirtualBox Virtual machine hosted on my personal home computer. By no means ideal. But something cheap (free) of which I had complete, local control. Somewhere I could make mistakes and learn from
When researching and searching for information and help on how to set up a local WordPess site on a local VM I found lots of less than helpful and contradictory advise. Whilst there was also a lot of good information, Linuxbabe consistently provided clear, concise and extremely helpful information
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