This web page is of cause an important part of my computer science lab. Having prior experience with the content management system Drupal, I chose to continue to use it in my web site as well. The last version I worked with was Drupal 7 and the latest is Drupal 9 as of 2022. An upgrade of my skills was apparently necessary anyways.
I could have created a web server on my own hardware, as I have done frequently in the past. However, in the recruitment ads there has become common to ask for experience with cloud services. For this reason I decided to run my web site on a cloud service, and after some searching on the Internet I decided that Amazon Web Services (AWS) offered me the best solution when it come to price and performance. With this said, I cannot guarantee that AWS is the best solution for everyone. Please follow my example and do your own research before selecting a cloud service provider.
So, by hosting my web site on AWS I can get some experience with cloud services. It's a skill in demand, but I will wait a couple of months before I claim that particular set of skills. I do recognize a lot from my Unix and Linux experience, but there are some new things.
So after selecting AWS as provider, I had to select which service offering was the right one for me. I selected Amazon Lightsail, created a Drupal instance, and this is it. The instance comes with some valuable software packages preinstalled. The most notable of these are: drush, and composer. However, before using these commands, it is necessary to change directory to /opt/bitnami/drupal. This took some time and a question to the Drupal community to discover. That community has a lot of skills, and help is usually provided within 1-2 days. Highly recommended. After discovering this I could easily upgrade Drupal to the latest version, which was necessary according to the information in my web site. The upgrade had to be done in order to solve an issue with security.
With this done, I could turn my attention to configuring my web site. Drupal can be extended with two basic types of packages: modules who provide new functions and capabilities, and themes who provide different looks and color sets. My original plan was to use the theme Zen, which I had previous experience with. However, I soon discovered that Zen is not available for Drupal 9 and I had to select something else. More work ensued, and at the end of this I decided to splurge on the theme VaniPro. It looks fairly much like Zen, it is responsive like Zen, and it is reasonably priced for unemployed people.
More work ensued when the selected theme had a pane with moving pictures, that created a more dynamic impression then I wonted. It took some time to discover that I had to disable the "slider on homepage", and how to do just that.
I wanted another background color, and took inspiration from parchments and paper who can yellow with age. I find that the color I selected is easy on my eyes, and gives me a restful environment on my web site.
As you can see, I have also begun to fill my web site with content. However, it will go slowly at first since I braught the book "Drupal 8 SEO: The visual step-by-step guide to Drupal Seach Engine Optimization" by Ben Finklea. I will make what I can to make my web site appear as high as possible on Google and Bing. Maybe I can eventually sell my web site. It's a one chance in a million but hey, that's a lot better than my chances at the lottery.