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      ARTICLE NAME="2018-08-21" TITLE="How to self-host a blog">
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    <p>One of the purposes of this blog is to experiment with simple
      ways put up a blog on the web without depending on any blogging
      platform. For this I wanted a free way to deploy static web
      pages on my own domain name. For this I chose
      <a href="https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/">Firebase
	Hosting</a>, partly because I am very familiar with it, having
	worked on the Firebase team and personally knowing many of the
	Hosting development team, but also because it is actually the
	best solution I know of for what I want, and it is free for
	sites that have the traffic of typical personal sites.</p>

    <p>People who are comfortable using the command line might be
      interested in following along the steps I took.</p>

    <ol>
  
      <li>Go to <a href="http://firebase.com">firebase.com</a>, login,
	and create a project.</li>
  
      <li>Install Node. If you don’t already have it installed
	already, I suggest first
	installing <a href="https://github.com/creationix/nvm">nvm</a>
	then doing:
	
	<pre>
      nvm install stable
      nvm use stable</pre>
      </li>
  
      <li>Follow the instructions in
	the <a href="https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/quickstart">Hosting
	quickstart</a>.</li>
  
      <li>Replace <code>index.html</code> with the HTML you want as
	your home page.</lI>
  
      <li>Do
	<pre>
      firebase deploy</pre></li>
  
      <li>I’d recommend storing everything in Git, and you might as
	well make it a public repo, as the web site is public
	anyway. (Mine
	is <a href="https://github.com/eobrain/webhome">on
	GitHub</a>)</li>
  
      <li>You also might want to register a domain name, and use
	Firebase Hosting to use that domain name (complete with a free
	SSL certificate so you the <code>https:</code> security for
	free.). I did this for <code>eamonn.org</code></li>
    </ol>

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