11/8/2025

Making this website!

This is the story of how I made this lovely website

It all started because I thought ChatGPT was lame

You see, I love computers, and I mess with them constantly. As anyone who messes with computers knows, you WILL have random problems that nobody has ever had before. Whenever this happens to me, often the only useful resource would be an AI chatbot. Despite my disdain for OpenAI and michaelsoft and such, it's a popular technology for a reason. That shit works. I was uncomfortable with it but, it was virtually the only time I would use the technology, so I justified my use for a while by saying "I don't use it too much, so it's okay." Eventually, I realized it wasn't, and I needed to find a reasonable alternative so that I wouldn't be actively contributing to real world problems. So I took a crappy HP workstation I bought off Facebook Marketplace, slapped in a GTX 1660 Super that I had lying around, and installed Ubuntu Server. Then, I installed Ollama and OpenWebUI, and voilà, AI server. (Side note, I turned up some dials on Chinese LLM DeepSeek and it spat out this when I input one of the sample prompts.) I've been using Tailscale for a while, and it's obviously useful here. I can access my Llama3 chatbot from anywhere using it, no need to expose my little server to the open internet.

But what if I did?

I've owned the brorelol.gay domain for around a year (and boy howdy, .gay domains are expensive). I use it primarily as my Bluesky handle, but I've always wanted to make a website. Back when I was a little chud with no server, I tried a myriad of free website hosting services but none met my standards. They all either served ads or didn't allow for hosting on custom domains. I did find one service that allowed me to host with no ads on brorelol.gay, but the UX on the hosting site itself was awful. So, I eventually abandoned the idea of my own website until I realized yesterday I could pretty easily host it on my HP monstrocity. So that I did. I installed Apache, "wrote" some HTML and CSS, did a li'l port forwarding, and asked my Llama3 chatbot how to make an SSL certificate. And there we have it. Website! I had one remaining concern though.

I don't have a static IP address

My ISP does not, to my knowledge, offer them. So when my dynamic IP inevitably changes, the DNS record pointing at my server's IP address will be wrong, thus making the website unavailable. To solve this, I took a little piece of Python I wrote for a Minecraft server that checks the devices public IP against any A records for a given domain, then has a Discord bot of mine annoy me if it doesn't match. I sent the script over to my server, changed the domain and Discord channel ID, and then set the script to begin running on boot. This was a pretty easy solution, and now my website can never ever go down. Oh, and by the way

I don't know HTML

If it isn't abundantly clear, I've never written HTML. I've been looking at a friend's website's source code for like 4 hours straight. I've never really written HTML or CSS, so I need some examples to figure it out, and online tutorials are boring. Every time I want to figure out something new about HTML, Google doesn't help at all and then my little AI explains it to me with no fuss. I know a decent amount of Python (shocking, I know) but "learning" HTML has been quite a different process. It is a lot more friendly than Python. It doesn't kill itself when you make a slight typo, just chugs on. That being said, don't expect the pages to get any better looking than this. Brorelol.gay is NOT a real website.