Alex Mendelson

Making this website

I created this website first using the R package Distill. Recently, I decided to use this as an excuse to learn some web code. I now write each page by hand in HTML5, and use a custom CSS theme for style. The IDE I prefer is Visual Studio Code. You can inspect element on any page to see how simple HTML can be, or see the next section for more robust code availability.

As for learning HTML5 and CSS, I relied almost entirely on W3Schools. I also spent a lot (too much) time inspect element-ing websites that match the vibe that I wanted, with little success (lots of websites these days are too complicated under the hood for a beginner to understand).

Hosting this website

There are lots of ways to do this. I chose to use GitHub Pages, which is free for individual use. Long ago, I purchased my domain name (alexmendelson.com) from some ancient domain provider that has since been folded into Google domains, which has now been purchased by SquareSpace. All that to say, I pay ~$20 per year to have a custom URL. You don't need to do that if using GitHub Pages, but your URL will be a bit funky if you don't. There is a slightly confusing process (for a beginner) to set up a custom domain through Pages, but the wiki documentation is good.