Ophelia Au

Product leader by day and games enthusiast by night. Take a walk with me as I embark on a journey where product meets personal passion.

2 minute read

What a journey I took to even create my first blog post. This blog site was just meant to track my progress on another project, but even getting started with my own custom domain, figuring out where to host it, finding a no-code option for a blog front-end, etc. was quite the learning curve already!

There are a thousand ways to make your own website out there, and after quite a bit of research and no small amount of choice paralysis, here I am! Here’s the summary of what I did:

  1. Buy a custom domain through porkbun.
  2. Create a repo in Github pages. Update the DNS on porkbun to match Github. Made a few mistakes here that took me a while to figure out, with the help of google.
  3. Tried using HTML5UP but wasn’t sure how to make a blog that would work the way I wanted. Maybe I could have made it work, but I found a jekyll solution that worked and was easier to learn.
  4. Followed this tutorial, which was a huge help: https://github.com/skills/github-pages
  5. Created a repository from minimal-mistakes remote theme starter (https://github.com/new?template_name=mm-github-pages-starter&template_owner=mmistakes) and updated everything with my own info.

One thing I’ve learned so far is that there are so many free resources out there that make it easy for someone without technical skill to build cool things. I’m super appreciative of this amazing community!

Creation of the blog aside, I’m planning to use this blog to track my progress and decisions I’ll make for “UNRAVEL” (name subject to change), a multiplayer murder mystery app that replicates a type of game that is popular in China, jubensha. I’ve played it only a few times in the past, with Google translate, and would love to bring English versions to the anglosphere.

My objective is threefold: 1) create an experience that I and others like me would LOVE and 2) rediscover my love for product management in an environment where I truly am the captain of the ship, and 3) learn some new technical and product skills. I feel like I’ve already made a lot of progress on the latter two. Hopefully the first will be met in due time!

I aim to come back to this first ever blog post at some point in the future and see how far I’ve come. I think I’ll be proud of future me, no matter what she has (or hasn’t) accomplished. :grinning: