Eleven dollars a year

Eleven dollars a year. That's roughly what alessandroazzaretto.com costs.

Today I bought it, on Cloudflare. Until today this site only existed in a folder on my PC. Now it has an address.

Where I started

The site worked, but only locally. Double-click index.html, and that was it.

Putting it online took four pieces:

• a repository on GitHub, set to private;
• the domain, bought on Cloudflare;
• Cloudflare to host the site;
• Google Search Console, to tell Google the site exists.

Private repository means the code stays mine, while the site is public. Anyone can read the pages. Nobody sees the folder behind them.

What got in the way

The first problem was hiding in the folder itself.

My project folder doesn't only hold the site. It also holds CLAUDE.md, the rules file, and the /articolo command. Working files. Not meant for visitors.

Publish the folder as it is → everything goes online → CLAUDE.md readable by anyone who guesses the address.

So I moved the whole public site into a subfolder, public/. Only that folder goes online. The working files stay outside.

One folder, one border.

Second surprise: for new projects, Cloudflare no longer recommends Pages, the service I expected to use. It recommends Workers. So I used Workers.

So what? For a site made of HTML and CSS, very little. A small configuration file says "the site is in public/", and Cloudflare serves those files. No server code, no build step.

Only public/ goes online. The working files stay home.

What I set up

I connected the repository to Cloudflare with automatic deploys. Every time I send my changes to GitHub (a push), Cloudflare picks them up and updates the site.

So what? Write an article → push → it's online. No uploading files by hand.

Then I turned off the temporary address Cloudflare gives every project, the one ending in workers.dev. So what? The site lives at one address only. Mine.

Before going live I also got the pages ready for Google:

• every page has a title and a description written for it;
• every page has a canonical tag, a line that tells Google "this is the official address of this page";
• every English page points to its Italian twin, so Google can show the right version to the right person;
• a sitemap, a file listing every page of the site, plus a robots.txt that tells search engines where to find it;
• on the home page, a small block of structured data saying who I am: name, electronic engineering student at Politecnico di Milano, link to the site.

Last step: I verified the domain on Google Search Console and submitted the sitemap. It found 16 pages.

Eight in English, eight in Italian. Exactly what the sitemap lists.

What I learned

A working folder and a public site are two different things. Keeping them in the same place works fine, right up to the day you publish.

Tools change faster than habits. The obvious answer used to be Pages; today the recommendation is Workers. It pays to check what the provider suggests now.

Next step

The site is online, but four project pages still say "To be defined". Before, they were placeholders on my PC. Now they're placeholders in public. They need real texts.

Eleven dollars a year for a name on the internet. Now I have to fill it.