I've been wanting to have a website to put things on for a while, but the idea of paying hosting costs for what is basically a personal thing didn't feel right to me. Using an online website building tool just didn't feel right for the project to me. I didn't really have a good machine to run a website on though, so I put the idea aside for a while. Recently though, I found an old raspberry pi, which is what I'm using now.
I had to play around with the pi quite a bit to get it to work properly. It had a super old version of raspbian, which initially I figured would be good enough, but I was (as you could expect) getting tons of errors, and there's not too many resources for a decades old version of Debian. I had to (the horror!) use man pages for some of the old software which didn't quite work the same in 2014. What wasn't helping was that all this time, I still couldn't get SSH to work, and because the WiFi card was fried, I had to use an ethernet connection. I don't have any super long ethernet cables, and the only port is right by the wifi router. In order to use the internet while also controlling the pi, and without being able to use SSH, I had to basically set up everything I needed on the floor in the hallway.
... I ended up deciding to use a modern OS. I actually had some issues with this, because a lot of the most recent versions of raspbian failed to boot. I ended up installing a headless 32bit version of raspbian, at which point I was able to SSH onto the machine and set everything else for the website up. Now it's just happily siting on top of the WiFi router, giving this page to you!