Your Own Website: Testing Free Website Hosts

pages.gay

pixelshannon.pages.gay and dotgay.pixelshannon.com hosted by pages.gay, at git.gay

pages.gay is part of git.gay, a fork of Forgejo, which is the same software that powers Codeberg. Upload through the website, or use git. Have your website at the .pages.gay subdomain, or bring your own domain name. It's similar to Codeberg Pages or GitHub Pages, but is a small service. Check their terms of use. Having a variety of small platforms is important to the small web. It's nice to donate if you are able.

Getting Started

• I signed up for an account at git.gay by clicking on the Register button in the top right corner. It was a basic registration process, and I confirmed my email address to activate my account.
• I'm now logged in and at the dashboard, but I don't have any projects yet. Basic instructions to set up a website are on pages.gay, with more documentation available.
• The first step is to make a public repository called named pages. To do that, I'll click on the + icon in the top right, and select New repository from the menu.
• Under Repository name, I typed pages. For Description, I entered Pixel Shannon's test website.
• I changed no other settings, and clicked Create repository

Uploading the website

• Now at my pages repository, I clicked the Upload file button.
• I can drop files or click to upload. I clicked to select my html and css files.
• The files upload and the page shows the files as uploaded in the file drop area.
• Under Commit signed changes, I typed uploading my test website in the first text field. You can add more description, or leave it blank.
• Making no other changes, I clicked the Commit changes button.
• My website is now available at pixelshannon.pages.gay

Add a custom domain or subdomain

• Instructions for using custom domains are available on pages.gay
• I created a .domains file in my pages repository.
• To do this, make sure you are in the same directory with your website's index.html file. Click on the Add file button, and select New file. Name the file .domains. At the top, it should say pages/.domains
• In the text field, I typed the domain I want to use on the first line, with nothing else. I'm going to use a subdomain, so I typed in dotgay.pixelshannon.com
• If you want to, you can add a comment about your change under Commit signed changes. I put Adding my subdomain
• Changing no other settings, I clicked the Commit changes button.
• Now I have a text file added to my repo(short for repository) that is named .domains and only has my custom subdomain in it.
• The next step is to change my DNS settings for the domain name. My DNS is managed by my registrar(Porkbun), so I headed over there to add a record.
• Documentation says to add a DNS CNAME record on your domain pointing to [branch].[repo].[user].pages.gay
• My branch is called main and my repo is called pages, so I created a CNAME record like this.
  • Host: dotgay.pixelshannon.com
  • Target: main.pages.pixelshannon.pages.gay
• The first time I tried to go to my custom subdomain, it didn't load, but I tried again a few minutes later, and my website was available at dotgay.pixelshannon.com
• I haven't tried setting the pages.gay subdomain as a Bluesky handle yet, but I expect it would work with the No DNS panel method, as I have gotten working with Codeberg Pages.