About Rutger
Nice to meet you
Hi, my name is Rutger Mandelings, I was born in Flanders, Belgium on the 13th of September 1994.
I studied woodworking and later wood technology and from 2001 until 2016 I was a member of scouting.
My studies and scouting made me fall in love with nature and traveling. In our society traveling is usually reserved for the weekends and holidays while we work on the other days. I wish to turn this around.
My purpose for this website
Sharing stories. To start off with, I want to share some stories about my travels and what want through my mind at the time.
Giving advice from my perspective. I will also write a blog post every now and then about something I wish I knew before I left Belgium.
Mind & Body. I don’t know yet how this section will go. The aim of it is to talk about mental and physical health and what I do to keep up with it.
Share photos. If i find some photos that I took that i think are worthy to share on this website I will put them in the photography section with I little story about where and when I was.
Opinion about books. And lastly (for now), I think it would be nice to share some of my insights on the books I read. It will also keep me motivated to read more books.
What prompted me to build a website?
I already thought about doing something online and sharing stories about my travels. I just never thought of a full-on website because I had absolutely no experience with it.
That’s when I came across this video of Ali Abdaal (on the left). In which he explains what the benefits of having your own website are. This time I was not going to overthink it and just do it, like Ali also mentioned. In hindsight, I think better thought a bit more about it and watched some tutorials before choosing a service.
I would like to thank Ali Abdaal for his amazing footage on YouTube and Spotify. His videos inspire me a lot and without him, I never would’ve started a blog.
So, once I decided to go with WordPress and I bought a subscription and a domain. But then I got stuck, I didn’t know how to edit anything, and I couldn’t install any plug-ins unless I would pay extra. It turns out that I needed a hosting platform.
So, then I found the following tutorial by Tyler Moore (video on the right) that explains, very thoroughly, how one can build a website from scratch with a hosting platform.
I followed every step and now it’s here, my own website. If you watch the video, you will notice a lot of similarities between the example website and mine. But I think that’s ok. Thank you, Tyler Moore, for your amazing tutorial!