ようこそ、私のブログへ (Welcome to my blog)

Hello world! Welcome to my blog.

1. Intro

Today I am very happy to announce that my blog is publicly available. 🎉

All contents and the site configuration are available at the GitHub repository too.

The blog has:

• Dark theme
• i18n
• Comment system
• RSS supports with full content

The blog is generated by Hugo using this beautiful Hugo theme, DoIt (Sincerely thanks for HEIGE-PCloud for maintaining this Hugo theme). In fact, the way I setup my blog is very similar to the way how DoIt’s official demo setups. The blog is hosted on Vercel, which is visible from China’s mainland. So in theory, friends from China mainland should be able to visit my blog without VPNs or proxies.

2. Why do I need a blog?

I write posts, but only friends in WeChat Moments can see them. I really hope there exists a platform where all friends of mine from overall the world can see my posts. In another word, A WeChat Moments but globalized. Not only that, I’d like to write in different languages so friends from both China and Canada can read my post easily. That’s why building a blog with i18n support becomes the best solution. The only downside is the privacy concern. Since the blog is publicly available on the internet, you can’t share something sensitive or too emotional on the blog. Fortunately, I am not the type of person who likes to share too much.

Well, talking about post writing, maybe some people would recommend: why not WordPress? Bilibili posts? Or Medium? Or Zhihu? Or whatever platform?

So here comes the second reason why I need to build my own blog, instead of using the existing platform. The harsh reality is that Internet has no memory. Please take a look at the first section of this article. Posts you published just mean money and view count for those service providers. Once the value is gone, they delete your posts for their convenience. What’s even worse is that this article and this sue case have pointed out: You never owned your accounts! Service providers like Google, Baidu have the absolute right of managing your accounts, and they can ban or delete your account whenever they want without notification (Now, I somehow understand why people are promoting Web3.0).

So how to gain back the true ownership of your contents? The answer is building your own blog. How to make your post stays longer on internet? The answer is hosting the blog yourself. Can we avoid building a blog from scratch using Angular, React, Vue or whatever frontend frameworks? Fortunately, yes! We have static site generators, like Hexo, Hugo, etc. The static site generator handles the generation of the source code of your blog so that you can focus on content creation without worrying about the code. (Well, you still need to spend the effort to choose and setup the theme to prettify your blog, but trust me, it is worth the time as there are many great themes with rich features you can choose from to fulfill your needs.)

With the static site generator, I am able to manage everything about my blog on my PC locally, but I still need to host the blog on the internet. For this, I chose GitHub and Vercel. Although I should worry about being banned on GitHub just like this post and this post, there are many great alternatives to GitHub and Vercel I can choose from. In the worst-case scenario, I can self-hosted my blog from my own home lab. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not promoting sharing illegal contents or anything violating the law, but who knows if one day your GitHub account would get banned for no reason and without any warning.

3. So what contents am I going to post in the future?

I got this covered😉. Simply take a look at the About page of this blog.

Although I can’t guarantee the frequency of writings, feel free to follow my blog, and hopefully we’ll meet again.