A year ago, there was one more place online where I could write for myself. A year later, I’ve written quite a bit after all. Looking back from the vaguely curious junior high school student I once was, fumbling through setting up my first blog, to now—my first year of truly recording things on this blog—I can’t help but sigh at how fast time passes.

Why launch the blog?

Every journey has a reason to begin, though sometimes people just leave on a whim.

To answer that, I’d have to ask the clumsy version of myself who tried deploying my first static blog on Github Pages: there was no real reason. Because that’s cool.

So I learned a bit of HTML, JS, and CSS. Then I spent some time figuring out how Hexo themes actually worked. Stumbling along, I modified a Hexo theme and somehow managed to turn it into something close to what I wanted. Back then, I didn’t even know what Webpack was, yet I still spent ages editing .min.css and .min.js files one by one. Thinking about it now, all I can do is smile.

You don’t need a reason to do something. As long as there isn’t a strong reason not to, just go ahead and do it.

Some things that happened this year

2022.04：

• launch the blog, and send out a Hello World on Github Pages.

• 19 years old

• (with others) took part in some competitions: Challenge Cup, Chuang Qingchun, innovation and entrepreneurship

  2022.06：

• CET-6 scores came out; although the score wasn’t very pretty, passing it in the second semester of freshman year was still not bad

• attended a formalistic college student representative meeting

  2022.07：

• got an Azure student server, and switched the blog framework to Wordpress

• woke up at five in the morning to move to the new campus, it exhausted me

  2022.08：

• got my driver’s license

• semester started, watched the new recruits do military training

  2022.09：

• took over a team passed down from senior students and cleaned up the mess

• became a deputy department head in the college student union

  2022.10：

• organized the opening ceremony for the new recruits new students

• PCR tests, PCR tests, PCR tests every day

• got dragged into the school sports meet

  2022.11：

• got a new computer; the old 1715 could finally rest for a while

• 11.24, may the dead rest in peace; do not stay silent, do not become numb

  2022.12:

• to prevent larger-scale protests, the government sent us home

• got COVID once

  2022.01:

• long-distance trip, hiked Tiger Leaping Gorge, visited Lijiang…

• goofy red packet relay in the department WeChat group during the New Year

  2022.02：

• bought a new monitor and controller; now this really is an esports dorm

Statistics

I switched statistics platforms three times, so I don’t have continuous data. We can only make do with what’s available.

Because Google Analytics is easily blocked, I can only make a rough estimate. Using Umami’s monthly traffic first, then roughly estimating my own traffic, I can say that over the past year I got about 8,000 visitors and around 10,000 PV.

For a site that has only been up for a year, has no ICP filing, and has not been indexed by Baidu, that’s already pretty good.

This year, I wrote 27 articles in total and received 18 new comments. On average, that comes to 2.25 articles per month.

The changes I went through

In the early days after launching the blog, for SEO and to avoid sensitive topics, everything I posted was half-baked technical blog content. Looking at it now, I really did myself a disservice.

As for self-censorship, I wrote a post. Since then, I no longer censor myself. Only then did this blog finally return to its original purpose—not writing for the sake of writing, but writing when I genuinely feel moved to. If even that impulse has to be worn away by self-censorship, then there’s no point talking about writing anything else.

I personally believe the purpose of language is to convey the most accurate information with the most concise words. Writing is a kind of cultivation. The goal of that cultivation is proper balance between detail and brevity, clear structure, and refined language. I used to be obsessed with making every blog post long enough, but after writing plenty of verbose nonsense, I finally let that go.

……

A few other things

This year my blog moved from Hexo to Wordpress, and recently I’ve wanted to move it to Hugo as well. But since it has already been running for so long and I’ve already spent a year on SEO, switching to yet another blog system would be too much tinker, so I just Stick with Wordpress.

I also tried hosting the blog in many different places: Hong Kong Azure, Cloudflare, Racknerd, BandWagon. After going in circles and stepping into plenty of pitfalls, I ended up back on Hong Kong Azure. Maybe plain and steady really is best.

I really regret not trying more technology stacks from the very beginning, and that’s something I want to do this year. To make a better-looking theme and the features I wanted, I learned how to write PHP. To deploy Umami, I learned how to use Docker Compose… Building a blog is a learning process to begin with: the more you learn, the more you write; the more you write, the more you learn.

Finally

Looking back on this year, I always have this feeling of “How did I only get this little done?”

I really spent far too much time on public affairs, and far too little on improving myself. I’m becoming more and more uninterested in the student union. When I first entered university, I was full of enthusiasm for serving classmates and improving myself, but that passion was worn away little by little by one meaningless formalistic activity after another. Looking back, maybe I really was too naive at the time… Even if I genuinely wanted to accomplish something in the student union, the formalism and bureaucracy that fill this university would turn every passionate person into a gloomy shell who only wants to coast through life and wait for the days to pass. In today’s terms, that’s called “lying flat.”

When poor, cultivate oneself; when successful, help the world. Given where I am now, I really should seriously think about how to cultivate myself first.