Hello World!

03 Jan 2023 in Blog

Some notes and stories on constructing this website.

Having a personal blog sounds like a really cool thing to me. I tried to build the first website when I was a freshman and eager to explore new stuff. I bought a domain name, rent a server, and followed some random tutorials from Baidu. (Thanks to the Great Firewall I was unable to get access to Google at that time.) In this way I learned for the first time that there is a popular blog framework called WordPress, some weird space called MySQL database, and that a computer system can be accessed remotely from command line tools. Everything looks like magic and is quite appealing to me (not as appealing as mathematics though).

After tons of trials and errors, I eventually succeeded in deploying a WordPress blog on my virtual server. Imagine how excited I was when I typed the URL into my browser, and the index page popped up as desired. I showed a friend of mine this achievement and he asked a very good question, “What do you plan to write on your blog?” It turned out that I had had no more than 10 posts before the blog was finally abandoned due to my laziness and heavy costs of maintenance.

I learned several lessons from this experience. First, do not build a blog if you are too lazy to write. Second, do not work as a back-end engineer if you want to enjoy your life. Third and most importantly, never use WordPress! Nonetheless there is one thing I gained there: I learned how to freely surf the Internet out of China by utilizing an overseas server, which would later completely change my life.

The second attempt was three years ago. At that time I was frustrated at being confined at home during the pandemic in China and was in a terrible mood for research. To be honest, I believed that the last semester of my undergraduate should have been full of traveling and exploration, and I felt that someone had stolen my last happy days of college before I embarked on a new challenging journey as a Ph.D. student. Out of dismay I decided that I would try something new like web development so I learned about HTML/CSS and JavaScript online. During that period I tested a few static site generators including Hexo, Jekyll, and Hugo as demos.

These frameworks are written in different languages (Hexo: Node.js; Jekyll: Ruby; Hugo: Go) but have very similar features. One most notable feature in common is that they do not look beautiful. But fortunately there are hundreds of themes crafted by different users. Very recently I got some spare time to search for a good template. This time my aim was to construct a website containing both a blog and an academic page or résumé. And here are some good designs.

Hugo Themes: Academic, Blist, Clean White, Eureka, Jane, Resume.

Jekyll Themes: Academic Pages, Al-folio, Galada, Hydejack, Hydrogen, Zolan.

Hydejack is one of the most good-looking and well-documented themes among them. There are even some showcases on the official website so I can refer to their source codes on GitHub if I encounter troubles. Naturally it became my choice for this site.

A few fun facts about this website:

• This is deployed on a virtual private server instead of GitHub Pages. There is a git repo located on the VPS, which enables automated deployment on my pushing the modifications.
• The cover picture was inspired by the cover of the novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which I read during the pandemic. I wanted a blurry version of that photo with some cyberpunk flavor. So I searched Unsplash to find this original work and stacked it with a movie poster of The Matrix.
• The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) of my name was generated using this tool. I thought no one would have had trouble pronouncing my name from Chinese Pinyin but I was wrong. The syllable le is actually a bit misleading as a single letter e is more commonly pronounced as /e/ in English. But in Pinyin it is a back vowel /ɤ/ instead of the front vowel.
• I borrowed a few ideas from the design of personal websites of this Google researcher and this professor. I also admire their works a lot.
• I checked this guy’s solutions for a few troubles in adapting the blog theme.

Further plans:

• Introduce a commenting system. Some choices: Disqus, Cusdis, Livefyre, CommentBox.
• Create a Tags page and a Categories page when there are enough blog posts.