Preface
Recently, I published several articles introducing my blog setup process and components. Many friends followed my tutorial and set up their own blogs. Meanwhile, some friends raised questions: In 2022, with so many mature writing and publishing platforms available, why do we still go to such lengths to set up and update our own blogs?
I started writing on WeChat Official Account in my freshman year (2015), sharing articles about books, movies, and personal life. In 2018, I began using Wordpress to build my personal blog, which I migrated to Hugo + Github Pages in 2019 and have maintained ever since.
Over these two years, I’ve updated 70 articles, mainly including course notes, technology, and efficiency-related topics. Since setting up my own website statistics system, there have been nearly 10,000 visitors. In this article, I want to share with you my thoughts on blogging from my personal experience, which might provide some reference for those who are hesitating.
The Initial Intention and Value of Blogging
Publishing Study Notes
Perhaps due to my passion for Chinese literature in middle and high school and the influence of my English major in university, I’ve always enjoyed reading and sharing. Long ago, I maintained a personal WeChat Official Account with an old friend, writing articles about books, movies, music, and personal life. This was my first time conveying my emotions through words, and I experienced the joy and touch brought by external feedback.
Later, for various reasons, the Official Account stopped updating, and I hadn’t published articles publicly for a long time. However, because I had the idea of changing majors at that time, I was constantly learning new knowledge on my own and would regularly record notes and learning insights in my note-taking software, gradually developing a habit of recording.
Especially during my study in Hong Kong, because the courses were taught entirely in English, I needed to spend a lot of time reviewing and organizing after class. I also shared with many classmates, so I picked up the long-abandoned blog and successively published many study notes, receiving positive feedback and thanks from many classmates. Later, I added components such as website visit statistics and comments. Occasionally checking, I would be pleasantly surprised to find many visitors from search engines, which provided me with a lot of motivation to continue updating.
Blog articles are different from scattered knowledge points. They require specific themes, certain writing structures, and complete content. This prompts me to sort out and summarize my knowledge system when conceiving and writing, sometimes needing to use mind maps and flowcharts to aid understanding. This process constantly reinforces the knowledge points I’ve learned and helped me through many assignments and exams.
Although not many people read it in the early stages, I viewed it as my channel of expression and a window to gain recognition and value. Therefore, writing an article required a lot of effort, making me more disciplined in giving up many meaningless distractions and investing more time in polishing my articles. Moreover, the time pressure also promoted my thinking about learning methods and efficiency, naturally understanding and thinking from the perspective of the entire knowledge structure when listening to lectures or reading materials.
Recording Work Insights
After starting work, because the blockchain industry I’m engaged in is an emerging field, sometimes a small knowledge point requires consulting many scattered materials to understand, and most of them come from blog posts of industry experts. Sometimes I would follow a blogger’s article timeline from the beginning, gaining a lot. At this time, I also had the idea of recording and sharing these pitfalls I encountered in my work and study.
I found that most blockchain-related materials online are relatively brief and biased towards the underlying layer, without very detailed step-by-step explanations, which is not very reproducible for beginners. So, I began to regularly organize my learning insights and work experiences into themes and publish them on my blog, and separately extracted blockchain-related content into a beginner’s guide for everyone to learn and exchange.
After publishing, I received a lot of feedback and met many like-minded people through this, establishing my own relationship network, gaining a deeper understanding of my learning and career development, and even getting some interesting opportunities.
After working for a while, I became the technical lead for some projects and needed to quickly onboard the team to the projects. At this time, these blog posts of mine could serve as shared training materials with team members, greatly reducing repetitive workload and also pushing myself to maintain a stable output rhythm. In addition, because of this attitude of willingness to share, I was also assigned to build a technical team documentation library with the team leader, which promoted information dissemination and business development within the department and even the company, and also helped my career development to some extent.
Sharing Efficiency Tips
In my spare time, I’m also an efficiency enthusiast who loves to tinker with various tool applications and maintains a “pseudoyu/yu-tool Personal Toolbox” project. Over time, many friends would come to me with software and hardware related questions, such as “What good software can achieve this function?” or “How do I download and install this?” and so on. I would answer them one by one, but because I don’t use some software as frequently myself, my memory of the details might be biased. Therefore, I would make detailed records of my software system setup and usage process, organize them into blog posts and publish them for my own future reference or direct sharing with friends who need them.
I’ve always felt that recording software and hardware and these tinkering processes is not just a pile of cold items and screenshots, but a transmission of my personal values, lifestyle, and way of thinking, as I felt in another article:
But when I use the system that I initially spent a lot of thought researching and optimizing in my daily work and study, or when a sudden need uses a software/configuration that I tinkered with before, I feel inexplicably happy and accomplished. This is probably the meaning of tinkering.
Personal Reflection and Growth
After going through various stages and roles in my studies and work, I found that I might have completely different thoughts and growth at different stages and roles, and sometimes looking back can be very touching. Therefore, I set up a “Thoughts” section, where I would record my growth on my birthday every year, and also record my thoughts at some specific time points. In the future, I will also record some of my stage insights in the form of weekly/monthly reports.
I believe that my future self, even after several months or years, can find my state of mind at that time from these bits and pieces of records. When one gradually cultivates the habit of recording life, it also allows one to pay attention to and feel the beauty of life, and to face challenges from the future more positively.
A personal blog is like one’s own tree hole. While recording and expressing one’s emotions, one might also receive some warmth from strangers.
How to Persist in Writing
Overcoming Psychological Barriers
Writing is not an easy thing. When I haven’t picked up the pen for a long time, I often feel “out of touch”. Friends who didn’t have a writing habit before might find it easier to feel “don’t know what to write”, “what I write is meaningless” or “will anyone read it”.
This is actually a misunderstanding. There’s a saying, “The master must please himself”. Writing (especially personal blog writing) should not be a strongly purposeful thing, but a process of self-recording, self-discovery, self-exploration, and self-expression. Each of us plays different roles and has our own unique perspective and way of looking at things. As long as we pay more attention to our own or interested fields, collect fragmented ideas, think actively, explore interesting ideas using methods like mind maps, organize these ideas into articles, carefully polish our articles, and express them with a sincere attitude, we can create valuable content.
Actively Sharing and Spreading
After completing the article, we can choose to publish and spread it on various platforms, actively obtain positive feedback, which will also promote ourselves to be more motivated to persist. In addition to personal blogs, we can choose content communities like Jianshu, Zhihu, Weibo, or some relatively vertical content platforms like Sspai, Jike, etc.
Good content will naturally spread and be seen by more people. What we need to do is to persist and continue to output. In the early stage, we can set a fixed frequency for ourselves, such as half a month/one month, give ourselves some small material incentives, and then slowly adjust according to our own situation and wishes in the later stage.
Personal Blog
Why Choose a Personal Blog
The above text focused on how we write valuable blog articles. Now, let’s return to the question at the beginning:
Since there are so many platforms already, why do we still choose to set up a personal blog?
After the popularization of mobile internet and smartphones, the term “blogger” seems to have become a tear of the times. Some time ago, I was even added to a list of “Salute to friends who are still blogging”, which made me laugh and cry.
With the rapid development of the internet, we have more channels of expression, but we seem to have lost the desire to express. Moments, Weibo, etc. seem to be suitable first positions for emotional expression, but character limits and too many social connections make us hesitate; while platforms like Zhihu and Jianshu seem too “professional” and are not suitable for all content, and are easily influenced by online public opinion.
A personal blog is a more perfect choice. We can customize each module of the blog according to our preferences at will, and the process of tinkering and optimizing is like decorating our own little room, which is very fulfilling. Coupled with a personal domain name, we can also build our personal brand. Putting our personal website link on personal social platforms or job resumes is a good bonus point.
Another important point is that the content and data we publish on the blog belong to us, and will not lose all data or experience the pain of large-scale migration with the demise of the platform. Having experienced the painful lesson of the demise of “Xiami Music”, I pay particular attention to this point and regularly back up my article data.
In addition, we can do some SEO optimization for personal blogs without being influenced by the algorithms of content platforms. Readers may link from one article to other expressions of their own ideas and attitudes, letting them feel that behind the text is a real, interesting person, not just a homogeneous knowledge molecule of the internet.
How to Set Up a Personal Blog
My personal blog was originally built on my own Vultr VPS using WordPress. Because the network access was relatively slow, I migrated it to Tencent Cloud server and got it registered. Although the access speed improved, the process of publishing blogs was very cumbersome, and the maintenance of the server was a considerable expense in the long term.
Therefore, I have been exploring a solution that can ensure both domestic and foreign access experience, and can be hosted on some platforms to optimize the deployment and publishing process. Later, I’ve been constantly improving the blog system setup and publishing process. So far, I’m quite satisfied with my full-process solution. Although some configuration is needed for deployment and setup, subsequent updates and maintenance are very convenient. I’ve written a series of articles about the blog setup process.
Blog Setup and Automatic Publishing System
I use Hugo, a static website generator, to build my personal blog. Hugo is a blogging tool implemented in Go, using Markdown for article editing, automatically generating static site files, supporting rich theme configuration, and can also embed plugins like comment systems through js, highly customizable.
In addition, I version control the blog configuration and source files of all articles, coupled with GitHub Action for automated deployment, automatically generating static sites and pushing to the GitHub Pages blog publishing repository. For the setup tutorial, please refer to:
Blog Comment System
A complete blog, of course, needs a comment system. Systems like WordPress have their own comment plugins, while static blogs need to interface with comment systems themselves. I initially chose the third-party Disqus, which is simple and easy to use, but comes with a lot of ads and promotions, and is not simple enough. Therefore, I chose Randy’s Cusdis, an open-source comment system that focuses on data privacy, and self-deployed it through Railway. For the setup tutorial, please refer to:
Blog Data Statistics System
As a continuously updated and operated blog platform, we must be very curious about which article has the highest readership, which keyword is searched most frequently, etc. Data statistics can help us focus on more valuable content creation and sharing.
There are many similar tools. I chose splitbee and Google Console to analyze my visitor information and search weight.
Cloudflare can also analyze network traffic, but because there is a lot of network-unrelated traffic, such as crawlers, etc., it’s not very referential.
In addition, I chose an open-source service umami that can replace Google Analytics, and deployed it through Vercel and Heroku to achieve real-time monitoring of visitor data. For the setup tutorial, please refer to:
Conclusion
It’s 2022, and I’m still blogging, and I will continue to persist. The blog is like my private space, each note records my changes and growth, and also carries the most important moments of my life. I hope you in front of the screen can also experience the charm of blogging, and let more friends join our still persevering “blogger” camp.
References
- Why I Write a Blog
- My Pseudoyu Personal Blog
- Free Personal Blog System Setup and Deployment Solution (Hugo + GitHub Pages + Cusdis)
- Build a Free Personal Blog Data Statistics System from Scratch (umami + Vercel + Heroku)
- Lightweight Open Source Free Blog Comment System Solution (Cusdis + Railway)
- Hugo + GitHub Action, Build Your Blog Automatic Publishing System
- Blockchain Beginner’s Guide
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