Origins

Come to think of it, I've been blogging for quite a while

Looking back over these years, I started trying to blog in my first year of college. Back then I didn't know much about technology, so most of my posts were miscellaneous essays, mostly my thoughts on current events.

At first I didn't even know independent blogs existed, and I posted everything on QQ Zone (a social blogging space attached to the QQ messenger). That was because QQ Zone was the only place I knew of where you could publish and keep journal entries online, so I used it as a blog. QQ Zone did have some advantages: since it was built on the QQ social platform, whatever I wrote could always be seen by friends and others, and I'd get some feedback now and then, which was one of the things that kept me writing.

But later, as what I wrote leaned more and more toward my major, and I rarely wrote those essays that oozed edgy teenage thinking anymore, QQ Zone's advantages faded. Its writing experience was also terrible (laggy, rich text only): fine for a short plain-text post, hopeless once a post had a few more elements.

I've blogged in a lot of places

So I went looking for other places to blog: Douban, NetEase and so on. But they were either awful to write in or full of ads that really spoiled the mood. Around then I happened to learn about independent blogs. So I registered a domain, bought a server, set up my own WordPress, hunted for a good theme, and after a lot of tinkering finally had my own independent blog.

After having it for a little over a year, though, I found that I spent less time on the writing itself than on maintaining the blog. One headache after another, until I was too worn out to care anymore.

That's when I realized writing was the real goal all along, and I no longer wanted to spend effort maintaining an independent blog. So began my second search for a suitable writing platform. I tried a wave of them, NetEase's Lofter among others, and only Jianshu was more or less acceptable, but Jianshu wasn't very customizable.

Then it also hit me that I'd used far too many platforms, and what I'd written was scattered all over the place, which was bad for building up and organizing my own knowledge. So I decided to keep looking.

In the end I found GitHub's twin: GitHub Pages.

Bringing it all together at last

GitHub is where programmers hang out most anyway, and GitHub Pages had great reviews. It took me just half a day to set up a semi-independent blog, and one look at the result told me this was exactly what I wanted.

And so began the road to bringing it all together...

Later I happened to see someone online summarize "the three stages of blogging," and it rang very true. Here it is:

Stage one: you've just discovered blogging, it feels fresh, and you try writing on some free hosting service.

Stage two: you find the free service too restrictive, so you buy your own domain and hosting and set up an independent blog.

Stage three: you find managing an independent blog too much hassle, and ideally you'd keep control while someone else handles the management, so you only have to write.

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An addendum from February 2024

Reopening My Independent Blog