Reopening My Independent Blog

Maybe it's just like that famous curve, from the Peak of Mount Stupid down into the Valley of Despair and up the Slope of Enlightenment: life is one cycle of tinkering after another.

The Past

In the first post on this blog, Origins, I quoted someone else's summary of the three stages of blogging:

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.

But after planting that flag, I only wrote on my independent blog for a year. When it came time to renew the domain, keeping my own domain going felt like a chore, so I gave the blog up.
After that I moved through Zhihu (a Chinese Q&A site), WeChat Official Accounts, and Xiaobaotong (a Chinese paid-newsletter platform) as places to publish my writing. I had thought that, just like the three stages above, handing my writing over to these platforms would let me focus more on the essence of writing. In practice, it was the exact opposite.

What Brought Me Back

Looking back, a few things led me to return to an independent blog.

1. These platforms are not convenient to use
Want to publish something publicly on them?
First you have to log in, then click around to find the publishing center, and only then can you write your first line (the editors on Zhihu and WeChat in particular are beyond words).

2. Playing away from home, without freedom
Almost every platform has its own explicit or implicit rules: what you can and can't write, what spreads easily, what sinks without a trace. These unspoken things shape my choice of topics and make me anxious.

All things considered, almost no writing platform is actually as convenient to write on as an independent blog. An independent blog does need some maintenance, but on the whole it's fairly infrequent. And more importantly, it gives you freedom.

3. I have engineering skills
After I left ByteDance in 2020, maybe because I came into contact with new things, maybe because I let go of some old obsessions, or maybe because I ran into a lot of problems in those years, with relationships and with my family's health, after a few years of struggle my view suddenly widened a great deal. I saw my own limits clearly, and society's limits, and I also saw what choices I should make within those constraints to keep going and keep living.

I also truly began to realize that technology is a very effective lever and a form of productivity, something that lets you make real changes by creating things.
Creating matters. Writing an article is creating, and using your own skills to build an independent product is creating too, and the latter compounds more strongly.

4. Some people's influence
Liu Shaonan, Bai Guang, and the indie developers on Jike (a Chinese social app) passionately searching for their own small business.
Huang Yan and Jiuzhang, whose independent blogs are still alive and still being updated.

Spending time around these people, I could feel the courage it takes to explore independence while being swept along by this huge, chaotic, noisy current of the world.

All in all, I've started to want to create things with a longer life span, and over these years I happen to have learned the skills to do it. Just as settling down in Hangzhou after turning thirty ended more than a decade of feeling adrift, these past two years I've increasingly wanted a home ground of my own, with all my writing gathered in one place.

What Changed

While trying to restore the old blog, I realized how carelessly I used to treat my writing. When I left ByteDance and switched computers, I backed up a lot of material, but not the source files of the old blog. Luckily, the GitHub repository still had the compiled files, so I restored the posts one by one, and one by one I reread those old articles from 2016. The writing is very immature, sometimes even deliberately mystifying, yet to me it somehow felt new every time I read it.

While rereading, I also found that many of the external links were dead. Some pointed to other people's independent blogs, some to general websites, and some even to ByteDance's old CDN image host. The GitHub and Google links, however, all still work.

Eight years really is a long time. Many things have changed or simply no longer exist, and some haven't changed at all. Putting them side by side makes you sigh.

Besides restoring the old stuff, there are a few changes:

• The blog's name changed from "Xiaohu Ruwei" (The Little Fox Wets Its Tail, an image from the I Ching) to the more concrete "Knots & Nets"
• I designed a new logo based on the imagery of my daughter's name (I've started dabbling in Mondrian, haha)
• I removed a lot of redundant visual decoration and simplified the UI to suit my current taste
• I care more about reader feedback, so I added Disqus for comments (Duoshuo, the old Chinese comment service, is long gone)

Also, the Jacman theme the old blog used is technically quite dated. I forked my own theme and started fixing the outdated or deprecated logic in it, for example gradually migrating the float layouts that were everywhere over to flex layouts.

Many choices can't be undone once made. Fortunately this one could. After going around the loop of third-party platform -> independent blog -> back to third-party platforms -> rediscovering how good an independent blog is, and back to an independent blog, I think I'll be staying on my independent blog for the long haul.

Bailujun North, Hangzhou, February 25, 2024