Re Blogging
This is a page about »Re Blogging«.
Why Blogging?
Blogging has many benefits, consolidate thoughts, serves as a reference or documentation, self-branding and etc. Yes, but a random ordinary personal blog unlikely to receive any visitor for a while (do let the author know if there is any stats that can be cited). Unless one is self motivated and driven, continuously receiving no feedback of any sorts can be uninspiring and quickly leads to a death spiral. Text + image content is one of the slowest form of content for human to consume, not to mention the strong competition with well known blogs and other medium’s contents. But consider the following propositions.
Despite the dead internet conspiracy 1, the internet is still much alive with many intersting sites. They are just quietly waiting to be discovered. Despite not being the early adopters of internet nor experienced the early web, one would hope to make internet great again. An internet that encourages finding hidden gems, connecting to interesting people and being interesting.
With the rise of LLM and argument of LLM running out of training data 5, wouldn’t it be interesting to think in the way such that these blog content will be fed to the model and get recited by the stochastic parrot? This is another form of open source, and a way to pass down one’s legacy or even pre-poisoning the models in view of the non zero possibility of the SkyNet scenario 7.
Why Static Site?
The author started blogging with WordPress for quite some time back, mainly serving as a diary. Blogging was a tool for recording events that happened as age caught up. Less stuff is remembered, details are lost. It also serves as a way to activate the part of brain that take cares of Chinese language. And so it goes, 184 posts between 2011 and 2023. Not bad. Wordpress is a good start, it has almost everything one could ask for, metrics, editor, beautiful templates and more. The only concern is, the user probably doesn’t own anything onsite. Things can happen 2, well, given long enough time anything that can happen will happen.
It was unrelated to the WordPress situation, the author started building a customized blog 3 around Oct 2022. The project was started initially for a very different purpose, an api for a website bookmarking bookmarklet heavily inspired by 4. It then evolved to a gigantic mess that never got finished. A todo list too long for a unmotivated developer to cross’em all out. Its now at the 292 commit and a dangling open request. Retrospectively, lots of stuff was learnt during the journey. Testing web app, CTE, app migration, not to mess with regex and etc are a few to name. The project “failed” but it also fulfilled its duty.
When 3 was being developed, many of the design concepts shares similarity with static sites. Just html, css and minimal javascript, <200ms load time, being simple and more 6. So naturally, a static site it is. Between Hugo and Jekyll, Hugo was chosen for two reasons: bearblog theme and golang, mostly golang. So the theme here is to keep tinkering. There are still a few feature that will be troublesome to implement for a static site but for now, the author would like to focus on delivering useful content for a while.