At the very beginning, I actually used LAMP to set up a personal blog on the school’s IP. Setting up a blog this way had a few dumb problems:

  • The internet cuts off at 11pm and only comes back at 6am, so this “personal blog” would go offline
  • The school blocked outbound port 80, and domain access defaults to port 80, so accessing the blog from off-campus required this weird format like https://cloudisdream:8080
  • Since my own computer was the server, I had to keep it on the whole time, which wasn’t great

JAVA / Servlet / Structs + Spring + Hibernate

After collecting a generous tip, the innkeeper whispered to you: every university’s software engineering major teaches JAVA+SSH

Actually before LAMP, I had tried writing a microblog-like (personal?) website using Java+Servlet from coursework

It looked like this:
First site

While writing I kept marveling at how hard web design really is, and actually this homepage was modeled after NetEase Weibo of that era

LAMP + WordPress

After writing once through from frontend HTML CSS JS to backend JAVA SQL, I started realizing that although full-stack engineer sounds great, actually writing it is exhausting

At that time chatting with ED, just talking about how his blog was built with WordPress, so I set up a server on my own computer

Although I mentioned the drawbacks of setting up a server this way at the start of the article, the school actually did give us a convenience: fixed IP

So I went to Wanwang and bought a domain name, CNAME-d it to the school IP.

But because I really couldn’t bear keeping the computer on all the time, and also the network cutting off, eventually I abandoned this approach.

Github Pages + Jekyll

The current blog is the simplest GitHub Pages + Jekyll

Putting webpages on GitHub gives you the natural advantage of version control. Jekyll uses Ruby, simple and easy to use.

Building a blog from scratch is basically just these steps:

  1. Register a GitHub account and create the directory account.github.com
  2. Run gem install jekyll, then gem new my-site
  3. Modify _config.yml to your own settings, then add blogs in the _post folder

Comments

A blog without comments always feels like something’s off. Since it’s a static page on GitHub, the basic solutions are: use Duoshuo Comments, Disqus, or customize comments using GitHub issues
(at first I even thought disqus == disquz)

Considering all aspects, I went with Disqus, following the official documentation

Just insert a Comment Code snippet in the Page and you’re done.

Enhancement

At this point, the basic blog theme has been fully set up

But there are still a few areas of dissatisfaction:

  1. The Twitter icon at the bottom of the page should be changed to Weibo (but I haven’t figured out how to draw it)
  2. Need to complete the About page
  3. The Kramdown GFM render style still doesn’t feel quite right, especially the interface — GitHub Issue’s Render style looks more comfortable

Looks like in the future, while writing the blog I also need to continuously optimize the website!