Home Is Where the Heart Is
I first started blogging in June 2023, but it fell by the wayside before long. On 20 January 2025, I gave the blog a fresh makeover and decided to make it a place for recording my research and interests. Fortunately, I managed to stick with it a bit longer this time. Now, a year on, 46 articles of varying lengths have found a home here—far exceeding my expectations.
This place is like a stretch of open wilderness. I can write about whatever comes to mind, or coax a large language model into adding some feature or tweaking a style on the page. I’ve spent ages agonising over fonts in the middle of the night, and even caused the ridiculous situation of the site needing to load tens of megabytes of fonts on each visit. I once thought about reaching a wider audience and made some attempts in places readers can’t see, like keywords, summaries and descriptions. Or I’d worry that domestic users were loading the site too slowly and go tinkering with domain optimisation, domestic object storage and edge acceleration.
Once, during a job interview, the interviewer asked me what hobbies I had and what I did when facing difficulties or pressure. After racking my brain for a suitably earnest yet refreshingly original answer, I told him I liked blogging. I said I enjoyed jotting down ideas, or collecting fragmented knowledge and organising it into writing, and that the process of typing helped me sort out my thoughts. Sometimes when someone asked me a question that couldn’t be explained in a few words, and I happened to have recorded something similar before, I could just point them to it.
Although a year has passed, the place is still a bit of a mess. Looking back at old articles, I still feel many of them could have been written better, and some viewpoints now seem outdated. But over this year, I’ve whiled away plenty of time here, processed some emotions, recorded and distilled my thoughts—so it counts as a place where my heart is at peace.
Clouds in the Sky, Water in the Bottle
Even with a simple static blog, there’s still plenty to tinker with—load speed, image hosting, domain names, search engine optimisation. Sometimes when the mood strikes, I’d find myself something to do in these areas, though it always seemed to backfire.
First, search engine optimisation. After adding the domain in Bing’s webmaster tools, SEO issues kept popping up—mostly titles being too short or descriptions too short or too long. I revised things according to its webmaster handbook and suggestions, time and again. At first there seemed to be some improvement, then one day the site was outright penalised by Bing. Even a site: search returned nothing. Emails to Bing’s appeal team always got a mechanical reply saying the site didn’t meet indexing requirements, with no anomalies or feedback whatsoever on the backend.
To optimise the experience for domestic users, I tried integrating Alibaba or Tencent’s edge cloud services, and planned to pair them with domestic object storage. Using domestic cloud services requires a domain with ICP registration.
For the ICP filing, I bought a domestic server and domain. What followed was the tedious ICP registration process. During this, I discovered that the domestic filing and review environment is extremely restrictive: there are countless limitations on personal sites, the number of sensitive words is staggering, and the system fundamentally discourages individuals from building websites. After the ICP filing, there’s also the public security registration with a terrible user experience, where every line of text radiates an oppressive sense of being ready at any moment to be summoned for a “tea chat.”
Now, I’ve chosen to “cease providing services to mainland China.” Since providing services means I must comply with the law, file registrations, and display identification tags, I choose to obey the law and position the site as non-mainland-China service. If domestic users can access it, it’s purely a gap in the firewall, not my intention. Besides, an all-Cloudflare setup isn’t so bad that it’s completely inaccessible—why would I make things difficult for myself? And is it even possible that I have barely any visitors, and even if I do, I’d like to think my target readers would bring their own network environment.
After being worn out by Bing and domestic internet policies, I asked myself: what was my original purpose in blogging? It should be about the content. What I write is already relatively niche knowledge or personal thoughts, so why pander to a domineering search engine or policy just to make myself miserable?
So the current strategy is: switch to the most hassle-free, simplest all-Cloudflare setup (Pages, R2, plus DNS and proxy), get a more proper domain jackchou00.com, and leave the rest to fate.
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way
This year has had its moments of hesitation and confusion, as well as moments of clarity and enlightenment, and of course the inevitable daily trivialities. Since I’ve already figured out not to get tangled up in minor details, and have prepared new plans and directions, it’s time to gather myself and keep moving forward.
In the year ahead, and even further into the future, I hope to keep writing and recording my thoughts and knowledge; to press the shutter more often and write words with warmth; to continue exploring technology and maintaining the habit of learning and trying new things; and to always stay curious, never losing the courage to explore.
I hope that this time next year, when I look back on this year, I’ll still feel it’s worth cherishing and worth celebrating.