Create: 2022-06-12, Update: 2022-06-12
Why I delete all the content and start over a blank new blog?
Every now and then, I have an urge to rewrite my whole blog. The posts were all over the place, and the update interval is so irregular.
Last year, I was busy at getting my professional license. (If you are curious at what my professional is, click the about me tab at the top.) Afterwards, I was busy at getting familiar with my new job. Time was running out.
Now, everything seems to be on the right track. I have enough free time to spend on what I want to do.
So here comes a complete rewrite of the whole blog. The rewrite was not only about the blog contents, but also the entire workflow of blogging.
At the earliest days, I was blogging in a very primitive way. Here is my old workflow.
Write a blog in an org file.
Export it into an HTML file.
Save it in a local directory.
Rsync it to the server.
Configure nginx to point to the directory.
This approach was simple, but with a lot of inconvenience. First, every blog post is an independent file. So every file contains all the headers and toolbar, which make the original org file filled with boiler plates. If I wanted to update the blog template, I would have to edit every single org file. Although this can be done with a script, it is just stupid.
Later last year, I wrote a backend in Go to generate a new html file with template on the server side. That approach was usable. But I did not make it a rest service. Instead, I wrote an emacs package to edit a local sqlite database, and sync it manually to the server. That was alright until I brought a brand new M1 macbook. Since I only use Emacs version 28 on macbook, (the emacs-mac does not support head), I realized that the emacs package I wrote uses some latest features of emacs-sqlite, and that does not work on the stable version.
Now, I rewrote the whole thing into a rest service, which should be good for quite some time.
Another thing leading to the big reset is the quality of the old posts. I do think some of the old blog posts are quite useful for the reader, e.g. dired sorting in emacs, artix linux installation guide. But the other posts are just all over the place. I wrote them at a time I did not have in-depth knowledge, and I was too lazy to update those posts later.
Here comes another question, should I be constantly updating the old posts, or do I make a new post talking about the changes and referencing the old post?
The problem is, if I update an old post, how does anyone know the post was updated?
The approach from now on would be, if a post is outdated, I would write a new post showing the updated content. Also, I would edit the old post and mark it as outdated and put a link to the new post.
The content of the posts was mainly about technical things. I would like to expand the categories into other aspects I am familiar with, e.g. medicine, music, also, maybe in some different languages I know.
I was lazy. And I am still very lazy. Although I have a lot of ideas sitting in my head, I seldom spend time to write and publish.
At this new start, I would set a target for myself to publish at least one blog post every week. Hopefully I could learn a lot more from this.