A Few Words After Setting Up My Blog
It took me two days to set up my own blog, and now I’m filled with thoughts—enough to share three points.
The Reason Behind It
After returning home on January 25th, I happily celebrated the Lunar New Year.
I have this habit: once I’m home on vacation, I absolutely cannot study. Back in high school, weekend homework would occasionally keep me in check, but now I’m completely unrestrained. Still, I couldn’t just let myself mess around at home every day. Old habits die hard, but people are adaptable—so as soon as the New Year festivities wound down around the eighth day, I escaped my own clutches and hurried back to campus. The lab has one advantage: no matter how comfortable the environment, I can muster the willpower not to switch to Windows and play games.
Back at school, after tweaking my half-dead website, I started thinking about the personal blog I’d been eyeing for a long time. I had previously registered on Jianshu because it supported Markdown, and I was excited to give it a try. But after writing a couple of casual posts, I still felt it was too restrictive and not free enough—call it nitpicking if you will. Seeing how well Azheng’s blog was doing, I immediately felt I needed to step up my game.
Getting My Hands Dirty
Actually, Azheng had already written a tutorial: Using Hexo Elegantly. It’s very detailed, and following it step by step would have made setup quick and easy. But at first, I missed it completely, so I dove in headfirst and started tinkering on my own.
Because of that, I decided not to write another tutorial. Instead, I’ll simply record my journey, adding links where appropriate.
First, I noticed the Hexo blog framework. After a night of research, I set up a Hexo blog, installed the NexT theme, configured it myself, deployed it to GitHub Pages, and set up domain resolution.
At that point, the blog was up and running—and I could have stopped there. But I still felt that manually generating and publishing updates for a static blog was a bit cumbersome. I wanted to see if there was a way to make this already convenient setup even more convenient. In short, I was lazy—lazy as hell. But then again, isn’t the world propelled forward by lazy people trying to make their laziness more comfortable?
So I discovered a pinned blog post by the founder of NexT (the theme), discussing whether Travis CI’s automated build and continuous integration—a service that benefits humanity—could be used to automatically update the blog. But since I had to wake up early the next morning, I first migrated two articles from Jianshu to fill this pretty vase of a blog and went to bed early.
Yesterday, I was out having fun all day and didn’t touch this. Today, back in the lab, I continued tinkering. Then, I suddenly stumbled upon Azheng’s tutorial on using Travis for automated deployment. It was on a whole other level—truly impressive:
Quick Deployment
Leveraging Git’s strengths, keep version-controlled files small and numerous, containing only source code.
Automated Deployment
No need to manually use
hexo deployfor deployment. Just push the source code to GitHub, and it deploys automatically.No Installation Required
You can write and publish blog posts even without node.js, the hexo CLI, or even Git installed.
With that, I was satisfied—my blog was fully set up.
Filled with Thoughts
Finally, as the concluding section of this inaugural post to mark the blog’s launch, I want to use this silly-sounding phrase I coined an hour ago as the title for this part, expressing the little insights I’ve gained.
New year, new beginnings! This is also the first post after the Lunar New Year.
Earlier, I crammed for a linear algebra exam from scratch over three days. Each day, I marveled: if only I could work this hard every day in my ordinary life. As the saying goes, “A steed’s single leap cannot cover ten paces; a nag’s ten-day journey succeeds through perseverance.” This is probably a perfect example—and I’m no steed.
In fact, this should be a lifelong goal for me: perseverance.
To hold hope in your heart and walk steadily forward.