My redesigned website is ready for release! I want to start a blog to write technical articles, share interesting findings, and mark my achievements – having a place to view all the achievements, as a gamer, that’s what we usually love (I am also starting a project for helping gamers. Stay tuned!). So I have started to redesign my old website.
At first I was debating between using a brand new site just for blogs and embedding it into my old website. The issue was that the old one was a SPA that wouldn’t work very well with blogs on SEO. If I started a new site just for blogs, then I would want it to follow the look & feel of my old website, and that would seem like a lot of duplication. If I embedded it into the old one, then it would be weird that other parts were loaded single-paged but the blogs were not. Thus I decided that a whole redesign of my website would be the best solution, although that would be quite a lot of work (and eventually it took me about 1.5 week…).
Then it was the consideration of whether using WordPress or building a own blog from scratch/using any library. The advantages of WordPress in terms of blog post management and SEO outweigh a lot, and that just reminds me of the classic quote “Don’t Reinvent the Wheel”. I could rebuild the website using WordPress and use the same look, but the previous version (V1) of the website was last modified in 2016, which was 2 years ago already. Looking at the old codes I wrote before, I think it would take so much time to copy the old styles. V1 was restructured a few times when I used it to learn building website, and so the code tangled with jQuery, AngularJS, events, etc. I remember I tried to solve these problems before already, like writing my own framework to add js & css files dynamically with reusable header and footer, but some part of the code was still as messy as it was at the very first time. I still love my old website, so I have kept most of the elements to fit into this version, like places, mini-games, and chatroom, but not the projects section. It is quite time-consuming when I have a lot of projects and I need to take screenshots and write a description for each. Most of my projects are now pushed to GitHub which is a better place to share to people.
This blog will mainly focus on technical areas, but sometimes I may want to also include some other aspects of my life such as volunteering, writing fictions, etc. I am excited about these!