Daily Progress

By Yangyu

- 2 minutes read - 422 words

In the recent 2 days, I’ve spent some good time setting up this blog site… here’s the rough timeline:

  • before 2022-07-26, I was using Jekyll, and it has been working fine
  • on 2022-07-26, when thinking about improving the blogging, there were a few functionalities that’s missing:
    • the googleAnalytics was broken
    • the commenting system was broken as well
    • deployment has been hard – I have to do it manually, by pushing to gh-pages branch
      • although GitHub uses Jekyll by default, it’s missing some plugins that I use
      • so I have to build it manually
  • in order to figure out what went wrong… I started to read Jekyll’s source code
    • it took me 0.5h, to roughly understand the basic code structure
    • progressing slowly, but there were some progress anyway
  • meanwhile, I’m also thinking – why not give other system a try?
    • I’ve heard about Hugo before, and I know it’s written in Golang
    • I started to clone Hugo’s source code, and started reading.
      • because I’ve been working with Golang for the past 3 years, the code feels easy to read
    • I also went through the tutorial, and starting a new site from scratch
      • interestingly, the tutorial was easy to follow – I have my site running within first 10min
      • it’s also easy to config – the guides has been mostly easy to read, I can get the info I need within minutes
  • I happily coded until like 1am last night, and published this site to replace my previous one in Jekyll
    • this has been a great experience
      • the templating system is easy to learn, and easy to figure out how to use it correctly, by reading the source code
      • I got all my issues with Jekyll resolved very fast
      • I’ve also got other functionalities like multi-language support – I can finally split my Chinese post from English ones
    • so it also makes me think, that I probably wanna pickup my previous habit of blogging again. So I start to write this post

Summary from my experience, I think there’re a few learning points:

  1. when working on something, focus on the end result – the deliverables. That’s also what motivates one to move forward
  2. before actually committing efforts into something big, try a few alternatives first. Probably there’re jsut a lot cheaper (in terms of time, and money) ones
  3. coding & writing is the kind of activity needs in-depth work – it needs some initial cost to start; then as more and more time put in, the productivity tends to maximized with a constant rate
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