In the blink of an eye, five years have passed. When I think back to the summer of 2020, I was still just a student moving from freshman to sophomore year, excited and curious enough to build a blog of my own. At first I wrote the occasional knowledge summary. But before long, aside from later building an exercise-sharing platform for classmates in the mathematics department, the blog stopped updating entirely.

There were, in truth, quite a few reasons. At first it was a financial issue: I did not keep renewing the cloud server. Later I tried deploying the site on both GitHub and Gitee, but GitHub remained inconvenient to access, and Gitee eventually suspended its Pages service, so deployment itself became troublesome. After that, academic life grew heavier and heavier. I spent more and more time in the library reading mathematics, and the blog slowly faded out of my life.

Only recently, a passing thought made me want to create a personal homepage. And once that thought appeared, it suddenly brought the old blog back to mind as well. I tried opening the old link and, to my surprise, it still worked. The only problem was that on GitHub I had kept only the deployment repository. The source code had been stored locally, and after changing computers I no longer knew where it had gone. Perhaps it is still hidden somewhere on an old backup drive. What remained were only a few scattered Markdown posts.

A great deal has changed over these years. Many of the web tools popular back then still exist, but many are no longer the first choice. Today frameworks like React and Vue have become almost standard. I casually picked up some React, and it is already more than enough for building a purely static personal homepage as practice.

As for blog generators, I used Hexo back then. It was decent, but it also exposed several problems. Markdown rendering was not flexible enough, and support for mathematical formulas was especially frustrating. Themes were also based on string-style static rendering, which made interactivity and special character handling less than ideal. This time, I want to look for a better tool and rebuild the blog properly.

In any case, I am back. I have picked up blogging again.

At least for these past two days, I have had things worth writing down.

贡献者: Junyuan He