Weekly Report #68 - On Writing Blogs and the Colors of My Life

Preface#

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This article is a record and reflection of my life from 2024-08-05 to 2024-08-11.

Looking back at this week in the TG Channel, I found that the entire week revolved around building and writing blogs, leading to some thoughts and a desire to share. Most of the content has been posted before, so this serves as an organization.

The ROI of Blogging#

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A few days ago, I saw some discussions about blogging on Twitter and came across Innei's article "From Disliking Writing to Enjoying Sharing: My Journey with Blogging," which was very interesting. I took the opportunity to carefully review my entire blogging journey and its gains.

My personal conclusion is that I also believe blogging is a costly endeavor with a long cycle but a very high ROI.

If we consider writing from a broader perspective, I started writing essays, public accounts, blogs, etc., around high school, and it has been nearly 10 years. The actual income I have earned directly from writing for myself is only about 3000 yuan from a handful of articles that made it to the homepage and a reader who has been sponsoring me 5 dollars a month on GitHub Sponsor for over a year.

I had a psychological expectation from the beginning that, apart from the company's salary, whether it's product development or writing, even getting users/readers to pay a dollar is not an easy task. But as Randy mentioned in an article on Notepal, the significance of "someone is willing to purchase" is far greater than the amount.

Blogging has also brought many potential meanings and returns. When I interviewed at my current company last year, one of the interviewers, who is now a colleague, mentioned that the whole team had read my weekly reports before the interview, giving them some preliminary understanding of my personality, technical skills, and learning ability; on social media, my writing has allowed me to have deeper exchanges and even collaborations with many people I admire; after introducing myself at various offline events, I often hear, "Oh, I've read your weekly report, and I really liked it."

These are all surprises gained from long-term persistence without aiming for them.

Whether it's blogging or other forms of creation, there seems to be a similar path. Initially fresh and full of motivation; gradually losing confidence over a long period, feeling pressure rather than beauty when seeing other good articles/works—"Why can't I write like that?"; slowly settling back to oneself, enjoying and finding joy in the process.

The Colors of My Life#

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I remember when I first started writing weekly reports, I wrote "Weekly Report #09 - The Colorless Yu and His Year of Pilgrimage" after reading a novel by Murakami. In it, I wrote:

The names of the other four people in the small group where Tsukuru Tazaki lived, as well as the close friends he later made, coincidentally included color words: "red," "blue," "black," "white," "gray," making him feel like a personality-less existence, and consequently, a colorless life.

I often complained about my name, just like De Shan in "Reply 1988" complained to his parents that his name was unremarkable compared to his sister Paula. I have had similar thoughts, feeling that my name is short and lacks uniqueness, and since it is one of the common surnames, I often encounter many people with the same name in school, which means I often need to work extra hard to leave more memorable impressions.

Although I later reconciled with myself, I still feel that my life is somehow disconnected from interesting experiences. I always envy others' interesting personalities and experiences, often feeling that even when I do well, I am merely fulfilling my ordinary life's responsibilities or that these experiences do not belong to me.

As an ordinary person, I often hesitate whether my "daily accounts" have any value to present to everyone, until recently when I happened to see a video on Bilibili—"What is Beautiful Color? After Five Years of Filming, What Have I Achieved in Color Grading," which discusses color grading. One sentence deeply moved me:

When I first pointed the camera at myself, I realized that filming could be so enjoyable and pressure-free. At that moment, I discovered that what I envied was not the image itself, but the romantic and passionate life behind it. This is the meaning of my love for tinkering; I want you to see the world through my eyes, and the most beautiful colors on my screen are the base colors of my life.

This perfectly describes my current mindset while writing weekly reports.

Blog Building Series#

The blog building series has finally been updated! There are more than 10 articles in total, and I can consider myself a participant in the blog renovation race.

From initially not knowing how to deploy on Vercel to now having tried almost all serverless options on the market, it has been a very interesting experience. The feeling of everything working according to plan is truly wonderful; both building and writing blogs have their own joys.

Building Tutorials#

2024 Version#

Compared to two years ago, the publishing process and appearance have hardly changed, but the components and content are quite different.

2022 Version#

Aside from some changes in platforms and many no longer offering Free Plans, the process is still largely applicable.

I wonder what I will be doing and thinking when I next update this series.

Multilingual Support#

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Actually, my blog has always had a bilingual option (the navigation bar allows switching across the site, and articles can also be switched directly by clicking the corresponding language). However, I have been quite lazy and only copied the Chinese documents over. This morning, I used Claude's Projects feature to translate all existing articles.

I created a Blog Translation Project, input a global instruction, and then just dropped Hugo's markdown source files in.

The model used is Claude 3.5 Sonnet. To save context, I opened a new conversation for each article and found that I translated over 130 articles without triggering Claude Pro's usage limit (at 9:40 am, I was reminded that there were only 10 left before 10 am, and it never appeared again), which is quite considerate.

Since my goal today was mainly to complete the conversion and rough proofreading of all articles, I used a relatively simple prompt, but the usability of the returned format and the quality of the translation exceeded my expectations.

You will receive a Chinese blog post in Markdown format (.md) using the Hugo template. Translate the content into English, adhering to the following guidelines:

Use a literary tone for posts in the "Idea" category; otherwise, employ a professional tone.

Maintain consistent terminology, especially for structural elements like "preface" and "conclusion".

Preserve all Markdown formatting and metadata, including Hugo properties, links, audio, images, and other elements.

Translate only the blog content itself.

Return the result in Markdown format for easy copying.

Do not add any introductory statements, explanations, or additional content to the blog.

Provide only the raw translated Markdown content in your response.

Interesting Things and Items#

Inputs#

Although most interesting inputs will automatically sync in the "Yu's Life" Telegram channel, I still selected a portion to list here, making it feel more like a newsletter. Additionally, I built a microblog using Telegram Channel messages as content sources—"daily.pseudoyu.com," which makes browsing more convenient.

Books#

Flowers for Algernon, re-reading it after a long time.

Podcasts#

Articles#

Videos#

Movies#

Life is Beautiful, a long-lost tear-jerking film. Like "Groundhog Day," it rekindles some passion for life and reflections on surrounding relationships; it doesn't need overly exquisite visuals or settings; the actors' eyes seem bright and full of spirit, which is probably the charm of old movies.