Weekly Review #68 - On Blogging and the Colors of My Life

《Photograph - Ed Sheeran》

Preface

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

Looking back at this week through my TG Channel, I realized that the entire week revolved around setting up and writing blogs. I’ve had some thoughts and the desire to share, most of which I’ve already posted. This is more of a compilation.

The ROI of Blogging

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A few days ago, I saw some discussions about blogging on Twitter, and then I read Innei’s article “From Disliking Writing to Enjoying Sharing: My Journey with Blogging”. It was quite interesting, so I took the opportunity to carefully review my entire blogging journey and gains.

My personal conclusion is that I also feel blogging is a high-cost, long-term endeavor, but with a very high ROI.

If we consider writing from the heart in a broad sense, I’ve been writing essays, public accounts, and blogs since high school, continuing for nearly 10 years. The direct income I’ve earned from my writing is probably only about 3000 yuan in royalties from six or seven articles that made it to the homepage of Sspai, and a $5 monthly GitHub Sponsor donation from a reader who has persisted for over a year.

I had psychological expectations from the start. Apart from company salaries, whether it’s creating products or writing, it’s not easy to get users/readers to pay even a dollar for you. But as Randy said in an article on Notepal, the significance of “someone willing to pay” is far greater than the size of the amount.

Blogging has also brought many potential meanings and returns. When I interviewed for my current company last year, a colleague who was an interviewer at the time said that the entire team had read my weekly reviews before the interview and already had a preliminary understanding of my personality, technical skills, and learning ability. On social media, I’ve also had more and deeper exchanges and even collaborations with many people I greatly admire through my writing. At many offline events, after a simple self-introduction, I often hear “Oh, I’ve read your weekly reviews, I really like them.”

These are surprises harvested in long-term persistence, not for this purpose.

Whether it’s blogging or other forms of creation, they all seem to follow a similar path. Initially fresh and motivated; gradually losing confidence in the long cycle, seeing other good articles/works and feeling pressure rather than beauty - “Why can’t I write like that”; slowly settling back to oneself, being free, happy, and enjoying it.

The Colors of My Life

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I remember when I first started writing weekly reviews, I wrote “Weekly Review #09 - The Colorless Yu and His Year of Pilgrimage” after reading a Murakami novel. In it, I wrote:

In the small group that Tsukuru belonged to, the names of the other four members and the close friend he later met all coincidentally included color words: “red”, “blue”, “black”, “white”, “gray”, making him feel like he was a characterless existence, along with a colorless life.
Actually, complaints about one’s own name are common. In “Reply 1988”, Deok-sun also complained to her parents that her name had no character, unlike her sister Bora. I once had such thoughts too, feeling that my name was short and unremarkable, and being one of the common surnames, I often encountered many people with the same name in a school. Accompanying this was the feeling that I often needed to make extra effort to leave more memorable impressions.
Although I later reconciled with myself, I still often felt that my life was incompatible with being interesting. I always envied others’ interesting personalities and experiences, and even when I did well, I only felt like I was fulfilling the duties of my ordinary life or that these achievements didn’t belong to me.

Just like that, ordinary me often hesitates, wondering if my “diary-like” life is worth presenting to everyone, until recently when I happened to see a video on Bilibili - “What is Good Color? After Five Years of Filming, What Has My Color Grading Become”. It’s about color grading, but a sentence in it deeply moved me:

When I first turned the camera on myself, I discovered that filming could be so comfortable, without pressure. It was then that I realized what I had envied before was not that image, but the romantic and passionate life behind it. This is the meaning of my love for tinkering, I want to show you the world through my eyes, and the most beautiful color in my screen is the background color of my life.

This is the most apt description of my current state of mind when writing weekly reviews.

Blog Setup Series

The blog setup series is finally complete! Altogether, there are as many as 10 articles, and I can consider myself to have entered the blog decoration arena.

From not knowing how to use Vercel deployment at the beginning, to now having played with almost all the Serverless options on the market, it’s been a very interesting experience. The feeling of everything working according to your ideas is truly wonderful, and setting up a blog and writing a blog indeed each have their own joys.

Setup Tutorials

2024 Version

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

2022 Version

Except for some changes in platforms, many no longer provide Free Plans, but the process is still basically applicable.

I wonder what I’ll be doing and thinking about the next time I update this series.

Multilingual Support

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Actually, my blog has always had bilingual functionality options (you can switch the entire site in the navigation bar / directly click the corresponding language to switch in articles), but I’ve always been lazy so I just copied the Chinese documents over. This morning, I translated all existing articles through Claude’s Projects feature.

I created a new Blog Translation Project, input a global Instruction, and then just threw in the Hugo markdown source files.

The model used is Claude 3.5 Sonnet. To save context, I opened a new conversation for each article. I found that after translating over 130 articles, it still hadn’t triggered Claude Pro’s usage limit (at 9:40 am it reminded me that only 10 messages were left before 10 am, and it never appeared again after that), which seems quite conscientious.

Because my main goal today was to complete the conversion and rough proofreading of all articles, and I will still manually proofread the content later, I used a relatively simple Prompt. However, the usability of the returned format and the quality of the translation were beyond imagination.

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 Objects

Input

Although most interesting inputs are automatically synchronized in the “Yu’s Life” Telegram channel, I’ll still select some to list here, which feels more like a newsletter. And I’ve built a microblog - “daily.pseudoyu.com” using Telegram Channel messages as content source, which is more convenient to browse.

Books

Flowers for Algernon, read it a long time ago, revisiting it now.

Podcasts

Articles

Videos

Movies

It’s a Wonderful Life, a film that made me cry after a long time. Like “Groundhog Day”, it makes you regain some enthusiasm for life and reflection on surrounding relationships after watching; it doesn’t need very exquisite images or settings, the actors’ eyes seem to be bright, showing spirit, which is probably the charm of old movies.

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Weekly Review #66 - 10x Engineers, Technical Passion and Personal Toolkit

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Author

pseudoyu

Backend & Smart Contract Developer, MSc Graduate in ECIC(Electronic Commerce and Internet Computing) @ The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Love to learn and build things. Follow me on GitHub

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