History of This Blog

It took me several days to finish a major upgrade of this blog, so worth the while to write down something for record.

I used to write my dairy, a hobby I built up during high school days when my Chinese teacher encouraged the whole class to do so. While I tried very best to keep this as long as possible, I stopped unfortunately after arriving in Canada. Instead, I put a lot of memories into my Instagram account(s).

That hobby, however, also inspired myself to write about the technical things I learned and thought. Thus, my initial blog posts were written back in 2005, in which year I claimed myself a programmer. For no good reason, those early posts were hosted on a Chinese site called CSDN, at https://blog.csdn.net/lextm. The blog system was crappy, but I didn’t know much about modern systems like BlogSpot at that time.

I wrote both in Chinese and English, but soon found a need to host them separately because of the first open source project I created, called Code Beautifier Collection. So, I moved English posts to BlogSpot, at https://lextm.blogspot.com. BlogSpot was acquired by Google and turned into Blogger.

As many of you know, Google was forced to stop its business in China and Blogger isn’t accessible ever since. I tried many workarounds to keep my Blogger site alive, but gave it up finally. Instead, I started to host my posts on my self-hosted WordPress server and used several domains of mine, like https://lextm.cn, https://lextm.com, https://lextudio.com, and later https://blog.lextudio.com.

Managing my own WordPress server was still a pain, so after landing on Canada in 2017 I decided to give Medium a try, and this blog moved there without a domain change. Sadly the several failed attempts by Medium to commercialize blog contents made reader experience pretty bad, and I decided to move out.

I chose Jekyll in the summer of 2020, and migrated most hot posts from Medium to this new Jekyll based site. Many old posts had to be left on Medium at https://medium.com/lextm, simply because

• I wrote too many, >1000, and to migrate all I need a lot of time.
• the Jekyll theme I chose wasn’t well maintained. I need to find a better one.

But anyway, I kept this blog alive. And another noticeable change was that I changed the URL to https://halfblood.pro, which I think matching the blog name very well.

Finally last December I found a lot of free slots to migrate the remaining posts manually to Markdown files. The manual process was killing me but in the meantime revealed many rewards,

1. I never knew that I blogged so many things, so along the way many products were reviewed and recorded.
2. I never came back to see how many pieces I had done in all those open source projects, so this journey brought me back to many important milestones. It was through all such projects that I built up my technical strengths.
3. I joined Microsoft a second time last summer, and through the posts I can see how my attitude towards Microsoft changes slightly over all those years.
4. Many tough periods of my personal life were also captured in various ways. The sudden changes on post frequency can be easily linked to the critical life events which I rarely talked about publicly.

OK. That’s enough for a flashback.

This time the Chirpy theme matches all my expectation, so let’s see how many more years I will enjoy blogging.

Happy new year 🍭 and stay tuned.