projects | blog
September 24, 2026 6:17 PM
I wanted to start a blog...framework
If you're reading this, you know I love blogs. I love blogs so much that I have three blogs. You might be thinking, three? This blog and the food blog, but what else? Well, my Teochew site technically has a blog as well. It's just hidden under the "Updates" link at the bottom. But I post updates pretty frequently! (Like waaaay more frequently than the food blog or this personal blog) But I never really considered it my "Teochew blog", no, not until...last Saturday. Because that was when I finally put my Teochew updates on my blog framework.
I have always always been a fan of blogs. I first became interested during the days of Xanga and everyone had a blog back then. A blog wasn't just a collection of entries. You customized your blog. The font, the colors, the obnoxious music playing in the background. And you did that by writing code. (I'm counting html as code) Or maybe by copying and pasting code, it doesn't matter. The fact is that you had a lot of control and it was fun. And it didn't matter what you blogged about. It was just an online journal. You did you and it also allowed you to connect with others remotely which is what the internet was made for in the first place, right?
At some point "social media" took over and blogs stopped being a thing everyone on the internet had. I had my Xanga for years and years, way after it stopped being popular, but eventually I stopped using it too. It was like, the first step in making the internet less fun. The thing is that blogs never really went away, but they became more of a business and marketing tool. It's like you needed a purpose for a blog. But I still enjoyed them! Food blogs, fitness blogs, technology blogs, early retirement blogs. I was reading lots of those.
And I had this yearning to start blogging again myself. I don't know how many times I tried to start a blog and then just stopped after a small number of posts. I had a tumblr, a blogger, a wordpress, even an angelfire website. Maybe I needed a purpose too. And in 2018, I finally had one. I would make my own food blog. My purpose was to show my aunt what I was cooking for dinner. I made sure to post updates frequently and I thought about things like making sure each post had enough pictures. And I put ALL my cooked meals in that blog! When COVID hit, I was food blogging so much and then...I just got tired.
I made an official "Taking a Break" post in my food blog on May 22, 2020, and you know how long it took for me to want to start blogging again? One month, almost exactly. Maybe I didn't need a purpose. Maybe I just needed control again. I needed something that was 100% mine. So I created one incredibly simple static page for a homepage. Then I looked at my Teochew site's code and copy pasted the stuff I used for updates to make the most rudimentary blog framework. And in like a day, I had whipped up my custom-made personal blog site. I had...a sense of pride, really. I had never felt proud of myself for starting a blog in the past. But now I like, actually knew how to code. This felt different.
And it didn't take me long to get back to the food blog either. I basically did the same thing for v2 of the food blog, with the copying and pasting of my blogging script and templates. Eventually I got tired of doing everything twice, so I looked into creating a Mojolicious plugin. And I will admit, that was...a whole project. But I don't know, is that something you'd want to hear more about?
...anyway, while the blog code all started in the Teochew site, I actually had taken such a long break from it, that it never got updated to use the shared framework. Not til last week, when I finally got tired of not having all my nice features that I've added over the years. So if you want to follow along, keep checking my updates page, or use the RSS feed, which I added as part of adopting the framework.
So here I am! Clearly still blogging. Still blogging...about blogging. I just like to share my thoughts online sometimes! I'm trying to think less about putting out the best content and more about, well, posting what feels right to me. In the past half-decade of my life, I've managed to meet a few others that also enjoy reading or writing blogs, which is crazy! Even knowing that one person reads my blog is honestly enough to make me excited about it.