Two days in, and this blog is finally starting to feel like something.
The piece that took the most time, oddly enough, was the visitor map. Getting the world outline to render cleanly, placing dots where real people are reading from, making the tooltip feel right — it was fiddly in a way I didn’t expect. Along the way, I went looking for some of those free, open-source visitor-map services that used to be everywhere back in the day. Most of them are unmaintained now, repositories frozen, demos broken. There’s something quietly sad about that — tools that once connected people across the web, just fading out because nobody was left to keep the lights on.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you think about why you’re building a personal site at all, in an age of algorithmic feeds and platform convenience. But honestly? That’s exactly why I still think independent blogs matter. This space isn’t optimized for engagement. There’s no algorithm deciding what you see. It’s just a corner of the web where I can be honest about what I’m working on and what I’m thinking about, without performing for anyone. A lab, sure — but also a tree hollow. Both things can be true.
Huge thanks to the blogging folks out there who put out free tutorials and ideas that genuinely made me stop and reconsider how things could be done. You know who you are.
This is the beginning. I hope this space grows into a record of progress, half-baked thoughts, and things worth remembering.
Beijing, 2:01 AM. Finally a new start.