Hello, World
Categories: life
Why a blog
Three years into my PhD, I’ve accumulated far too many scattered notes across Obsidian, Notion, phone screenshots, and random tmp.md files. Every time I want to find that “interesting thought” from six months ago, it’s gone.
This blog exists for a simple reason: to put the things worth revisiting into one stable place. If someone else finds them useful, that’s a nice bonus.
What will be here
- Academic — paper notes, research observations, things I’ve learned the hard way.
- Tech — engineering problems, new tools, AI experiments.
- Life — London, books, films, passing thoughts.
- Projects — side project build logs.
About the blog itself
Building this was a fun engineering exercise:
- Frontend: Jekyll static site on Cloudflare Pages, theme adapted from tw93/cosy-jekyll-theme (MIT, thanks).
- Backend: Separate admin at
admin.jingxuan.uk, with Novel as the WYSIWYG editor and Hono on Cloudflare Workers for the API. - Publishing: Admin converts posts to Markdown and commits to the blog repo via the GitHub Contents API, which triggers a Cloudflare Pages rebuild.
- Comments: Giscus (readers sign in with GitHub to comment).
I’ll write a proper post-mortem once it’s been running a while. For now, this post just plants the flag.
Comments welcome.