Notes on "blogging"

I just added a world map to my landing page, showing where I’ve been. Have a look! I’m looking forward to exploring more of this world!

Screenshot of the world map

Tw93, and his Mole. I heard of this macOS cleaner app called Mole before, but today I finally tried it out — a neat CLI utility that digs through and cleans up your macOS.

I checked out its author, Tw93. He’s also a Chinese programmer, and keeps a blog that caught my eye immediately. I’m glad to see programmers like him sharing tech thoughts and personal life, reminding me I’m not alone. He’s doing a great job — another role model to look up to. From his GitHub profile, I believe Simon Willison influenced him too.

Follow him on X: @HiTw93.

I just added a new category of notes called “collection notes”.

Collection notes gather resources on a single topic — books, articles, videos — in one place. Think of them as better-organized bookmark folders. Here’s the commit: zlliang/zlliang@d4c1f5a.

I’ve already written one on my Zilong’s Days (Chinese) website: Shinobu Yoshii’s works.

Simon Willison on Technical Blogging. Simon was the direct catalyst for me starting my own blog (see my post), so it’s great to see him share more about his blogging experience.

Last weekend, I reorganized my personal websites. Here’s the new structure:

Website	URL	Description
Personal landing page	https://zlliang.me	Brief introduction and navigation
Zilong’s Tech Notes	https://tech.zlliang.me	Tech learning and research (English)
Zilong’s Days	https://days.zlliang.me	Daily life and reflections (Chinese)

In this post, I explain my motivation for splitting the sites. After this change, I’m ready to mark version 1.0 of my writing framework. The permalinks will be stable, and I’m excited to share more technical and personal topics in these spaces.

Today I spent a day trying to add i18n support to the website. I brainstormed ideas and documented them in a GitHub issue. I also tried to design and implement a translation key system and a new routing system, and wrote a lot of code.

In the end, I realized it makes both the site and my writing workflow more complicated than I’d like. Direct i18n support doesn’t feel like the right move right now — it adds friction and mental overhead, and I want to be able to just start writing when an idea comes up.

Since the website’s structure is entirely under my control, I want to design a content organization that genuinely fits my own writing habits while still being open and readable to different audiences. I don’t want to add structural complexity to the site just to satisfy a sense of “everything must be unified.”

So I’m going to park this issue for now. The site will stay focused on technical writing and public English content. Anything that doesn’t fit yet will live in my private Notion workspace, and I’ll revisit it later when it makes sense.

I just updated the license of this website. Now it’s dual-licensed: code under MIT, content under CC BY 4.0. Previously I used CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 for content, but decided to go more open — fewer restrictions, more sharing.

Here’s the commit: zlliang/zlliang@6083f34.

I just added a new category of notes called “quote notes”. Quote notes share quotes from books, articles, and other sources, sometimes with my own commentary.

Here’s the commit: zlliang/zlliang@3419c89. I also updated the relevant descriptions in Starting a Tech Blog at the End of 2025.

I just added pagination to note pages like /notes and /notes/categories/link, as the number of notes grows. Each page now shows up to 20 notes, and a tiny pagination indicator lets you navigate between pages without scrolling endlessly. I used Astro’s built-in pagination feature. Here’s the commit: zlliang/zlliang@0b22dda.

Happy holidays! At the end of 2025, I’m starting a blog. I’ve already written several entries and feel confident I can keep it going.

Here I talk about my past attempts, the writers who inspired me, the motivation, the topics to cover, and the approach I’m taking. It’s my version of a blogging manifesto.