《关于写博客的初衷》 (“Why I Started Blogging”) has this line:
不过我暂时还没有摸索独立于 Github 仓库的独立域名那一块，anyway 先跑着看看吧。
(“Haven’t explored the whole standalone-domain-outside-the-GitHub-repo thing yet — anyway, let it run for now.”)
Tonight I went a little unhinged and suddenly decided to get one. From the moment the idea popped up to the domain actually resolving took only about half an hour, domain-hunting, paying, and configuring all kinds of config included. cloudflare has a built-in agent to help — seriously fast! And now, finally, the blog has its own domain, brightonxu.com!! 🍾🍾🍾
What Happened
Domain hunting first. I had ds scout a few candidates for me — brighton.blog actually looked pretty nice too, but on its own “Brighton” is literally just a city in England, so after much agonizing I settled on brightonxu.com. The .com suffix just reads more authoritative.
The domain was cheap, ten bucks a year, and given cloudflare’s beefy CDN and all the other services on top, the value for money is great.
Then came payment, and it hung for an insanely long time. Without that snag the whole thing could’ve been done in 20 minutes. Apple Pay kept failing at first, then a ZhongAn Visa — nope. Swapped to an HSBC MasterCard — still nope! Then Google Pay — nope again! Finally PayPal just went through, inexplicably. Mysterious, given I’d never actually used it — just registered an account once and linked a card.
Next, configuration. cloudflare’s built-in agent took care of business — zero headache. My local agent and cf’s agent had a little chat, and everything just got done. My only jobs were copy-pasting, plus clicking a few buttons on cf following a hand-holding-grade tutorial. Effortless and pleasant.
What’s Next
Since this domain is my name (well, “Brighton” isn’t exactly a proper name, but it counts as my personal ID at least), it will probably become my main hub going forward, home to some (potentially) fun stuff beyond the blog. But the internship has been exhausting lately, and I’m still squeezing in time to patch up knowledge gaps all over the place — I’ve barely even been trading stocks! I’ll tinker with it more when I catch a breather. I’ve been playing with manim recently, hoping to learn from 3b1b and make some fun sci-communication animation videos!