2024

October 26, 2024

Photo credit: None

Note: This post was originally meant to symbolize the beginning of my blogging journey. It has now been repurposed as a changelog , a space to share updates about my website and projects, tracking my progress, changes, and key milestones as I continue to develop and refine my platform and content. For specific details about the updates, you can refer to the index, which is organized by dates.

My First Post

Hi, I decided to start this blog as a means for me to stay honest, transparent, and share my story, my thoughts, and my journey through life. I’m not sure how much I should share because this is different from a private journal, so I guess I’ll have to figure that out. I’m not certain if I can keep this up in the long run or if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, but I promise to try my best and to always be honest and transparent.

I will be using AI to correct my English grammar because I’m not a native English speaker, but I’ll do my best to keep the content my own creation. I’ll probably use ChatGPT to help structure the format of these posts, as I’m still not sure if I need a consistent structure or about the frequency of posts. I know nothing.

But I guess this is it for the first post. To anyone who stumbles into this blog and reads this post, I hope you know that you are blessed, you are loved, and you deserve to love yourself as much as you can.

Update: October 27, 2024

This was my first post, originally shared on Blogger on September 24, 2024. I recently decided to move to WordPress, but I didn’t want to leave my posts behind, so I’ve reposted it here as they were.

Update: December 26, 2024

I’ve moved to a new platform! I’ve created my own website hosted on GitHub, and I’m excited to continue my journey there. Thank you to everyone who has supported me so far, and I hope this new chapter brings more opportunities to share my story and thoughts.

Update: January 1, 2025

I’ve updated my GitHub website and I’m now using Jekyll. I originally started off building my own custom website, but I got stuck trying to create a posts page.

Although I really wanted (and tried) to build and maintain my own website with custom HTML, I realized I might spend too much time trying to define and maintain the website itself. It detracts from the purpose I started documenting my thoughts and putting myself out there, and also, I fear it might interfere with my main projects.

The website, though still under construction, is functional, and I suppose it’s just a matter of time before I figure out how to customize this to my own liking better.

I’ve also decided to use this post as a place for site updates, where I’ll share updates about my website and projects. Stay tuned for more!

Update: January 10, 2025

I’ve updated all my blog posts to follow the title format Journal Entry d/m/y. I made this change because I believe it gives the website a more structured and expressive identity as a journal, editorial, opinion blog, or something in between—even if it doesn’t always sound like a traditional journal.

Additionally, I’ve added a guests section. While I don’t expect anyone to post there, I’ve created it to separate content like reviews, humor, commentaries, and general posts from entries meant to be more self-reflective. I think this distinction will help clarify the nature of the entries and make the site more organized.

When testing the website on the Mi Browser, I noticed it displays the site with a dark background, even though the default is a light background. I believe this is controlled by the browser’s system theme setting since I haven’t implemented any logic for this. It’s possible that Jekyll or the Minimal Mistakes theme offers such a feature, though I haven’t come across it in the documentation I’ve read.

Regardless, I think adding a dark mode toggle would be a good idea for a future update. However, before that, I need to figure out a better way to organize my posts with categories and tags. So, while the dark mode feature is interesting, it will likely be a lower priority for now.

Update: January 11, 2025

I’ve set my homepage to just display a :) , which acts as a minimalistic entry point to the website. Clicking on it leads to the main menu located at /main/. This approach helps keep the journal and its contents from being too exposed, maintaining an element of subtlety and exclusivity for those who explore further.

Update: January 23, 2025

I’ve enabled Categories and removed Guests, along with the homepage update from January 11, 2025 (the last update). I’ve also added a button on one of my posts Journal Entry 12-01-2025. The idea is to enable switching between English, Mizo, and Hmar.

However, I have to create translations manually and then create the buttons and link each post manually. I’m pretty sure there’s no way to bypass this since Hmar is not available on Google Translate yet, and the Mizo Translations are often incorrect!

Overall i’m satisfied with this update, but there are still a few features I’d like to add in the future:

Tags: I haven’t been able to create a tags page yet, but I’m optimistic about implementing it in future updates.
Randomized Website Titles: I want to add randomized title logic to the website, similar to what I had on my old site. The idea is to fetch titles from a .md or .txt file and refresh them with every click. However, I currently lack the skills to implement this since working with simple custom HTML was straightforward, but it’s more complex with Jekyll and the Minimal Mistakes theme. If I could implement this, I’d probably bring back the homepage update from the January 11, 2025, last update.

Update: March 28, 2025

Changed the theme to “dark” and edited the scss for it and changed the background of codebox to darker

Update April 15, 2025

Added a custom home page. Issue : No pagination for the landing page for /blog/

Update: January 6, 2026

I am back online after a long period of silence. While I wasn’t writing or updating the site, I was busy behind the scenes experimenting with the site’s architecture, testing various frameworks to see if there was a better fit for my workflow than Jekyll.

My testing included:

Hugo: Specifically the Bear Blog theme, looking for that ultra-minimalist feel.
11ty: For its speed and modern approach to static sites.
Bear Blog: The platform itself, for its focused, text-only philosophy.
Custom SSG: I even spent time attempting to build my own static site generator using Python to have total control over the build process.

Ultimately, after all that testing, nothing felt quite right. Each alternative either lacked the flexibility I needed or didn’t feel as intuitive as my current setup. This period of “framework hopping” served as a confirmation that Jekyll is the right choice for this project.

To coincide with this return, I have made two major changes:

New Theme: I’ve moved to the Contrast theme. It perfectly captures the “retro archive” aesthetic I was searching for during my experiments—minimalist, text-heavy, and functional.
New Hosting: I have officially migrated from GitHub Pages to OnRender.

The site is now live at batchnode.onrender.com. This update marks the end of my experimentation phase and a return to the original purpose of this blog: documenting my journey.