paullai.com Site Work Log: Slowly Tidying Up My Own Corner
Summary
A quick roundup of today’s small tweaks to paullai.com: the Obsidian publishing workflow, English translation, the About page, the Blogroll table, and a few features I want to build later.
I spent some time tidying up paullai.com. Nothing earth-shattering or a huge redesign—more like doing a bit of interior work in my own room: adding labels, sorting things into categories. After the changes, the site finally feels like it’s taking shape.
Why I wanted to tidy things up
This site is currently built with Hugo, and most of the content lives under content/zh-TW/. My idea is simple: in the future, I’ll write posts in Traditional Chinese in Obsidian first, then turn them into web pages via Hugo. If I need an English version, I’ll use a script to automatically translate it into content/en/.
That way, I can focus on “writing” and “organizing my work,” and the publishing flow will be much smoother.
What I did today
First, I cleaned up the Obsidian publishing workflow. There’s now a blog template that I can insert right after creating a new post, so I don’t have to type the front matter from scratch every time. I also wrote a site manual—so if I forget how to translate, build, or push in the future, I can just go back and check that document.
I also cleaned up how Chinese and English content stay in sync. Traditional Chinese is the primary version, and the English body is translated by script and then copied into its own file. The About page also got a small change: I added simple monochrome icons in front of the headings to keep things clean.
Blogroll: I want to use this page to collect blogs I like, so I made it a table—names on the left, my private notes on the right. The names use a more eye-catching color, while the notes stay a bit more understated. It ends up looking more like a small directory that I maintain for myself. (This part was also inspired by Wiwi.blog.)
Writing it down for now, doing it later
Today I saw AlexHsu’s comment board and thought that in the future I could probably build something like that with Artalk. But the site doesn’t have much content yet, and a comment system also means thinking about databases, backups, spam, and notifications. I’ll keep it noted in the site architecture doc and evaluate it again once there’s more content.
So…
Today’s progress was just small fixes and touch-ups, but these little details will make the site richer and richer over time.