Rebuilding My Personal Blog After Losing the Old Posts

This one feels more like a “starting over” kind of post.

So yeah… I’m back.

🧭 This site actually disappeared for a while

When I first built this website, I was pretty excited about it.

Bought an Aliyun server, set everything up from scratch, deployed it, wrote blogs — it all felt kind of fresh and motivating at the time.

But then the server expired.

And when I tried to renew it, the price had basically doubled.

Even worse, all the blog posts were gone with it.

I could’ve recovered them if I noticed earlier or had proper backups… but back then I honestly didn’t think too much about it.

Looking back now, it does feel a bit wasted.

🔁 But maybe it was also a restart point

Rebuilding this site wasn’t something I just decided overnight.

I actually had the idea somewhere around mid-2024, but I kept pushing it back because of work and life stuff.

And to be honest… I was also just procrastinating a bit 😅

Then this year I finally had some free time, so I just decided to pick it up again.

No overthinking, just start.

💡 This time I want it to be more casual

This time I don’t really want to limit the site to a “tech blog” anymore.

Of course I’ll still write about development stuff and things I run into while building projects.

But I also want to include more everyday things, like:

• random thoughts while growing up
• changes at work
• small moments in life
• anything interesting I come across

No strict topics, no pressure to be consistent.

Just write when I feel like it.

✨ Final thoughts

If the first version of this site was driven by excitement, this one feels more like a calm restart after taking time to put things in order.

I just hope this version lasts longer and doesn’t randomly disappear again.

And if you happen to read this, feel free to drop by anytime — maybe you’ll find something useful here.

What should a blog rebuild check beyond the design?

Losing the old posts made one distinction clear: a working website is not the same as recoverable content. These are checks prompted by that experience, not a claim that the lost data was recovered:

• Posts and code: Is the server holding the only copy? Does the repository need an independent backup?
• Images and downloads: Does a content backup include the actual assets, or only their URLs?
• Domains and hosting: When do the domain, server, and storage renew, and do renewal reminders reach an active address?
• Restoration: Can the posts and attachments be opened in a fresh environment using the backup? Saving files and testing recovery are separate tasks.

These questions are less visible than a new theme, but they determine whether the next hosting change preserves the work already published.

Follow the later development work

The site later gained Chinese and English content. The implementation is covered in the Next.js 15 and next-intl 4 tutorial; the architectural lessons are in five Next.js i18n mistakes. This post remains a personal rebuild account rather than a complete setup guide.