neverland

Revising the About Page

2024-03-09

I enjoy reading the “about” page whenever I visit a personal blog for the first time. A well-crafted about page serves as a mini wiki for the site owner, offering biographical and contextual information that aids in understanding their writings and guides the visitor to other aspects of their life. Its quality is also a good proxy of the level of care invested in maintaining the site.

The about page of this site (titled “colophon” inspired by John Gruber) was originally written in the spring of 2017 when I acquired the domain name cyhsu.xyz. I was in my third year of college at the time and, understandably, abused my creative license in composing the page, resulting in a collection of loosely connected sections that, to me today, seem awkward to read and share. And the English was just… broken. Over the years, the information has been updated sporadically, but the structure has remained largely unfixed.

So I decided to rewrite the page as part of the annual housekeeping of the site. In past years, I’ve done enough fiddling by migrating between site generators and hosting providers and experimenting with stylesheets. But this year, I feel perfectly content with my current setup, making the about page an obvious target for improvement with the efforts spared.

And here are the changes I’ve made:

  • A “mini bio” was added to provide an overview of my past experiences and current pursuits;
  • Descriptions of my personality and views were revised to reflect the influence of my recent learnings and lived experiences;
  • The unnecessarily extensive tables of gadgets and software were replaced with a simpler list of essentials;
  • The list of topics covered was updated to include more recent posts; and
  • The grammar was streamlined with the help of GPT (rest assured, almost all the words are still my own).

I have also created a redirection from /about to /colophon as an courtesy to my fellow nerds who would intuitively add /about after the domain name to reach that page.

Hopefully, the revised page can serve as a decent description of the site and myself, and provide a better framework for updates in the coming years. As usual, all comments and suggestions are welcome.