Blog Refurbishment

2026-09-20
Status: finished

Hello - Bryan here.

If you're new to my blog, welcome!

If you're are not new to my blog, you may notice that I've "unpublished" all of my old blogs.

After making so many changes and writing about many different topics, I came to a few unfortunate realizations:

  1. In the past, I didn't organize my thoughts or proofread my writing.
  2. Most of my older blogs used outdated components (back when I used NextJS).

Because of this, a lot of my older pieces were hard to read. In particular, my technical blogs weren't well-structured, making it super hard to follow along.

All in all, I decided that it would be easier to start fresh. Thus, here we are.

In this blog, I will provide a quick overview of the current tech stack I'm using for my website. After that, I'll write about what I plan to use this platform for and what kind of content you can expect to see.

Website Stack

This website is a hybrid static site generator and web server that is written in Rust.

In particular, I am using Axum for the web server framework. There's one dynamic route that returns the song that I'm listening to on Spotify: /api/current-spotify. Other than that, everything else is static.

I keep some information (education and experience, etc.) in a JSON file so that I can easily update it without adjusting the website code itself. An example (my education history) is shown below:

data/education.json
[
  {
    "institution": "Stevens Institute of Technology",
    "degree": "Master of Science in Data Science",
    "startDate": "2025",
    "endDate": "2026",
    "location": "Hoboken, NJ",
    "gpa": "3.900/4.0",
    "courses": [...]
  },
  {
    "institution": "Stevens Institute of Technology",
    "degree": "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science",
    "startDate": "2022",
    "endDate": "2025",
    "location": "Hoboken, NJ",
    "gpa": "3.769/4.0",
    "courses": [...]
  },
  ...
]

To generate the static files (such as this blog), I am using Tera as my templating engine. To render the actual markdown in the blogs, I use pulldown-cmark. KaTeX is used to render any LaTeX math expressions (like the one below).

P(A∣B)=P(B∣A)P(A)P(B)P(A|B) = \frac{P(B|A)P(A)}{P(B)}

The Deployment Process

Let's say that I've finished editing my code and am ready to deploy from my laptop.

I have a GitHub actions workflow that builds a docker image of my website on push. After the image is built, it is pushed to DockerHub.

The actual machine that hosts my website is a UGREEN NAS DXP4800. This machine has an instance of Watchtower running. It regularly pulls the latest version of my website's docker image and updates the container if there's a new version.

My router has a reverse proxy configured such that requests to bryanchan.org are forwarded to my NAS.

Plans for the new Blog?

I will continue to write as I usually do. This means that the topics may still be messy and scattered around.

However, I'm hoping that I will be able to do it more authentically and carefully. This may mean that I will lose some blog length in exchange, but I think that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. After all, who wants to read a 5,000-word blog anyway?

I plan on starting by going through some of my previous blogs and renovating them for this new style. You'll probably see some rewrites of my old blogs soon.

See you soon!