Come check it out!!
Main site: www.ethan929.com
Blog: blog.ethan929.com
Some ramblings
It’s finally live😭😭😭
I started tinkering with this site back in May, and it’s finally looking like somethin‘!!
Hey hey Ethan, so what’s the point of this website, anyway?
(deepthinking…)
i dunno. maybe just for fun — don’t you think having your own domain and your own website is just really cool?! (doge)
Why does this site exist?
Hmm… At first I just wanted a personal site + tool site to replace the messy pile of web tools I used while editing videos (plus an interactive pitch PDF that I laid out in InDesign in literally half a minute???). But as I went along, features just kept piling up, and it turned into a personal site + tool site + blog + channel tracker + an I-love-Charlie site + … (?)
Yeah, that’s about it.
The early version actually looked like this1 — one page to rule them all ()
What’s on the site?
General features
- 🌍 Bilingual support!! the i18n stuff ./
- 📱 Responsive design, also optimized for mobile~
- 🌓 Light/dark mode, follows your system by default, and you can toggle it manually in the bottom-right corner!
- 🔤 Killer typography: hand-picked with top-tier taste2 for BEAUTIFUL fonts, quite pleasing to the eye~
Main site
- 🌟 My intro, contact info, and my journey so far;
- 📺 Real-time stats for each channel (Bilibili, YouTube, rednote);
- 🛠️ A few handy tools (scale visualizer, audio analyzer, online piano);
- ✨Charlie Zhou!!
Blog
- 🎵 In-sync moments (still Charlie Zhou!!), music reviews (…which i’ll probably manage to write once every half a lifetime), music theory;
- 🎬 Video creation and channel operations;
- 📝 Essays, rants, random musings;
- 🏆 Achievements and recaps;
- 🔍 On-site search, specially adapted for Chinese!
- 🏷️ Category & tag filtering;
- ❤️ Like system — hit that heart if you enjoy it~
Tech stack…?
🤔 Hmm… I couldn’t even tell you what I actually used… AI is just too good these days (DeepSeek is freaking incredible!! I can never repay Lord Liang3’s kindness ✋😭🤚)
Better check the Tech & Copyright page~
The fun (and weird) pitfalls
I hit a ton of pitfalls building this site… it nearly did me in (not really bruh
The big-text design on the Charlie page
I still maintain this was a stroke of genius…
I must have spent a good half a day debugging this big text on and off. I wanted the “text embedded in the photo + white inner stroke” effect. At first I used text-stroke for the outline, but it turned out that only does a centered stroke — and since I was using a variable font, every single stroke of every glyph got outlined (OH NO! I’M ANGRY!!!). I asked every AI I could think of, went around in circles, and finally switched to SVG: first “erode” the glyph’s alpha inward by 1px, then subtract the eroded shape from the original — leaving only a clean white line hugging the inner edge of the glyph, with adjustable thickness😋
Genius!
Chinese has no real italics
So, Chinese doesn’t have real italics, so for Chinese italics I use a serif (Song-style) font instead, paired with a serif italic. Honestly that’s not bad… way better than fake-oblique italics!! (English, of course, gets real italics.)
Why Song-style, you ask? A wild accidental discovery (bro, my attention span is insane): in UN documents, Chinese body text is typeset in Song-style, matching the upright serif of English; and where English uses italic serif, the Chinese UN documents use Kai-style. But Kai looks terrible👎👎 on the web, and the Kai fonts on Google Fonts are hit-or-miss and don’t match our beloved Source Han family — so I’d rather use Source Han Serif~
Pagefind’s Chinese support sucks!
The on-site search uses Pagefind, but by default it tokenizes by English words and basically can’t handle Chinese — God knows how it splits the text, so you might search a keyword and find absolutely nothing. For example, searching 阿拉 would actually surface 阿拉伯 (Arab), but searching 阿拉伯 itself would come up empty; searching 中国 (China) would return 中日文 (Chinese & Japanese), and happened to drag 一中 (No.1 High School) along for the ride, but never 中国 itself.
After a lot of thinking, DeepSeek came up with a hack: before indexing, insert a zero-width space between every two CJK characters to trick it into treating each character as its own token, and on the search side auto-convert queries into exact phrases — problem solved!
That DeepSeek, it’s a sly one.
This site exists because of you
So, not bad, right?
I’m pretty satisfied with it myself~ There’ll probably still be small updates down the road, though.
And thanks to all of you for giving me the chance to share my thoughts on this site!!
Love you all!!
Footnotes
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This one was actually one of the better versions, using the Google Fonts API… There was also an even older (read: extremely bare-bones) version, but I switched hosting platforms halfway through, so it’s long gone from the current Cloudflare Pages. ↩
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Self-proclaimed, of course 🤓 ↩
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Liang Wenfeng, CEO of DeepSeek. ↩