During this Christmas holiday, one of my students suggested me to update my personal website, and so here it is (though improvements are still needed).
It is indeed a long time since last update. According to the file timestamps, the last update was done in the year of 2016, more than seven years ago. It is really bad, and I also felt guilty. During the past seven years, I have worked with many talented students, but their names are not listed in time. Also, we have many interesting works which are not put on the publication lists, let alone the download links.
Actually, I have been thinking about the updates sometime ago, but was stuck on how to do it. I am a tech-nerd in some sense, and I will always try to compare and learn new techniques if there were different choices, e.g., in this case, how to build a personal website.
The original one was constructed when I first joined CUHK in 2012, and that was a pure manual work, i.e., typing every piece of HTML code inside a Vim editor. Reason? Because at that time, I believe that, as a programmer, I should write all the HTML code by myself instead of using some frameworks, automatic tools, or some office software (like Word).
Of course, that is tedious, and might be one reason why I was reluctant to update the website :)
So, today, when considering a website update, I am again facing a choice. I have done some homework, and know some available approaches and tools. In the end, I decide to using the existing page structure, but use pandoc and markdown for new contents. I hope the use of pandoc and markdown will make life easier, so I will be able to keep this website updated frequently.
Besides, since this website shares lots of information with my CV (which is written in LaTeX and is always updated), I am also considering write some tools to generate website contents automatically based on data in my CV. For example, I plan to use OCaml Lex and Yacc to build a parser of bibtex data and generate the publications.html page based on the bibtex file of my own publications.
You may challenge me that it is totally unnecessary to build a parser using Lex/Yacc, and the job can be done easily with simple Python scripts.
Well, you are right. But I am a curious programmer, and want to try something new.