I Brought Back My Long-Buried NetEase Blog Archive and Met Myself from More Than Ten Years Ago

Recently I did this one thing: I imported a NetEase Blog backup from more than ten years ago into my current blog.

First, I Just Moved It Back

NetEase Blog has been gone for many years. Strictly speaking, these posts had already disappeared from the internet. I only still had them because, before the platform went offline, I left myself a small escape route and kept a copy of the data. Recently, while cleaning up my blog, I remembered that since I now have my own site, I might as well move these old things back.

Then I Read a Few Posts

After exporting them, I was a little surprised. There were more than I expected. Laid out one by one, from high school to college to my first year of work, they felt like a stack of old notebooks pulled out from a forgotten corner of a hard drive. I originally thought I would just import the archive and be done with it. Then I read a few posts, and they turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

I started reading them one by one.

The earliest ones were from 2007, when I was still in high school. I wrote about the tofu culture festival in my hometown Huainan, a day trip to Shangyao Forest Park, heavy snow, and cheering myself on the day before the college entrance exam. Yes, the day before gaokao, I was apparently still in an internet cafe updating my blog. Many sentences now feel very dramatic, sometimes even a bit embarrassing. When I wrote about scenery, I liked to make everything sound huge, like a school essay mixed with the old internet blog style of that time.

But the more I read, the more I found them interesting.

It is not really about whether the writing was good. Those posts directly preserved who I was at that time. A high school student, using whatever language he had, carefully recording the things happening around him. Maybe it was snow, maybe a festival, maybe a few words before an exam, maybe the reluctance before leaving home.

Then in 2008, I went to Shanghai for college. The posts suddenly became about military training, dorm life, my first impression of Shanghai, Shanghai dialect I could not understand, sweet food, and the first time a dorm room started to feel like "home." Reading them now pulls up all kinds of threads. When you first arrive in a new city, it is probably like that. Everything feels new, and you keep comparing it with home, but deep down you are still looking for a place where you can settle.

Later, the posts slowly turned into class projects, Flash, 3ds Max, web design, group projects, competitions, interviews, and job fairs.

The change is obvious.

The Me from Back Then

For example, there was one post called "Good Luck on the College Entrance Exam!" It was basically one sentence: tomorrow is the exam, may every student get the result they want, including myself. Looking at it now, it is almost funny because that post was published on June 6, 2008, the day before the exam. In other words, the day before gaokao, I was still in an internet cafe updating NetEase Blog. It sounds a little ridiculous now, but it also feels very much like me at that age: nervous or not, the blog still had to be updated.

Another one was "First Impression of Shanghai." I had just arrived there not long before, carrying heavy bags, taking the train from Huainan to college. In the post I wrote that Shanghai had taller buildings and higher prices, but otherwise did not seem that much better than my hometown. I also wrote that food in Shanghai was very sweet, so sweet that classmates joked even the chili tasted sweet. The hardest thing to get used to was Shanghai dialect, which sounded like an alien language. Reading those lines now brings back the feeling of arriving somewhere new: everything is fresh, everything gets compared, but you are still trying to find where you can land.

At first I was only using NetEase Blog to write things. Later I began making my own web pages. Then web pages, design, and projects slowly became something that could maybe become a direction. Looking back now, I find it a little funny. When I wrote about my first web project, MyBlog, the excitement was real. The project was probably rough, but for me at that time, it really was the first time I turned an idea into a page.

That MyBlog post is interesting too. By then I had been using NetEase Blog for years, but for some reason I wanted to write my own blog system. Looking at it now, that actually turned out to be a pretty correct beginning. After learning Dreamweaver, an ancient artifact now, and I wonder how many people still remember using it, I made my own MyBlog. I even wrote very seriously that it was "typed out line by line in code." Of course, technically it was very early, and it even borrowed ideas from QQ Zone. But that line matters, because it was probably the beginning of me moving from "using a blog" to "wanting to build something myself."

Some posts are even more naive. I wrote about work after only one week of internship and already felt the workplace was nothing like I imagined. I read a career planning book and seriously thought about three-year, five-year, and eight-year plans. I wrote letters with emotions that were much more direct than I would use today. I probably would not write like that now, but I also do not really want to fix it.

If I fix it too much, the taste is gone.

So when I imported these old posts, I decided to keep them mostly as they were. Typos, broken links, old tone, old formatting: I only did the necessary conversion. I do not want to turn them into today's articles. They are not there to prove I used to write well, and they are not there to package the past into something more respectable.

They are more like a box of old photos. Maybe this is what middle age does to people. You start enjoying looking back.

A platform that has already disappeared, a pile of words left in a backup, and now they are back on my blog. The internet loses things all the time, so looking at these old posts now, I am pretty glad I archived them back then.

So I am putting them up like this.

The quality is not always high. The formatting carries its age. Some parts are childish, some parts are wordy, and many images and links are already gone. But I still think they are worth keeping.

The person who wrote about gaokao, military training, and his first web project on NetEase Blog probably could never have imagined that, more than ten years later, he would be sitting in Finland, moving those old words back into his own blog one by one.

It is not a big thing, really. Just putting an old backup back online. But for me, it is interesting. It feels like suddenly meeting myself from more than ten years ago. He was naive, wordy, sometimes funny. But he really is part of how I got here.