The predecessor of this site was Under the Banyan Tree in a White Coat. It once changed its name and its URL. Changes in different periods reflect the shifts in my state of mind during different stages of life.
"Under the Banyan Tree in a White Coat" was during my naive and uncertain time as a medical student and resident, entrusting many literary memories and dreams. "Under Yggdrasil, the Eye of Höðr" was a period filled with despair, hiding away to heal, and striving to reclaim myself.
The evolution of the website is also related to the server resources available, my technical maintenance capabilities, and my state of mind for writing. In the beginning, I toyed around with WordPress. Later, because Google Cloud Free Tier network traffic started charging, I migrated to a paid Vultr Cloud instance and switched to the Ghost Blog Platform.
Later, due to a lack of confidence in maintaining my writing habits, as well as an interest in Hugo Static Site Generator technology, I switched to hosting on GitHub.
By a stroke of luck, I obtained Oracle Cloud Free Tier resources in March 2025, so I rebuilt this site using Ghost Blog. I plan to occasionally migrate articles from the previous period's website, refine them, and post them here.
Starting in November 2025, due to the rise of Vibe Coding, and a preference for managing documents with Git for easy integration with Obsidian Markdown, I used my own blog to practice Next.js development. Thus, I streamlined the current blog into an architecture that loads Markdown documents from a Git Repo and then deploys to the Vercel platform.
Origins of the Site Name
"Under the Banyan Tree in a White Coat" was the name chosen after blending my name, my alma mater, and my dream of becoming a physician. "Under Yggdrasil, the Eye of Höðr" was a name chosen during an onset of chuunibyou after my efforts shattered. It drew from Norse mythology, selecting an allusion related to declining eyesight and blindness among the gods, while attempting to maintain imagery related to the banyan tree. Now restarting, I wanted to simplify, and temporarily having no better alternative, I retained "The Eye of Höðr".
Article Types
I treat this blog as a personal journal, with no specifically set goals or genres. Because web traffic is tied to commercial interests, a blogger's image is easily associated with marketing and sponsored posts. However, this is not the ambition of this site; its core is merely thinking, writing, and sharing.
In the past, I only focused on image, appearance, and technical details. I constantly played around with themes, layouts, and optimizing website loading performance, yet I neglected the essence of sharing articles.
Observing the changes in the website's writing style over time, I found that the level of anxiety is related to the trivial details of the terminology used, and whether the writing is comfortable has also slowly become more easygoing. Perhaps this is also a kind of change in my state of mind towards life.
Refinement Principles
Starting in 2024, in the era of LLMs, and even after the prevalence of integrated Deep Search-related tools, the rapid turnover of information and the lowered threshold for updates have become inevitable. I believe the necessity for a blog to compile notes on rapidly changing tech products or information has greatly diminished. In application, the feasible steps or methods figured out today might quickly be overturned by a single Git commit or a single LLM Q&A session. Since the establishment of this site, I had originally accumulated some user experiences of Apps, exploratory notes on network technologies, etc. During the process of migrating and rebuilding, these have all been manually filtered out as outdated or of reduced importance. For example, "Thoughts on using the Arc Browser" and "Windows 11 WSL + Tensorflow Installation Notes"—these articles with obvious time sensitivity will be directly archived and not published on the new blog.
The retained articles place more emphasis on the human elements such as "humanities, warmth, viewpoints, memories, and feelings." At the same time, regarding tech products or technologies, experiences, common underlying logics, and principles might also be preserved, even if some of the information is outdated.