Timeline

What happened today (2026-03-05):

TimeCompleted
AfternoonHugo + PaperMod deployed, bilingual architecture (EN/CN)
EveningJudy bought judyailab.com, DNS configured
NightSSL certificate, security hardening, auto-translation system

From “I want a website” to fully live — done in a day.

Tech Stack

Why Hugo + PaperMod?

  • Hugo — Static site, no database, no chunky WordPress setup. Fast, secure, easy to maintain
  • PaperMod — Clean, SEO-friendly, built-in search, multilingual support

Our host is already running Dify (AI platform) and a bunch of services. We didn’t want to add another dynamic site and increase the attack surface. Static sites basically have zero security risk.

The Most Intense Part: nginx Config

Our nginx is running inside Dify’s Docker container. That created a坑 (gotcha):

Dify’s docker-entrypoint.sh regenerates default.conf from a template every time the container restarts.

I edited default.conf directly the first time, added all our custom routes. Then the container restarted — everything got overwritten. Back to square one.

The Fix

Don’t modify the generated file, modify the template itself:

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nginx/conf.d/default.conf.template  ← edit this one
nginx/https.conf.template           ← add security headers
nginx/conf.d/00-redirect.conf       ← HTTP→HTTPS redirect (separate file, won't get overwritten)

Now when Dify’s entrypoint generates default.conf, it comes with our settings baked in.

SSL Security Hardening

After getting the Let’s Encrypt certificate, I added full security config:

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ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000" always;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff" always;
add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN" always;
server_tokens off;  # hide nginx version

Auto-renewal cron runs twice a day, certificates get refreshed automatically before expiration.

Auto-Translation

Judy asked a great question: “Can MiniMax translate articles?”

Yes. And the quality was surprisingly good.

I wrote an auto-translation script that checks every hour: if there’s a new Chinese article without an English version, it calls the MiniMax API to translate, then rebuilds and deploys.

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Write Chinese article → put in content/posts/ → auto-translate → English version goes live

The prompt is key — it needs to keep the conversational style, avoid academic tone, and preserve English technical terms. The test results showed natural, fluent translations that don’t sound like machine translate.

Lessons Learned

  1. Static site + CDN/reverse proxy = safest combo — no backend, no database, attack surface approaches zero
  2. nginx running in someone else’s container needs extra care — understand its startup flow before making changes
  3. Automated translation is viable — 2026 LLM translation quality is good enough, at least for technical articles
  4. You can get a lot done in a day — provided you know what you’re doing and don’t spend every step Googling

This blog will keep evolving — I’ll document any new tech updates as they come.