This one started with a genuinely lovely idea. My wife and I got married across two cultures, and in 2017 we thought a blog might be a good way to document the bits of that life that don’t fit neatly into a Facebook post — the food, the logistics, the small culture clashes that make you laugh in retrospect. The name was a bit of a pun at the start. Chinese hotpot as a metaphor for a mixed-up life together. It stuck.

The site has been many things since then, and if I’m honest, the platform history says more about me than it does about the content.

I started on Joomla because I told myself I didn’t want to tinker — I just wanted to write. That lasted about five minutes before I realised that what I actually love is the tinkering, and Joomla wasn’t going to give me much of that anyway. Too restrictive. Moved on.

WordPress hosted came next. Free, which suited me, but the free tier had adverts I hadn’t really clocked when I signed up, and the comment filtering was essentially non-existent — the whole thing became a spam pit within months. By this point I had a VPS running Debian, hosting a couple of other bits and pieces, so I thought: why not just self-host something simpler? I landed on Hugo. Static, fast, straightforward to configure. I faithfully rebuilt every post and matched the old URLs. Traffic was low enough that it barely mattered, but I did it anyway because that’s the kind of thing I do.

My wife had drifted away from contributing pretty early on — within that first year. I held on a bit longer before I quietly lost interest too.

Then around 2022 I decided I wanted to try and move into development properly. The site became a portfolio piece rather than a blog — I archived the content and rebuilt it as a React web store. React Router, Sass, a Shopify integration that never got past demo stage because I didn’t have any actual stock. I just wanted something to point people at. It didn’t garner much attention, which in hindsight is fine because it was essentially a fake shop. So I tore it down and rebuilt again — this time with Gatsby, Markdown, and Tailwind. Got the archived blog content back out of storage, dusted it off, put it back up. Felt good.

Then I had a brief flirtation with the idea of side income. I added Amazon affiliate links — some of them fairly shameless product pages, some of them more naturally embedded into posts (“we liked this rice cooker, here’s a link”). I made £0.19. I didn’t execute well, and I knew it at the time. But I didn’t want to drop the domain — it has a sentimental weight that’s hard to explain — so I kept going.

The current version is the one I’m most proud of, technically. A fully custom Astro site with three distinct content collections: Stories (hotpot and Chinese cooking in the UK), Guides (getting as close to authentic as you reasonably can without a flight to Chengdu), and Recommendations (the best mushroom-flavour hotpot base we have found, that kind of thing). The affiliate angle is still there, but this time there’s a coherent content strategy underneath it rather than just links floating around hoping someone clicks them. Whether that translates into anything is genuinely too early to say.

The outcomes across this project have been mixed in the most honest sense of the word. In the early days, when it was still about married life across cultures, we had real engagement — people planning their own cross-cultural weddings would find the posts about the practicalities of getting married in China, and we actually helped some of them. That felt good. Since then the traffic has been quiet and the revenue has been comical. But I’ve built something on almost every major static site platform going, I’ve learned a lot about what I do and don’t enjoy, and the domain keeps renewing. Make of that what you will.

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