Building for China with global infrastructure

Serving a personal site well in mainland China is mostly an exercise in separating what must come from the main domain from what can be cached elsewhere.

The HTML request is still the hard part

If the apex site is not licensed for domestic acceleration, the initial HTML response remains the weakest link. CDN can help almost everything after that, but not the first document itself.

Move every non-critical asset off the hot path

JavaScript, CSS, images, feed data, and dynamic widgets can all be served from a faster domain with better regional delivery.

That means the main document only needs to do one job: become readable as soon as possible.

Design around partial success

The practical architecture is not “make everything equally fast.” It is “make the page useful before the slower parts arrive.”

If a stat counter, guestbook list, or activity widget loads later, the document still succeeds. That is the right failure model for a personal site.