A little backstory
It’s been 2 years since the last time I’ve written a blog post. In those two years, I have worked two full-time software jobs, learned a TON of new stuff, worked on a few side projects, and got married. 💍
In the meantime, I abandoned the previous blog I maintained since 2007. I couldn’t see the point of keeping a blog in Turkish anymore, and most of the time I felt like I had no story to tell, and not even a single person to listen. After a long break, today I visited it for one last time and got an instant shot of nostalgia. I’ve started and run a community for local mobile Linux enthusiasts and developers 1 there, I’ve announced first (and to this day, only) mobile apps I created, announced a few side projects, shared videos, comics, and opinions on topics I cared about the most. I learned a bit about everything and somehow managed to help a few people along the way.
After a long time of neglect, my previous blog, a hungry, WordPress-based mammoth, now sits on a Raspberry Pi with the help of aggressive caching, CloudFlare and a few optimizations I made back in the day. It runs on out-of-date versions of Nginx, PHP, and MySQL. To my surprise, somehow it seems like it’s still not hacked yet. (as far as I can tell)
Anyway, in a few hours, I will pull the plug and my now 11-year old blog 2 can finally rest in peace. 😌
Moving on to greener pastures
Time for more energetic thoughts! Today, I am starting a new version of my blog! And it doubles as a personal landing page too. It is now in English, and to me, it is a thing of beauty. It’s minimalistic, there are no share/social buttons, no sidebar, no tags, categories, twitter widgets or any other kind of badges, and the best part of it: not a single component moves or animates on its own.
As for content, I don’t really have a plan in mind right now. I think I’ll post infrequently, and mostly about software, personal projects, and other stuff I am interested in.
Under the hood, it’s a beautiful static website, generated with Hugo. I created a Hugo theme from HTML5UP’s “Stellar” CSS template and made a few customizations on top of it. 3 It’s deployed with Docker Compose, and all of this process is wrapped in a tiny Makefile. To add a new post, all I have to do is to write my post in a Markdown file and run make build.
By the way, if you like this website, and wish you had your own: all you have to do is to fork my repository. Everything is configurable, so you can just remove my name from config.yml and remove my posts from the content/ directory, then it’s all yours!
Update: 2019 facelift
I made a facelift for my blog, a year after I published this post. Now it’s a slightly customized version of Lithium theme, with a few minor changes here and there.
If you like it, you can still have it by forking my repository.
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MeeGo Turkey was an initiative to help non-tech people and developers get on-board to Linux-based mobile devices. ↩︎
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I started it just after installing Linux to my computer for the first time. ↩︎
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There already was a Hugo theme for Stellar, named “hugo-stellar-theme”. But it did not support blog posts, and I wanted to create something more personalized with customized layout, colors etc. ↩︎