Branches of a Blooming Linden Tree

I have been using WordPress for my website for years. My first encounter with it goes all the way back to 2006. I am quite satisfied with it, too. I still use it on another website of mine. It holds a very important place in where the web is today. But with the emergence of artificial intelligence in the last few years and blogging being on its last legs, it has gradually started to lose its former importance for people like me. Especially with the general public’s reluctance to write/read long articles, the proliferation of “microblog”, “video”, and “visual content” platforms has pushed these valuable contents into the background. For me, personal platforms are far, far more valuable—that’s another story—but generally, people prefer to be in crowded places. And that is the absolute truth.

As someone who no longer writes as much as I used to, I was keeping an eye out for an independent and as lightweight a system as possible. Consequently, I was introduced to Hugo over the last few months. A static website generator. A simple system without a database, complex code, plugins, or security concerns arising from code vulnerabilities. Don’t be fooled by me calling it simple. I tinkered with it ‘a bit’ on a Raspberry Pi at home (with the help of AI, too). In the end, I managed to build something, even if it is simple.

Many features and things I want are not there yet. For example, there is no on-site search feature. I have other plans regarding the design, but I don’t have the time to deal with them. If everything goes well, I will try to add new features in the coming months/years. I tried to redirect old links as much as possible, but it is almost impossible to create rules for links coming from different sources and systems. There aren’t many visitors to the site anyway. Those who do visit will have to put up with these inconveniences.

Long story short, I migrated my old content to this new system. For now, I have moved some content under a few sections (blog, gallery, microblog, podcast). I hadn’t been using my social media accounts for a long time anyway. I decided to move my content from there to here over time as well. We could also call this an effort to purify myself a little more as we rapidly progress towards a digital dystopia. If I live long enough, maybe 20 years from now when I look back, it might be nice to look at some nostalgic things gathered under a single roof. Whether all this will matter then, I don’t know. Since I generally deal with silly and unnecessary things, it probably won’t. But it’s still worth a try.

Around the time I wrote this article, the linden trees had bloomed. It is one of my favorite scents and drinks. That is why I named the omerify.com 2.0 release the “Ihlamur” (Linden) release.

Praying that it leads to good things.

Ömer