Greetings World

Greetings, World

After a long digital journey, today I’m launching my blog for the first time under my own name. I’ve previously shared my thoughts in hundreds of forum threads, written two different anonymous blogs, produced a podcast series with over 50 episodes, and spoken on countless audio broadcasts. But most importantly, I now have a multilingual platform under my own name and full control.

For those curious about the technical infrastructure of this site: my blog is entirely based on a Static Site Generator. In the past, I’ve used many different static site generators, tried the tools they offered, and even contributed to some of them. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, I chose Astro — which I found to be the most suitable in terms of developer experience and plugin ecosystem, and one that allows me to use other frameworks if I wish. The source code of my blog project is hosted on my own Git server. With each new content addition, a build/packaging process is triggered and the blog is automatically deployed via Cloudflare. This ensures every update is published instantly.

Choosing a domain name and hosting provider was also a crucial step. After much thought, I registered a .me domain with my own name and managed its DNS settings via Cloudflare. Thanks to Cloudflare’s global CDN (Content Delivery Network), my website reaches visitors around the world with low latency. HTTPS certificates are renewed automatically, giving me peace of mind in terms of both security and performance — with no extra effort required.

Although I use Astro’s built-in solution for the multilingual content of my website, I still need to manually review each post in every language or carefully examine the machine translations, because I can’t fully trust automated translation. I’m concerned about losing the intended meaning or ending up with unintended interpretations. As you can see in this post, you can instantly switch — if available — between the Turkish, English, Esperanto, German, and French versions using the language selector in the header.

Was this all necessary? Not really. I don’t plan to publish every post in every language. But by including this feature, I give myself the flexibility to translate and publish a post written in English into Turkish — or vice versa, or into other languages.

I’ve also customized Astro’s template for RSS feeds and now provide separate feeds for each language. This way, whether you’re using a news aggregator or an RSS reader, you can follow my posts in the language of your choice.

For now, I don’t have any fixed topic plan — I’ll write whatever I feel like. Of course, I won’t be writing about my guilty pleasures or niche interests I don’t usually share. :)

Voilâ! My very first post now live on your screen or device. Happy reading in the posts to come.