The 11th Version of My Site: A Side Menu, Two Languages and a New Mark

I've rebuilt my personal site eleven times since 2018. The first version was written in React; over the years it moved through jQuery, Gatsby and Next.js before landing on TanStack Start. Every old version lives in a single repository. This post is a note for that archive: what changed in v11, and why.

Nothing was really broken

Honestly, I had no big complaints about v10. The only problem was the menu. As I added more pages, they stopped fitting in the header. A link that doesn't fit doesn't get seen, and a page nobody sees doesn't get visited. Writing a page that no one can find isn't much different from not writing it at all.

The menu moved to the left

In v10, the menu was a single row in the header. Four links fit; everything else was tucked away under Keşfet, Turkish for "Explore".

That's the biggest change in v11: the menu now sits on the left side of the screen, split into groups. Every page has its own place under Work, Writing, Explore or Personal. The left side catches the eye more, and adding a page is no longer a fight for space; it's one more line in a list. On mobile, the same menu becomes a drawer that slides up from the bottom.

The change also brought a few pages into the light. In v10, the books I've read, the films I love and the links I've saved all lived on a single bookmarks page, where they were easy to miss among hundreds of links and images. Now Library, Films and series and Bookmarks are pages of their own. The tools I use every day are collected on Uses.

Now in English, too

Another big decision in v11 was adding English. I want what I write to reach more than Turkish readers; I want it to be found from anywhere.

To be honest, my English isn't good enough to write articles in. Without AI, publishing the site in two languages wasn't a realistic goal for me. That limit is gone now. The English pages aren't word-for-word translations; they're rewritten to read naturally to someone who reads English. This post is one of them.

Turkish is still the default language. Most of my older posts are in Turkish, and I didn't want to lose the search visibility they've built up over the years, so the English pages live under /en. From now on, I'll publish most of my technical posts in both languages.

A clean rebuild in a single day

Instead of patching the old site, I started from scratch. ViraStack Start laid the foundation, ViraStack AI set the coding rules, and I wrote the code together with Claude Opus 5.5. The images, icons and posts were already done, so the whole rebuild took one day, in one sitting.

It went smoothly, just as planned. That's exactly what ViraStack was built for: when the foundation and the rules are clear, the AI follows them to the letter. The most valuable result isn't speed, it's consistency: every component sits in the same place, follows the same naming and is written the same way. There are more pages than before, with less code.

Not everything I tried made it in. I gave TanStack's new Redact feature a go; it trimmed the JavaScript a little, but pages got slower to respond. I've left it out for now.

Finally, a mark of my own

I never found a logo for my personal site that felt right. My surname, Gülçiçek, means "rose flower" in Turkish, so older versions used a rose icon. But it was an off-the-shelf SVG, and it never felt like mine.

For v11, I chose a motif that's closer to my culture and one I love: çintemani. Made of three spots and wavy lines, it's one of the most cherished patterns in Ottoman art, found on everything from kaftans to tiles. I drew it myself as an SVG. The background is the same turquoise the site uses, and that's no accident: turquoise has become the shared color of everything I make, from ViraStack to this site. I wrote about the pattern's meaning and its small version on the Brand page.

Take a look around

Every time I rebuild my site, I write it from scratch with the most current tools of the time; each of the previous ten versions was built with what was modern back then. For v11, that meant the tools of the AI era: agents, skills and LLMs, the fast-rising TanStack, and Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui, which have become the standard way to write CSS.

That's v11 for now. Every page in the menu used to be a link that didn't fit in the header; now they all have a place. If you have a moment, take a tour through the menu on the left. You might come across a book you love, or a film you've never heard of.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments; feel free to reach out about anything.