We had a visa appointment at the US Embassy in the capital city, Ankara, on Friday. We were supposed to go there by the sleeper train on Thursday night but unfortunately my wife, in a way very out of character for her, made a mistake and bought tickets for Friday night instead. We needed to find a bus ticket in a rush to make the appointment (very early in the morning) on time.
The journey was one of the most uncomfortable of my life. I slept less than 2 hours. Once it was past 3am, I started thinking about my “productivity” as usual. This is a common experience for me: if I’m not able to sleep but also too tired to read anything, I start thinking and I usually think of novel ways to overhaul my entire setup and try out new PKM tools. Fortunately I’m now experienced enough not to put much importance on any thought that comes after 2am.
But from that night one thing stuck with me: the desire to close the gap between my obsidian vault and my blog(s). Even though I write all my posts on Obsidian first, they usually got updated on my hugo blog and drifted out of sync, and links in my vault weren’t transferable to the posts at all. Standalone pages were not in my vault at all. All these were hard to keep track of. So I decided to migrate all my blogs to Quartz. I did so by forking the amazing-looking digital garden of the creator of Quartz.
This is the 4th blog migration of 2026 (and we’re still in August!). The first 3 were mostly visual changes I did as I figured out how I want to blog. This one is bigger than that: it’s a complete visual overhaul of how my writing is presented to you and also a radical change in how I maintain content on my websites. Hope you like the new design. There are probably a few bugs here and there. I’ll squash them in the following days.
A few things didn’t make the migration: blogroll integration with my miniflux server, comments integration with Bluesky and Mastodon, and standard.site integration with ATProto. I’m not sure if I want to continue these; I might have other plans:
- Blogroll: I added a few blogs to my homepage. I think maintaining a blogroll with intentionality is better.
- Comments: From the beginning, I didn’t like forcing people to have a social media account (even if it’s Mastodon or Bluesky) to comment on my posts. I might build a simple comments backend myself. This would also be a good addition to my dogfooding homelab.
- standard.site: I still think this is a good thing to have but I didn’t like the clumsy integration I had using sequoia. I might also build this myself.
OK, enough with the site updates. As I said at the beginning, we had a visa appointment for getting a US visa. Our visa is approved and soon we’ll have it printed in our passports. I had no doubts that we’d be granted a visa—until we entered the embassy. Since this was my first time applying for a US visa, I had only preconceptions of the process. I knew we’d be interviewed about our plans but I thought the interview would be somewhere with privacy. I was unpleasantly surprised to see how public it was instead!
Imagine you’re waiting in a long queue and listening to others’ appeals. Embassy officials asking not-so-friendly questions. People squirm while they are trying to explain themselves. One by one they get rejected. The end of the line gets closer and closer. You start to realize your chances are not that great either.
Fortunately this was not the case for us. The interviewer approved our visa in less than 2 minutes. I think the biggest contributor to her decision was our long list of visited countries before the USA and the fact that we had Schengen visas for the last ~5 years. So we returned home triumphant.
P.S.: Today is the birthday of my lovely wife. We’ll celebrate her 31st cycle around the sun with a small barbecue party with her parents and siblings. Happy birthday to G!