Erkan’s Field Diary is 15 today! Major design change after 9 years!

My longest digital experiment/ playground is 15 years old today!

There will be a party but around October. I had decided to postpone. The 10th year party was a big hit and I feel like the 15th one should be even a bigger hit. Let me first settle in Istanbul.

Nowadays are so hectic I could not even prepare a good post. However, I should still note this important date. I owe the origins of this blog to Prof. Chris Kelty who set up the first version at a Rice University subpage. Archive.org keeps the first pages here. Blogging may be passé for many but not for the die-hard bloggers like me.

This blog became more than a research tool; it had its own life and it transformed my academic orientation eventually. If I am known to be a new media scholar, I owe it to this blog to a large extent. It is also a digital record of what happened in Turkish politics with occasional personal commentaries.

I had several fantasies about the blog, such as making it a multi-authored nationwide site. If I had a more commercial logic, I could do that in the early 2000s. But now there are many sites already and without substantial financial support, it is hard to that. People do not have the stamina or have petty ambitions. We could still do it but in the end, it remained to be my own playground. In the end, I am happy to maintain it in one way or another. I know that despite its relatively low traffic, it has an impact, I have lovely readers and I managed to meet some of them all over the world in these 15 years. Both in diplomatic terms and human terms.

So I decided to give a facelift to the blog. After 9 years, I had recently changed the WordPress template (I started with the Movable Type, then used Yahoo hosting software before switching to WordPress for good). I have tried to provide information to my all digital dealings. Nearly all public digital existence is linked to Erkan’s Field Diary. Harun Vedat Şahnacı, a former student of mine, assisted me in some SEO settings. Thank you, Harun! So, some of the wiki-like projects I give priority are linked at the very top. That includes The Gezi Archive and SeçimTürk. Under the blog title, there are links to my most favorite social media accounts in addition to About pages. You can reach my continuously updated CV and media appearances. The features posts, which I give priority, cannot be missed under the banner. In fact, I have switched back to less frequent but more personal posts. Still, I can not stop posting lists of news links on current affairs. On the right-hand side under the subscription by email box, there are links to back up blogs. Some of them might be interesting like the Beşiktaş news blog. I have decided to insert the Archive box again. Maybe you would like to see the old posts. Unfortunately, I could not transfer the earliest posts.

I have implemented WordPress ads. I guess I would be grateful if you click on these ads from time to time. However, I am not sure if it is worthy. Let me know if should delete all the ads for the sake of simplicity. In 15 years, I have once earned more than a thousand USD in a year many years ago, but since then virtually nothing. But I still assume the site not necessarily a commercial place. So far so good. I am happy.

On the upper right-hand side, there is the email subscription box. I believe email subscriptions to the blog posts may be the most reliable method to follow if you do not use an RSS reader.

It is hard to miss posts as they are automatically shared by my Twitter, Facebook page – which has sometimes bigger reach than the blog itself, Medium, and Linkedin accounts. It thus reaches to more than 18 thousand accounts.

So happy readings and please drop me a line whenever you would like to recommend something!