The AYA community site, aya.is, is built on the vision of enabling writers, artists, and producers to express themselves better, and preventing these productions/expressions from being lost under the feet of interaction algorithms in social media chaos.

Many of us open blog sites with similar motivations, but after a while we forget to update them, deal with security/dependency update issues, hosting troubles, and eventually abandon them. In scenarios where we don't abandon them, spreading the content from our personal site to reach interested people requires serious effort.

Since I've been genuinely making an effort to develop this place, putting my mind to it so to speak, over perhaps 3 years, I've taken the pulse of many people asking "Why don't you write your articles on aya.is?", and many conveyed to me that "closing their own sites wouldn't make sense, their hearts wouldn't allow it." After thinking about this feedback for a bit, I found myself explaining: "But that's not my purpose anyway!":

On the contrary, the AYA community site exists to emphasize "what is produced", bring it to the forefront, and spread it. Not to destroy things and absorb them into itself.

Therefore, I thought that while you continue to add content to your site, a system where the same articles appear on your aya.is profile without any effort would serve both situations.

Based on this, our updates this week are in this scope:

Mirroring Jekyll, Hugo and Zola Sites

We started especially with markdown-based static site generation (SSG) infrastructures, and in the future this feature can include more external site mirroring options.

Step 1: We create a new external site connection from under Social Links in the edit section of our profile.

Step 2: We share the details of the external site and its GitHub address.

Step 3: After a while, the system completes the content synchronization.

Details!

Of course, the biggest challenge with this development was adapting the unique syntax of the infrastructures we mentioned. Apart from a few adjustments, the results were quite satisfactory.

The second concern was on the SEO level. Of course, since the source website is the original owner of the content, it has an advantage in the eyes of search engines, but nonetheless, to address concerns, a canonical url implementation was necessary.

The aya.is mirror defines the original source as canonical url, so origin of the content won't face any scoring disadvantage. On the contrary, it's more accessible than before thanks to channels like aya.is MCP!

YouTube Channel Mirroring

If you have a YouTube channel, you can use the same workflow to ensure that the content you produce appears both in the Contents section and on your own profile.

Currently, mine and Furkan Baytekin's YouTube channels are connected here, and new videos are automatically transferred to the system without any effort with each new video.

Example:

That's all for this week's development summary. Stay tuned to stay informed about both existing and new features!