No fresh start, just a better home for my writing

For quite a while, most of my writing happened on LinkedIn. onygo.org was still there, but increasingly quiet. Not because I had stopped caring about the blog, but because every time I looked at it, I had this slight feeling of: this isn’t really me anymore.

The design had aged, the technical setup wasn’t particularly elegant, and the whole place no longer fitted how I work today. But I didn’t want a fresh start either. There are years of articles on onygo, including plenty written by earlier versions of me, and I want them to stay. Renovating a house doesn’t mean pretending nobody lived there before.

So I renovated it. What started with a new design became a complete WordPress theme, built with Claude Code and deployed directly from GitHub through GitHub Actions. Light and dark mode are part of it, obviously — hey, Martin <3 dark mode — but so are the less visible things a proper website needs: Matomo integration, cookie management and two-click embeds. onygo now also shares a common design language with my portfolio and CV site, which will follow soon. They remain two separate places with different jobs, but they should clearly belong to the same person.

Then the renovation started producing its own tools. I wanted the writing from my LinkedIn-heavy years to become part of onygo as well, without pretending those posts were new. So I built a WordPress plugin that takes my LinkedIn data export, lets me review the posts and imports the ones I want with their original publication dates. That work is now done: the LinkedIn posts worth keeping from the last few years have joined the older onygo articles in the archive. The history of my writing is in one place again, even if some of it originally happened somewhere else.

And because WordPress itself still insists on shining a small artificial sun into my face whenever I open the admin area, I built an admin dark mode plugin too.

Somewhere along the way, I realised how much my way of thinking about software has changed. I used to search for a tool or plugin that did roughly what I needed, then work around whatever it couldn’t do. Now the thought is increasingly: There’s no suitable solution out of the box? Fine. Give me 30 minutes and I’ll build it. I learned a ridiculous amount during this renovation, but that change in mindset may be the most interesting part — and probably deserves its own article.

More importantly, I actually want to publish here again. LinkedIn is great, and I’m not going anywhere. I like the conversations, the people and the slightly unpredictable mix of ideas there. But going forward, the direction changes: longer pieces will live on onygo first, while LinkedIn becomes the place for the teaser, the conversation and the way back home.

I love cafés, so this isn’t about deciding cafés are bad and staying home forever. Quite the opposite. But loving good cafés doesn’t mean I want bad coffee in my own kitchen. If I want a proper espresso at home, I need a decent machine, a very good grinder and good beans — and for a while my blog had become the digital equivalent of a kitchen where I’d stopped bothering to make coffee.

I didn’t need a new house. I needed the old one to feel like home again. And now the espresso is pretty decent too.