Pishgamit
A Persian technical publication I founded in 2017 and have run as the sole engineer ever since. 4,000+ articles, a peak of 157K monthly visits, rebuilt with AI and now running on .NET 10.
The project
Pishgamit is a Persian technical publication. I started it in 2017, during my student years, and I have been its founder and only engineer ever since. It has published more than 4,000 articles and peaked at 157K monthly visits.
Built and maintained by me for nine years; the rebuild, the move to .NET 10 and today's operations are done with AI. I own all of it: SQL Server, IIS, the VPS, deployment, monitoring and SEO.
The rebuild
The current version is a monolithic ASP.NET Core MVC application, with a Blazor admin dashboard for content management and reporting. It was rebuilt from ASP.NET MVC onto .NET 8 and has since been migrated to .NET 10, both with AI-assisted development (vibe coding).
Operations, run with AI
Day-to-day operations are AI-driven with Claude:
- SEO monitoring
- publish scheduling
- article preparation
- publishing to Telegram and Instagram
Incident: a ~48% traffic drop that wasn't a penalty
Traffic fell by about 48%. Search Console analysis showed the drop was demand-side — internet disruptions and a gap in publishing — not a ranking penalty.
The distinction matters because the two call for different responses: a penalty means fixing the site, while a demand drop means publishing consistently again rather than rewriting pages that were ranking fine.
Cleaning out zombie pages
Years of publishing leave thin, low-value pages behind. Without any Google penalty, I removed about 60% of the low-quality content and rebuilt the taxonomy, which had grown to 11,000 tags, into a usable structure.
The reason was crawl budget: Google was spending it on 11,000 near-empty tag pages. After the cleanup, crawling goes to the pages that matter.
What nine years taught me
Nine years of maintenance taught me more about long-lived systems than any greenfield project ever did.