Nick Romney

Moving my blog to Hashnode

Nick Romney's photo
Nick Romney
·

5 min read

I've previously blogged about:

What I hadn't realised until the last week was that the Eleventy theme I was using was mangling my code snippets. I found a good theme, and was mid-way through the conversion when I saw that Catalin Pit had joined Hashnode as a Developer Advocate. This tweet was enough of a reminder to prompt me to search out his blog entry on the reasons for moving his blog to Hashnode.

Why move to Hashnode?

I decided to have a look at Hashnode, and was sufficiently reassured that I've moved my own blog too. My reasons for choosing it:

  • I plan to write more (blog articles, tweets, an eBook and a video-based course) particularly over the next couple of months as I consider my next project. Being able to point people to my articles will hopefully help.
  • I like the writing experience. I can:
    • continue to write in Markdown
    • copy and paste screenshots, which get hosted on Hashnode's CDN
    • write on and off through the day, knowing that post drafts are saved automatically.
  • The theme:
    • has a dark mode, which is easily toggled.
    • has a Click to copy code block button
  • I still publish on my own custom domain, but there's a Network Effect of being on the Hashnode platform, and what I write might be more easily found by other developers.
  • The lack of lock-in means:
    • I can export posts in .md format as a backup and if ever I need to move.
    • Any SEO is against my own custom domain, rather than the Hashnode platform

Domains and DNS

I really like the content at Learn Enough and am impressed that they've written a free eBook Learn enough Custom Domains to be dangerous which includes a guide on working with DNS in Cloudflare.

www or naked domain?

Increasingly, modern browsers hide https:// and even www. To change this behaviour in Chrome right-click the address bar. In Brave browser, go to brave://settings/appearance and toggle Always show full URLs

  • Cloudfront have supported CNAME flattening, since 2014, but I'll stay old school and use www., and handle traffic hitting the naked domain with a redirection rule.

  • Change nameservers to point to Cloudfront, and enable MFA to avoid unwanted changes to DNS.

  • Check in the Google Admin Toolbox Dig tool that the change has been made.

  • Handle what happens when a visitor goes to the root of the domain.

  • Follow the instructions in redirecting example.com to www.example.com when using Cloudflare.

  • Use a CNAME to point www. to the Hashnode network. We set the DNS record to DNS only to allow Hashnode rather than Cloudfront to work as the CDN. image.png

  • Use an A record for the @ record.

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Posts

  • Use the bulk import functionality to import the 36 posts I already had in Markdown format.
  • Update tags on imported content.
  • Start writing!
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