Vercel saved my ass😌 - and always set up redirects for blog posts
A couple of months ago I decided to start a blog about online and data privacy (cureprivacy.com). I initially used Wix to create the site and write posts. Retrospectively, using Wix was a very bad idea, but I didn't know better at the time**. After two months of writing posts and gathering some feedback I realized that a blog is actually not the best way to get my message across. I decided to create a biweekly newsletter instead, to be able to provide a bigger range of content each two weeks. My Wix blog did not have that many visitors at the time so I decided to move the blog to blog.cureprivacy.com and repurpose my main site for my newsletter. I didn't care too much about setting up redirects for my posts either (BIG MISTAKE) because I wanted to manually promote my newsletter and gather feedback before letting Google do the search engine magic.
And then someting unexpected happened...
Authy decided to mention one of my blog posts about two factor authentication in a tweet, but the tweet quoted the old post URL (facepalm). When I saw the tweet I went cold for a few seconds because I knew there's nothing at that URL. Fortunately, I have set up my new cureprivacy.com site a week ago using Vercel. I quickly got to work, copied the content of my original blog post to a new page and thanks to Vercel's lightning deployments I had the blog post up at the original URL in 20 minutes (https://cureprivacy.com/post/pros-and-cons-of-using-multi-factor-authentication). It was quick and dirty, but it did the job perfectly!
Four important lessons I learned during this exercise:
- if you created a blog and moved it to a different domain, ALWAYS set up URL redirects (even when you think nobody is reading your posts)
- sometimes reactions to your content can be delayed - I wrote the blog post on the 6th of June and it only got mentioned on the 1st of July
- Wix is not suited for hosting a blog at all
- Vercel is awesome (but do your own research about each platform before starting your blog)😎
The mistakes I made might be common sense to the experienced bloggers, but since this was my first attempt at creating a blog I had to learn the hard way. I hope these lessons will help some future bloggers.
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** After using Wix for about two months to run my blog, I would absolutely not recommend it. One of the reasons I chose Wix to get started was that I could just focus on writing and not worry about any code. But, that wasn't a good enough reason. I would not recommend Wix for the following reasons:
- The UI desinger and your site itself are SUPER slow compared to other sites
- Building a generally good UI from a template is easy, but small UI customizations are very hard
- Wix (probably intentionally ) makes it difficult to migrate your content to other services
Just some quick feedback but originally I assumed the alternative links would lead me to a page with the rating for those products/services rather than link to their website. Also doesn’t appear to have a way to search. Otherwise looks good.
Hey @enonevets, thanks for the feedback! Search functionality is coming, I just wanted to add some content to search for first :)
As for the page containing ratings/reviews of the software, that is definitely something worth considering in the future. For now I'm focused on adding content and getting feedback on the idea, but that's definitely a suggestion I'll keep!
How did they share a link that wasn't up anymore?
I hear ya on redirects, I actually have a redirections as a service product sold directly to some clients. Never even advertised it. Its too niche of a product.
I assume the tweet went through an approval process or something, which might have taken a while. In that "while" I chopped and changed everything but the tweet was already scheduled to be sent out. It's my best guess...