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swyxio / swyxdotio

This is the repo for swyx's blog - Blog content is created in github issues, then posted on swyx.io as blog pages! Comment/watch to follow along my blog within GitHub
https://swyx.io
MIT License
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How to change custom domain on Substack #473

Closed swyxio closed 1 year ago

swyxio commented 1 year ago

category: note slug: substack-change-domain

Since September, I've been running my AI newsletter on https://lspace.swyx.io

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I've since acquired the https://latent.space domain, but Substack's shitty documentation doesn't offer any help on how to navigate a custom domain change (only how to add one for the first time).

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and the Disable Custom Domain button is so scary with zero empathy on how to arrange a fallback for old links to the old custom domain.

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I'm about to execute this change so just making a log of what I did (but also shame on Substack for not documenting this stuff). I am doing this at 11pm Pacific Time so as to minimize disruption.

  1. hitting the Disable Custom Domain immediately chucked my substack address back to the old https://swyx.substack.com/ subdomain. https://lspace.swyx.io/ is 404ing.
  2. now I can add a new domain image however it seems it is registered on cloudflare.

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I went ahead and added the CNAME in my Google Domains panel image

but substack still reported an issue. image

Google says "Changes are published immediately, but may take time to propagate" so I will wait a few minutes before panicking.

update: when I click "Check Status" this is the new report

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but when i refresh it goes back to the previous screen. seems unstable and buggy.

15 mins later...

ok www.latent.space seems to work now, but latent.space doesn't. let's try to add a web forwarding thing on google:

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it does not work automatically, but after 10-15 mins it started working for me.

swyxio commented 1 year ago

redirecting old domain

i use to have this as a CNAME

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now am deleting it and setting up google domains forwarding. However my domains seem to be with Netlify which does not support forwarding so this seems like a poor choice....

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i asked chatgpt and it asked me to set up a redirect.pizza thing so...

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so i take that and delete the old record in netlify dns

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and now its

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after 10-15 mins it started to work. redirect.pizza's tool: https://redirect.pizza/tester?url=https%3A%2F%2Flspace.swyx.io%2Fp%2Fmultimodal-gpt4 was useful to see that things were starting to work, but not really for debugging. (I panicked and made a Neltify support forum post first but i think in the end it was unwarranted)

hatmandu commented 1 year ago

Well this is a happy coincidence: only last week I came across your website and enjoyed reading your articles; and now you seem to be the only person who has written about this exact thing I am considering. (I submitted a support request to Substack earlier today though am not wildly optimistic.) Thank you for documenting this!

swyxio commented 1 year ago

free will is an illusion!