If you are wondering why:

• You were redirected from a blog on another domain name (edand*****.com), or
• There are posts in this site from 2007 (!)

Then the answer is that I’ve managed to pull my old blog off my personal domain name onto a new site powered by Substack here.

Why I’ve moved to a new domain

My personal email address that I use for everything in my private life has always had my name as the domain name. I had also always hosted my blog and personal website on that domain. This might be fine for some people, but the era of “build a personal brand” is a bit 2014. I wanted to write more, but the thought of every person, company, employer, bank, gardener, teacher, vet and contact with my email address simply being able to easily find my blog was preventing me from writing. I’m not Scott Hanselman.

In the last couple of years I’ve also been having some fun with YouTube. Originally again this was under my name, but I moved to “Ted’s Tech” in 2021, primarily because the thought of people in real life easily finding the channel was far too cringe. The personal email => blog => YouTube funnel for all connections in my private life was uncomfortable.

However, I do not mind going the other way around, the Ted’s Tech => real me funnel is A-OK. I’ve you’ve randomly discovered and tolerated my “content” on the internet already it’s okay to reach out in real life. Go nuts.

How I moved the site

Last year I managed to migrate from Wordpress to Hugo, but I “hid” the blog, only leaving posts available for Google to find (as some of the posts have been deep linked for over a decade and were still getting traffic), and it wasn’t possible to access the blog from the main landing page. Google did not like having indexed but hidden pages on the site.

I’ve always used Cloudflare as a CDN for the old Wordpress site, but also started using Cloudflare Pages to host the Hugo site. Cloudflare supports Redirects, so I set one up to point all blog posts to this new domain:

Because this created a 301 redirect, Google should keep the link juice flowing. Substack also graciously keeps the post slugs working, stripping the date from the old Wordpress/Hugo post URLs and redirecting again to its /p/post-slug URL.

In order to allow Substack to import all the blog posts from the RSS feed, I needed to update the RSS feed template in Hugo to include all post content and also make all the images absolute URLs. This great guide helped on the RSS aspect.

The end result

Basically the new setup is this:

• My “personal domain name” now goes to a landing page linking to Github, LinkedIn and a parked Twitter account
• Anybody with my email address who is nosey just gets greeted with that page now
• Old links to blog posts now redirect to this site
• New posts will go on this site
• YouTube and this site can still reference the personal profile and site,
• But the personal profile does not reference this site or YouTube.

And there you have it, an extremely elaborate internet presence. Let’s see if I can keep it up.