I've been thinking for some time to migrate my blog to a new domain and yesterday I finally did it (I'll talk about the reason for this in another post). My main concern was transferring the blog posts from thewindev.net to https://bogdanbujdea.dev, and redirecting users from the old posts to the new domain. This way, if anyone clicked on an article from the old domain they would be redirected to the new article instead of seeing a 404 page.
Here's how I did it:
1. Register a new domain
I decided to register a .dev domain from Google. This step is fairly easy so I won't go into details here.
2. Migrate Hashnode blog posts (the hard way)
Here is where things got tricky. I thought that there would be a way to export my blog posts and import them into another account, so I created a new Hashnode account where I added my Google domain (bogdanbujdea.dev). Then I went to the Export page from the Hashnode Dashboard and I exported the blog posts to a json file.
This only took a few seconds (I have only 18 posts so far 🤣). Once the file was downloaded I went to the Import page where I saw these options:
Clearly I don't need Medium or Dev.to, so I looked at the other two options. The first one I tried was the Bulk markdown importer
Bulk Markdown Importer
Import a zip file containing posts in markdown format. Your zip should contain a .md file for each post. Importer reads the following properties from the markdown frontmatter: title, slug, date, and image.
This one requires a zip file with .md files, but Hashnode exported a json file, so clearly this will not work. Then I remembered that I use GitHub backup for my Hashnode account and in there I have .md files for each blog post. So I went to GitHub, downloaded a zip with all the blog posts in .md format, and then I tried to upload it to Hashnode. The result:
The problem is that Hashnode expects a .md file that looks like this:
And here's how my GitHub .md files look like:
As you can see, the backup doesn't contain the blog post title, date, etc. One way would be to create a tool that modifies my .md files to add this information, and while this would've been fun as a side project, I didn't had so much time so I decided to try the next option.
Unfortunately, the RSS import was not a good solution because it didn't kept the structure of the article so I had to decide if I want to manually edit each one or go with something else, so I picked the latter.
3. Migrate Hashnode blog posts (the easy way)
As I mentioned earlier, I created another Hashnode account for my new domain, so I thought I could switch the domains:
There's no "switch domain" option in Hashnode, so I did it like this:
- I went to my initial Hashnode account and deleted the domain thewindev.net
- I did the same for the second Hashnode account
- I went to my initial Hashnode account and added the domain bogdanbujdea.dev
- I went to the second Hashnode account and added the domain thewindev.net
Now, my blog posts stayed where they were, on the same Hashnode account, but the domain was changed and it took less than a minute. The only problem I had was that the analytics were transferred as well, so I have 0 views on my blog again 😅.
4. Redirect posts from old domain to new one
Thankfully, Hashnode offers an option to redirect users in the Advanced settings page.
As you can see in the screenshot, I have two redirects. The second one is the easiest to understand, as it will redirect every user that opens an old link to the new domain.
You can try going to this article
https://thewindev.net/overview-of-my-smart-home-the-bedroom
and see that you will get redirected to
https://bogdanbujdea.dev/overview-of-my-smart-home-the-bedroom
The only thing that's missing is a redirect for the root of the site, so that if you go to thewindev.net you will automatically go to bogdanbujdea.dev
Unfortunately, this is not possible with the current redirect settings in Hashnode, so I found an acceptable workaround.
This is the only blog post on my old domain, so when someone tries to click on it, Hashnode will redirect them to my new domain. I achieved this by adding a redirect from /moved-to-bogdanbujdeadev to https://bogdanbujdea.dev
5. Conclusions
To be honest, I would've preferred they had an option for this so I don't have to do everything manually, but I understand this is not something you might do everyday so I'm ok with it, Hashnode should focus on more important features :)
The only downside that I found is that I can't redirect from my home page and the fact that I lost the analytics, but this is acceptable for me because I relied on Google Analytics anyway.
