How to move your GitHub pages blog to Netlify

I bought jameshfisher.com to use for this blog. I tried using GitHub’s custom-domain support, but found that they still don’t support HTTPS. Therefore I’ve moved the hosting to Netlify. Netlify is a free static site host. I’ve used Netlify before to host making.pusher.com, Pusher’s engineering blog. This was a smooth and friendly experience, so I decided to do the same for my personal blog.

The process was:

Create a new Netlify site.
Tell Netlify that this site will use the custom domain jameshfisher.com.
Create a DNS A record pointing to Netlify’s load balancer’s IP address. Namecheap’s DNS doesn’t support ANAME or ALIAS records, which are preferred for apex domains. CNAME records don’t work well with apex domains like jameshfisher.com. I’ll cover that in a future post. Also, Namecheap has some BS “URL redirect record” which I don’t think is properly a DNS record at all. I deleted that. In the future I’d like to move the DNS away from Namecheap. Another future post.
Request a Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate via the Netlify dashboard. Netlify requests the certificate, and proves control of the domain by hosting a challenge on that domain (I assume).
Wait around for the Let’s Encrypt certificate. This should take a few seconds, but took ages. I think this is because of Namecheap’s BS “URL redirect record”, which added another A record, which then got cached for ages.
Enable “Force TLS connections” in the Netlify dashboard.
Add <link rel="canonical" .../> tags to point to the new domain (see tomorrow’s post).
Clone the repo to a new GitHub repository, github.com/jameshfisher/jameshfisher.com. This will be the repository backing the new site, and the old repository will only be kept for redirects.
Point Netlify at the new repository.
Add <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; ..."/> tags to the old jameshfisher.github.io site.
I need to keep the GitHub hosting around to redirect to the new domain. Maybe I’ll remove the site some day, but I’ll keep it around for now.

What can computers do? What are the limits of mathematics? And just how busy can a busy beaver be? This year, I’m writing Busy Beavers, a unique interactive book on computability theory. You and I will take a practical and modern approach to answering these questions — or at least learning why some questions are unanswerable!

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After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

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