@11/22/2020
My blog has now had 3 phases over 13 years (😱):
Wordpress (2007-2009)
Jekyll / GitHub Pages (2009-2020)
Notion / Super (2020-?)
My writing tapered off immensely in recent years, and I didn't find my old site built with Jekyll to be interesting to work on anymore. I've now swung back to the land of a managed platform that frees me from:
- Worrying about Ruby dependency updates (No JavaScript, what a concept!)
- An ancient CSS template that still uses 960.css (and fully learning flexbox still, sorry I haven't done this yet)
- Needing to think about mobile design / accessibility (I hope Notion is doing so...)
- Having to jump to GitHub (or my editor) to make changes. (Now it's all in browser!)
I haven't switched my entire blog over, as most of my Archive is hosted on other sites. Since the majority of the posts were on external sites I didn't feel beholden to correct URLs that may be broken, but I may do that too soon!
I've been using Super to host my site off Notion, which is only $4/month and allows me to stop worrying about all of the above. I get a great little writing and note-taking platform that allows for HTML import + export, and then Super scrapes all of that and wraps it up in a beautiful CDN-enabled package for any internet denizen to browse.
The Super setup is quite straightforward! Here's the basic steps once you sign up for Notion, and then sign up for Super:
Site Method
Do you want suped-up pages for SEO or just publish your Notion document on the web? I've been using Super Static and it works quite wonderfully.
Site Settings
The basics and the "root" of your site.
Pretty URLs
This section needs some work. It would be nice to use Notion itself for this via a "database" page, or use tags on pages to create their pretty URLs. This is a bit annoying to make for every post, and I hope this gets fixed soon. If I was moving over a blog with 100s of entries this would be a nonstarter, or I'd have to choose a new domain. For now, I punted on the old posts.
DNS Records
There's nice walkthroughs for the "big" DNS providers, but setting this up with DNSimple was pretty easy to do.
Super Options
I've decided to not track visits/readership via analytics for now but it's nice that there's an option. I'd rather have readers engage me via Twitter instead of a comments feed anyhow, and I'm not sure what I would learn from analytics on my blog other than it gets less traffic than I'd like.
The end game
So one might think: what happens when Super, or Notion, breaks this setup or disallows publishing? Yes, that's a risk I have assumed with this project. I can export any Notion document as HTML or Markdown, so once this setup stops working I'll just move on, just like I did twice before. This time it'll cost $4/mo for the time being, but honestly that's motivation to get me to write more. I guess we'll see in a few years!
The TL;DR:
1. Sign up for both Notion + Super 2. Configure DNS 3. Don't stop writing
If you enjoyed this, you can use my referral link to sign up for Super and that'd just lovely:
¤ @qrush