I had been thinking of buying my own domain to host this website for a while. I was always putting it off, since it was not a priority or a strict necessity. But, lately, I reached a tipping point.

I have been working on a side project that requires setting an application identifier. From the beginning I knew that I wanted to go with com.ckardaris.<Appname> and not share “naming custody” with GitHub. You don’t really need to own a domain to use it as part of an application identifier, but it makes verification with some platforms possible.

So, I bit the bullet and moved forward with my plans.

ckardaris.com is now live.

The whole process was quite quick. It took a couple hours reading the required documentation and setting everything up.

I registered the domain via porkbun.

I verified the new domain for GitHub Pages to avoid any future surprises and added any additional DNS records needed.

I created a second static website repository on GitHub and pushed the existing repository to it. As the first order of business (i.e. first commit) I made sure to fix any “stale” links pointing to the old ckardaris.github.io domain to now point to the new one.

Finally, I edited the old static site to redirect to the new one automatically and that was all1.

  <script>
    window.location.href = "https://ckardaris.com" + window.location.pathname + window.location.search + window.location.hash;
  </script>
  <noscript>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://ckardaris.com{{ page.url }}">
  </noscript>

UPDATE: It turns out I did not read the GitHub Pages documentation carefully enough. Creating the second repository and the manual redirects were not needed. By setting the custom domain in the original repository, GitHub handles the redirects from the default domain (i.e. ckardaris.github.io), while properly returning the 301 status code in the process.

This was my first ever domain purchase and I have to say everything went quite smoothly, so I am satisfied.

That’s all for now. Watch this space for my side project update.

See you soon.

  1. Reading online I got the understanding that a proper redirect emitting the 301 status code would be preferable in order to preserve any search engine ranking that I had. But, honestly, I don’t think that will prove to be much of an issue. ↩