Finally, My Website is Public

First Time Releasing My Page to the Public on the Domain ellymar.blog

Phot by Elly Mar — Screenshot of my website with the newly bought domain

Today, I spent the entire daysetting up my website for production, which involved buying a domain and releasing it online.

Last time, I dedicated my time to sorting my blogs in the codebase. Changing the code was quite challenging, but fortunately, I managed to remove a lot of unnecessary code, making it cleaner although more complex.

Thanks for your assistance, Chat GPT! With your help, I was able to add features like favorites and database sorting based on date. All sorting now includes a counter, and words and letters matching search queries are highlighted. These features are simple, yet they took up a significant amount of time.

After more than a year of considering buying a domain and researching different websites which offers cheapest price, today I decided to spend 129.15 pesos on a year of domain registration. I bought ellymar.blog from Hostinger and configured the DNS to work in Vercel, which was quite confusing for a first-timer like me. It took some time, but I managed to get it done. Another challenge I faced was with metadata. I got lost for a while trying to optimize metadata for almost all pages to improve SEO. Just out of curiosity, how will this help me become more visible online?

The confusing part was configuring Clerk to work in production, set up Frontend API, Account Portal, Email, all for DNS Configuration but luckily, it's free, so even it takes time, I'm okay with it. After more than 5 hours of tweaking domain settings, links, and routing (because I'm a bit obsessed with routing and kept changing it), I made some significant changes.

In summary, I switched the DNS nameserver from Hostinger to Cloudflare because Hostinger couldn't handle multiple CNAMEs.

Cloudflare also offers free features, although DNS verification takes 24 hours, the configuration itself is immediate. After trial and error, and after reading Clerk's documentation and trying to figure out how to implement mandatory sign-in for specific articles, it finally worked.

All I did was include this in "env.local" file

1NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_SIGN_IN_URL=https://accounts.ellymar.blog/sign-in

1NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_SIGN_UP_URL=https://accounts.ellymar.blog/sign-up

and everything works perfectly. Yehey!

Now that it's working,

Why have mandatory sign-in?

Because I want interested people to make an effort if they are genuinely interested in the topic. Plus, looking at Vercel's Insights, it has significantly boosted visibility on my website. As of writing, there have been 40+ page visitors and 300+ page views, which makes having a specialized domain worthwhile.

Well, it's functioning now. My goal is to create many great blogs and share my learnings here.

Wed Jul 17 2024

My website being indexed in google search engine.

After a lot of tweaking online and in the code base, trying my best to figure out how to appear in search engines, I finally managed. I don't know how sitemap and robot files could help for online visibility, but I tried for hours to set up these files. ChatGPT didn't manage to completely help me, but after scanning the Next.js documentation, I finally managed to set up the sitemap.xml. Yay!

Thu Jul 18 2024

My website logo is not visible in google search

Today, I'm configuring the website's favicon to enhance the visibility of my logo in Google search results. Check the Documentation on how to set up file-based Metadata API.

1icons: {
2   icon: '/favicon.ico',
3   shortcut: '/favicon.ico',
4   apple: '/favicon.ico',
5   other: {
6      rel: 'apple-touch-icon-precomposed',
7      url: '/favicon.ico',
8   },
9},

My website stat in Google Search Console

I'm also monitoring the site's performance on Google Search Console, despite its 48-hour delay. You can already see the impact of these changes by checking the site's statistics. Based on the image, it shows that by just having a domain makes you already visible online but a very small chances, unless you search yourself specifically.

Based on the search results about "why my favicon is not showing in Google search results", according to some answers, even if you try to submit your favicon to Google, it may not display it; your efforts may be futile. It could take weeks or depend on Google's discretion to show your favicon. Check this funny conversation. However, I saw in one answer that someone checked in DuckDuckGo, and their favicon was visible in the search results. I tried it, and it works. I can now see my favicon in DuckDuckGo search results. Regarding Google, I may need to wait or not expect it to happen at all.