One Little Domain or How I Got My First Domain

Note

I know I said in the previous post that the next post would be about how my Pixel 3 committed suicide, but I didn’t quite feel like publishing 3 posts in a row about my devices dying and being replaced, plus I haven’t researched the topic enough and don’t have much to tell about the replacement, so it will stay in the drafts folder for a bit longer.

I do have another post in the works and expect it to be quite interesting, so yeah!

Today—I mean, the 22nd of June—I fulfilled my little dream: I got my very own domain!

Yes, you read that right. My dream was to have my own domain. I don’t know what’s wrong with me; I just wanted it so badly.

At first (back in the “Space” theme era), I thought I’d get daudix.space, but later on changed my mind since I’m not really into astronomy, it felt a bit lengthy and I didn’t plan on hosting public services, which are usually associated with this TLD. I considered other options, but they were expensive. Then I remembered about zagura.one and seirdy.one, what was common about them is this nice TLD: one.

It was perfect: one of the cheapest options, one of a kind, and not a boring one.

Uninteresting Fact

Only after getting the domain, I realized it’s actually a huge one reference. So yes, the pun was not in fact intended.

A while later, I finally decided it was time, even if I might not be able to pay for the next year.

And so, in the early morning of June 22nd, I started the research with serious intentions. First, I checked Porkbun since I heard good things about it and exozyme (the coziest community) uses it as far as I know. Surprisingly, daudix.one was super cheap—just $1.57 (renewal will cost $13.88, which is still cheaper than many other options).

For fun, I also checked daudix.io, which cost a whopping $40! Then I checked Cloudflare Registrar since apparently they charge only the required fees without any markup, but it didn’t have .one TLD, so I checked Namecheap, where daudix.one cost $2.60 or something like that. So I settled on Porkbun.

One registration and payment later, I got that email from Porkbun!

“Hooray!” - thought I. Promptly I tried connecting it to Codeberg Pages, but it didn’t go well, so I went to sleep.

In the evening of the same day, I tried to finish the setup, but after countless attempts, I gave up and had to refund it :<

Just kidding, Porkbun doesn’t accept refunds.

I asked for help in Codeberg’s Matrix room and promptly got some suggestions. They didn’t work on their own, but putting my issue into words helped me realize something: I used an obscure method of deploying Codeberg pages by pushing static files to the pages branch of the pages repo, while the main branch is supposed to be used for static files. This confused the Pages server, causing it to spit out some unhelpful error messages. After renaming the repository to website and re-adding some scary IP addresses and TXTs into Porkbun one more time… it still didn’t work.

I was super tired and had no will to mess with this that day, so I kinda forgot about it and gone to do some other stuff.

Only to return and find it working!

Yes, apparently it needed a bit more time than 15 minutes to fully propagate. In the end, everything was working, so I repeated the steps to make Duckquill use its own subdomain. It was a bit of a pain (mostly me making silly typos), but I got it working eventually.

The next day, I created the pages repository and added a _redirects file to make the old daudix.codeberg.page address redirect to the new one, while keeping the path (so e.g. daudix.codeberg.page/ananas-duck becomes daudix.one/ananas-duck and not just daudix.one).

/*  https://daudix.one/:splat  302

Yup, that’s the entire file! It doesn’t work perfectly though; links have a double slash after the domain (daudix.one//blog/), but it doesn’t seem to affect page loading, so it’s fine, I guess?

Edit

Awesome Anthony suggested me to try removing the slash between the domain and :splat (so it becomes https://daudix.one:splat), and it worked!

Edit

Changed HTTP response from 302 “Moved Temporarily” to 301 “Moved Permanently”. The final _redirects is:

/* https://daudix.one:splat 301

And that’s about it! I’m super happy to be a real internet citizen and, in the long run, to be able to move the site between different hosting services without constantly changing links everywhere.