Even after activating a custom domain, when you publish a new post, write.as takes you to the write.as URL of your blog post instead of the custom domain one. This isn’t good because then if I want to share posts elsewhere, the link will always be the write.as URL instead of the custom domain one unless I remember to navigate to the latter. This, to me, defeats one of the main purposes of having a custom domain.
Also, when browsing the blog at the custom domain, the editing options aren’t available. I get that this is probably why the issue described above even exists. Nevertheless, it’s confusing to me as an end user, and makes custom domains on write.as not a practically usable feature.
Yeah, this was the simplest / most secure way for us to enable custom domains on the platform. Basically, our web application only know that you’re logged in on the https://write.as domain. With the way browser cookies work, you’d need to log in again on your custom domain to see editing options, etc., since it’s on an entirely different domain. And even then, those links would just take you back to the Write.as application.
I know it’s a good bit of friction, but we try to compensate by:
including the correct “canonical URL” metadata for search engines
automatically redirecting users to your custom domain in case you share your write.as/blog version
linking to your custom domain when using our cross-posting features
internally linking readers to your custom domain
in the future, providing better post management so you have a single place to edit posts from
As far as a workflow, one thing I’ll do when I want to share e.g. a https://micro.baer.works post is to just go to that site and then copy the link to the post from there. In case that helps.
That does help clear things and alleviate most of my concerns, thank you!
When you mentioned about having to log in again, it reminded me of having to do the same thing on Substack the first time you activate a domain there. But the difference there is the Dashboard also loads on your custom domain! Which is why I never encountered such a discrepancy. Letting you know just in case it’s something that intrigues you to take a look.