Finally, My Website is Public

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

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 the domain and routing, but after more than 5 hours of tweaking settings and links, 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 some trial and error, it finally worked.

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

Wed Jul 17 2024

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

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},

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.

Tonight almost 10PM, I checked my website again in Google and finally!

my computer will automatically shutdown tonight with out me stopping. Because I've got what I wanted. In summary, Patience is the Key.