Jay Cuthrell walks through migrating a newsletter from Substack to Buttondown using Next.js on Netlify. He sets up DNS records, SSL, and redirect rules to map old /p and review/issues URLs to new locations, including sitemap-based redirects.
Chapters
If you're subscribed to my newsletter Fudge Sunday that comes out on Sundays, then you know that my domain name for that newsletter is fudge.org, but it used to be sunday.fudge.org. And I've cataloged all my trials and tribulations along the way, starting with Twitter, using Revu, moving to Substack, and then from Substack over to ButtonDown. But if you were to search, you'd still see references to sunday.fudge.org showing up in search engines. So I needed to do the redirects from the subset content starting around the time of "Don't worry about SRE" and then making sure that that was going to be properly imported into all of the button-down as well as all the new newsletters I've been writing that are going to be on just fudge.org. So what I did was I went over to Netlify and took a standard Next.js boilerplate, started off, deployed it to GitHub, and then went in and made a couple of important updates. The first is if we go in and look at some of the domain management choices. I've got this sunday.fudge-org.substack.rectify. Boom. Long, long words, but basically it's a subdomain. I've even got an SSL certificate for it. And you would say, well, why would you do that? And it's simple, because what I was really changing in this entire, uh, you know, package was just a couple of things. The first is I went to a redirect file and made it exhaustive. So taking the entire contents of, say, sitemap XML and then redirecting that into a proper format, which would itself do redirects. So for every /p and for all the legacy ones for what was review/issues, all of those now become and direct to the right place. So for example, this— don't worry about SRE— if I was to sunday.fudge.org and then slash, boom, it should just direct me over to fudge.org. And the reason it does that is because I have in this example updated DNS so that when you go to sunday.fudge.org and look at that TXT record, it'll actually take you over to, bum bum bum, our fine friends at Netlify. So thank you, Netlify, for making all this possible. Really appreciate it.
