Fido & redirect.pizza

I enjoy finding a tool that solves a very specific problem well. I had that experience twice this week and I wanted to share them since the problems they solve are common to those in the indie web community.

Fido

Fido is a tool developed by Meadowing. It finds broken links on your site. It couldn’t be more simple. You plug in your URL and it scans the whole thing and then comes back with an index of the links that don’t work. When I ran Fido for my site, it found 3 links that were mistyped. Those are now fixed and it was such a simple task thanks to Fido. I found it after seeing another blog that used Meadowing’s lovely Guestbooks solution.

redirect.pizza

Fun name; great tool. redirect.pizza solves a very niche problem when dealing with sites. Most domain name services (like Hover or Porkbun) offer a redirect function. The issue I was running into was that I’d merged two of my old blogs into this one. Hover’s redirects for the two old domains worked, but not for https routes. With most modern browsers defaulting to https (for good reason), this meant that when someone just typed techandcoffee.com into a Safari address bar, it would render a 404 page error. My wife was the one that brought this up to me (thank you). While I knew the technical reason for the negative experience, I hadn’t put the time into finding the right solution.

Rather than having to setup landing pages to point people to Tangible Life, or configuring SSL certs redirects (which wasn’t an option since the old sites are no longer sites, and just domains I still have registered), redirect.pizza’s free tier offers 5 domain forwards that include handling of https routing. It was 5 minutes of configuration between redirects.pizza and Hover and all versions of my previous two sites route here. It even supports forwarding to the same path endpoint (which I didn’t need) and has a toggle for tracking hits or letting it be a completely private implementation (which I opted for the latter).

When I find these little gems, I’m going to collect them into small posts like this one. Simple tools for common problems. Great stuff.

⭥ Site Index   |   ↻ Random Post