Unaffiliated review of a doc custom domain "provider"

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Hi community! :slight_smile:

I had recently the need to have a custom domain for a coda doc of a client, and this is my experience about it! (sure it will be of help for at least someone :slight_smile: )

Because this is not an advertising page i have to make a couple of disclaimer, first, i’m not affiliated in any way with the service or the developers of this provider, also, i’m just gonna write just it at the end of this post, always to keep the story about the experience and not about a service :slight_smile:
Second, the client will remain private but the app is a “classic” event, costumer, warehouse, mailing list etc manager

So! In many occasions having a custom domain for a coda doc can come handy, if the app you’re making is gonna be used by the general public especially!

Here in the community i had read a post about a “third party” service that allowed you to make a domain point to your coda doc (link at the end of the post)

So i’ve tried it!

  1. Bought the domain (hehe off course)

  2. Opened the third party service web page, inserted the domain (there’s a free trial so you can just try!) and it gave me back the dns i have to use for my coda doc and my domain.

  3. Configured the dns (took a little 'cause the domain provider was a local one and they had them hidden in an advanced sub-menu that was kinda too advanced for me :sweat_smile: , if you feel like wt* are those you can use one of the “guided” domain provider listed in the third party service website!)

  4. Made a 301 redirect from yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com, asked by the third party service to work, if you have cpanel (is it the case worldwide?), it’s easier than i tought, it’s kinda takes less time than read this paragraph :sweat_smile:

  5. Done! :slight_smile:

Everything works out of the box! Those are all the passage needed!

Then, as an extra, one could add custom css and javscript to the platform, personally i think css on coda is hard to correctly apply, so yeah it’s doable but you have to kinda understand how coda generate content…and based on the final goal it could take some time/be impossible, for javascript i havent found an use yet but i think an help chatbot could be an use, if someone knows cool uses for it please let me know :slight_smile:

Then, critical point! Assistance! I actually don’t know where the third party service have their company located, but from europe i had an answer in less than an hour during the afternoon, and i was easy on having it the day after, instead i was surprised :slight_smile:
The developer that answer’d me (pretty sure he’s in the community too btw! :slight_smile: ) was really gentle, and fixed in minutes a problem i had in the mobile version of the website (oh god! a website! or a coda app??? hehehehe), and together we talked about how could we speed up things a little, so he suggested we could try caching (that was a totally unexpected help actually!), so we tried it, and yeah actually it didnt worked for a lot for some coda-related things (i mean, it was faster but it broke icons…probably it could work with more investment…buuuuuut i would say codans, can’t we make little docs load faster somehow? :))))))))) ) but also here the assistance was super fast in solving all the issues!
Also, they digged in the “can i have coda dark mode on my site? :face_holding_back_tears:” for me (sadly not :((, at least using published mode, another calls for codans, can we have a) doc maker choice of at least default dark mode, if not “mandatory”, and b) published mode dark mode? :face_holding_back_tears: :face_holding_back_tears: :face_holding_back_tears:)

So chapeau to them for this amazing service :slight_smile:

One last word about the pricing, is definitely acceptable i would say :slight_smile: But you can check them in their website!

Okey! so we reached the end of this review! If you have some question off course write them in the replies :slight_smile:

The service is cloak.ist :slight_smile:

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Just checked them out.

$10/month for a simple redirect? That’s… well, okay, you are paying for service there :slight_smile:

A year ago I made a redirect from uzhvol.org to a published Coda doc and other than the domain cost, it cost me 0.00 cents.

Ingredients:

  1. Firebase, namely Firebase Hosting

  2. These few lines of code on firebase.json

{
  "hosting": {
    ...
    "redirects": [
      {
        "source": "**",
        "destination": "https://coda.io/@uzhvolunteers/home",
        "type": 301
      }
    ]
  }
}

P.S. On their site I don’t see any examples where Coda is actually rehosted. That would justify the $10/mo, but all I see is simple redirects. Can you maybe show me how your site used to look when it was actually rehosted?

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Thanks for sharing your experience Mario!

I’m Bruce, the founder of Cloakist. Happy to answer any questions you have in this regard.

Regarding the question from @Paul_Danyliuk … Using a redirect, is typically not a great experience for the visitor of your site, as they will be taken to a different domain where the page hosted (at the coda·io), so you loose all the benefits of keeping visitors on your site and the ability to customize the branding.

Cloakist gives you the ability to connect your coda page directly to your custom domain, such that visitors will stay on your domain when visiting the page. This is better for the visitor experience (because they won’t be redirected away from your site) and with our customization options (custom logo, favicon, social sharing & meta data) it gives an experience that is consistent with your brand.

If you’re interested, check out our showcase with more than 180 live examples of sites created with Cloakist: https://cloak.ist/examples

Keen to hear from other community members.

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I use GoDaddy and I have a hosting package with them, so I can just create a new doc and assign it to one of my domain names and do the redirect. There is a quirky thing sometimes getting the right link to the doc to do the forward. But it’s a nice way to handle docs for some cases. For me, I wanted to do a .org for our community about some issues and not build an actual website. Coda is so much faster for me to update. Worked great.

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Hi @Susan_M_Davis !

I think a precisation is needed! This is not a simple redirect, but more like a rehosting, read the comment above by @Bruce_McLachlan :slight_smile:

Fast version: this doesnt just bring you to coda.io/you/yourdoc but keeps the user into the domain you’ve choosen! (also cool for url sharing!)

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Very nice of you to post this for community consumption - appreciate ya

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Soon though…

Screenshot_20230304-023139
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