I’ve always been a big fan of owning your platform. Whether it’s through my sad attempt at blogging again or just making sure my digital footprint isn’t entirely dependent on a single social media company, I’ve tried to keep things under my own control when easily manageable.
For a bit, I had a standalone “link-in-bio” site at links.ejd.dev. I originally built this as a simple GitHub Pages and documented the process in an Instagram post and a TikTok. It worked well, but since I’ve been consolidating my site and moving everything over to Hugo, it felt like the right time to bring my links home to ejd.dev/links.
Managing two separate repositories and deployment pipelines was just a bit much. Plus, having everything under ejd.dev felt a bit better.
Moving to Hugo also meant I could stop hardcoding everything. I’m using Hugo’s data folder for the links now—basically just a YAML file where I list everything out. It looks something like this:
links:
- title: Technical Interview Study Guide
url: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Cr...
I built a custom layout that pulls from that file, so whenever I have a new link to share, I just update that one file and the site handles the rest. It’s a lot cleaner, and it let me keep that “link-in-bio” look while still using my main site’s styles and fonts.
To make sure I didn’t break any old links out in the wild, I set up a redirect rule. Since I’m using Cloudflare, I just created a simple bulk redirect rule to handle the traffic seamlessly.
Small change but it’ll let me remove a stale repository and clean up some of my projects, also took the time to update the style a bit better.