Linking to another website from fastpages
Quick example of how to link to an external page from a fastpages blog.
My inaugural post on here is a bit meta and probably unlike most things that I’ll write.
First, this blog is built with fastpages. If you’re like me and work with Jupyter notebooks all the time, then fastpages makes it a breeze to turn them into blog posts. There’s a whole lot more you can do with fastpages mentioned in the Twitter thread below. I love everything fast.ai does, and this tool is no exception.
We're launching `fastpages`, a platform which allows you to host a blog for free, with no ads. You can blog with @ProjectJupyter notebooks, @office Word, directly from @github's markdown editor, etc.
— Jeremy Howard (@jeremyphoward) February 24, 2020
Nothing to install, & setup is automated!https://t.co/dNSA0oQUrN
The problem:
Outside of this blog, I have a personal website and I wanted them to blend together as seamlessly as (a data scientist like me can make) possible. Namely, I wanted to link to an external “about me” page where I keep an updated resume to the “About” page of this fastpages blog.
Luckily, a fastpages GitHub issue addresses this very thing and one of the primary fastpages contributors already posted some helpful links there.
But I also like to see concrete examples. So, if you’re the same, then hopefully this helps.
The fix:
It’s a pretty simple fix. I removed the “about” markdown file from the /_posts directory and replaced it with an html file. This is what the new about.html file looks like:
---
title: About
search_exclude: true
---
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Redirecting to https://bdeignan.github.io/about</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=https://bdeignan.github.io/about">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://bdeignan.github.io/about">
This pretty much follows one of the links provided in the issue’s comment.
The main thing you’ll want to change is the URL linked to. Substitute your page for https://bdeignan.github.io/about above.
And, voila. I pushed the changes to my blog’s repo and now “About” sends you to my personal site.
This lets me keep my blog separate from my personal site – in case I want to change things in the future to one of them. I find the fastpages blog setup so convenient for data science posts but I may want to change my personal site in the future if I get bored enough to learn some web development skills. This separation should help make those changes easier to maintain.