Put your blog on a domain you ownOfficial postWritten by noted.do itself — a notice, a rule change or an announcement.

Your blog, on your own domain

A blog at noted.do/@you is fine. A blog at yourname.com is yours in a way the first one isn't. The address outlives any platform, including this one, and that's the point of having it.

So noted.do lets you put your blog on a domain you own, and we tried to make it the least technical version of that we could.

Here is the whole of it. On your account page, under Your own domain, type the domain. It can be a bare one like yourname.com or a subdomain like blog.yourname.com. The page then shows you one DNS record to add wherever you registered the domain: a CNAME pointing at domains.noted.do. For a bare domain, your registrar may call the same thing an ALIAS record or CNAME flattening; it's the same idea. Add it, come back, press Check DNS.

That's the part you do. The rest happens on its own. Within a few minutes the site sees the record, gets a certificate issued for your domain, and switches the blog over. You don't buy a certificate, renew one, or know what one is. Your posts live at yourname.com/the-post, your feed at yourname.com/feed.xml, and anyone following by email or from Mastodon keeps following without doing anything.

You also choose how the two addresses relate. Your domain can be the only way in, with noted.do/@you quietly redirecting to it. Or both can work, with either one as the main address and the other as a backup, which is handy if your DNS ever has a bad day. Search engines are told which is which, so nothing counts as a duplicate.

If you'd rather the blog carried no trace of noted.do at all, no top bar, no footer link, no site name in the tab, that's a switch too. The blog looks like a site you built, because in every way that matters it is one.

Your own domain is part of the supporter plan, which is what keeps the servers on. Removing it is one press, any time, and your blog goes back to its noted.do address with nothing lost.

If you've been meaning to own your address, this is the easy week to do it. Pick the domain, add the record, press the button.