The New Blog

Hardcore fans of BetaBooks may have noticed we have a new look on our blog, as well as a new URL. Whereas we previously ran the blog on our subdomain (blog.betabooks.co), today we've switched to a subfolder instead (betabooks.co/blog). This is apparently a big big deal for SEO purposes.

The SEO benefit is a good reason to make the move, but from a technical perspective it's historically been a lot harder to actually DO. I'll spare you the nitty gritty, but the gist is, you can point a subdomain to a different server from your main server (for example, to point it to Ghost or Wordpress directly), but you can't point a sub-folder to another server that way. So, if your blog is going to live in a subfolder, it has to be powered by your main server. That means you've got to host your own blog and either write it yourself or perform a somewhat more complicated install of one of the existing blog platforms. That's a lot of work.

So, until now, we've lived with a subdomain.

What changed? We discovered Butter. Butter is a developer-oriented CMS that basically makes it outrageously easy to embed a blog (or other kinds of content management) in your website. Again, since the readership here isn't primarily programmers, I'll spare you the nitty grity, but the service is great. The total time to get everything set up was about 3 hours, and they were kind enough to import the old Ghost blog for me so that we didn't have to do that part ourselves.

If you're not a programmer at all, Butter probably isn't the best fit for you. But, if you are, you should really give it a look.

This has been one of the big TODO list items for BetaBooks for a while, and I'm really glad it's done. Now, onto doing more fun things with the blog, like writing great articles :)