The art and joy of having and maintaining a website is one that is an ever declining trend. It was just a decade ago when people would have really cool sites that had really awesome and nostalgic animations and colors: it was a treat. To be fair, I was only 8 a decade ago, so the only websites my 8 year old brain liked were colorful.
However, if you are among the rare few who actually like having their own little space on the web, first up: Hi! I’m Ishan and second, I have a really neat trick for you. Have hidden pages on your website
Well the sentence is kinda self explanatory, but what I mean by hidden pages, are pages whose existence only you know about.
If you have a robots.txt file on your site, be sure to unindex the pages, exclude them from your sitemap.xml: They should essentially be incognito.
Now this has many advantages.
- You can have semi private stuff on there: Think family photos, a small journal or anything that you would like on the website, but not directly to anyone. Now even if you take all of these measures, if someone really wanted to index your site, they would. Hence why I called it semi private; but hey, base it off of your security and privacy model.
- Sharable Link: You have an instantly sharable link to stuff that you might need to share often: Think licenses, credits, your setup etc.
- Just cool: If you are anything like me, you will definitely enjoy the feeling of having something like that exist.
How do I implement this?
Well for my site atleast, there are alot of hidden pages. There are pages leading to some of my notes, personal links etc.
So to implement this, all you really need to do is to not include a link of the page anywhere on your site, exclude it from the sitemap and robots file and you should be good to go. If you are storing stuff like photos, I recommend that you password protect the page or delay the render of the image to futher prevent indexing.
I know this post is kinda weird, but hey, this is my blog 😄