If you're living the dream and looking at your Pagecord Settings area this evening, you might be thinking who moved my cheese? Well, that was me I'm afraid but it's all for a good reason – honest! Let me explain...
The Appearance section is finally only about keeping up appearances. Bio, title, avatar... and (soon!) themes! No imposters. Yay!
The less popular, nerdy settings like custom domains and that scary fediverse author attribution thing have moved to a new Blog Settings section.
Finally, the Email Subscribers section has been transformed into a new Audience section (for paying customer eyes only – soz). This is not my greatest naming achievement, but it does make sense and that new-fangled AI couldn't think of anything better. The toggle for Email Subscriptions is now in this section and it will be joined by an upcoming Reply by Email toggle in the coming days (this is in beta, so email me if you want early access).
One more thing.
In the Blog Settings area, you'll see a new section called Search Engine Visibility which has a checkbox to prevent (or, to be more accurate, discourage) search engines from indexing your blog. It does this via robots.txt so it will only work for customers using custom domains.
The reason it doesn't work for pagecord.com blogs is because these are located at "pagecord.com/blog_name" and search engines won't find or index "pagecord.com/blog_name/robots.txt". It's not a thing. This is part of why other blog platforms use subdomains, so yes, I am currently rueing my early technical design choices! 🤦♂️
To be honest, it's probably not a massive deal since most people would want their blog to be indexed by Google, Kagi and the like, and I may look at switching to subdomains in the future (it would actually simplify a few things). I've made a note.
Since we're in the AI age, it's worth mentioning that ALL Pagecord blogs (custom domain or not) discourage the use of AI crawlers. You can see the current block list here – feel free to open an issue on GitHub if you'd like to update this list.
