The unglamorous part

Most of the work that makes a site feel legit is invisible. This week I did the boring, important layer: a real domain, link previews, and search metadata. None of it changes how the site looks — but all of it changes how it lands.

What I actually did

A custom domain. The site now lives at its own address instead of a random .vercel.app URL. Ten dollars a year, and it reads a whole tier more professional on a resume or a recruiter DM.

Link previews. Paste the link into Discord or LinkedIn now and a proper card shows up — my name, what I do, my site's look. It's generated from code, so it always matches the rest of the site. Before, a shared link looked broken. Now it looks intentional.

SEO metadata. A real description, keywords, and the tags that let Google actually index the page. When someone searches my name, I want the right thing to come up.

The catch

None of it was hard, exactly — but it was fiddly, and I broke the build twice getting there. Once from a re-export the framework didn't allow, once from accidentally deleting a chunk of a file I was only meant to edit.

Both times, the same move fixed it fast: read the error, it names the file and line, fix that one thing.

The takeaway

This layer is easy to skip because you can't see it. But it's the difference between a link that looks like a real person's site and one that looks like a school project. Worth the boring afternoon.