Today's work, in full: typing www.snugit.app into a
browser returned a server error instead of the site, and Google had
quietly noticed. Nobody using the actual app was affected by either
thing. I still spent the day on it.
What was actually broken
The DNS record for the www subdomain existed and pointed
through Cloudflare correctly, but nothing was actually listening on the
other end — no redirect, no matching route, nothing. Anyone who typed
"www." out of habit, which is more people than you'd think, hit a dead
end instead of the site. Google's Search Console had already flagged it
as a server error on a crawl days earlier, sitting there unnoticed until
I went looking.
The fix was one rule, finding it wasn't
The actual repair was a single redirect rule — send every
www.snugit.app request to the matching path on the real
domain, no www, permanently. Five minutes once I knew what to do.
Working out that it was a missing redirect and not something wrong with
DNS, caching, or the site's own routing code took the rest of the
morning, because a 522 error looks the same on the surface regardless
of which of those it actually is.
Why this is worth writing about at all
Nothing in this post makes Snugit a better app. It makes the website around it slightly less broken in a way almost nobody would have consciously noticed, and slightly better positioned in search results over time, which nobody notices either — you just show up, or you don't. That's most of what "building in public" actually looks like day to day: not every entry is a feature. Some of it is just making sure the front door actually opens.
Download Snugit — the invisible stuff gets fixed too, not just the parts you'll actually see.
More on the last round of unglamorous, necessary work: the paywall is real now.