Site built with Hugo/Blogdown is no longer functional or even displaying properly

[rjk]

Hello,

I have a website/blog that had been working well for years. My site is: https://rileyking.netlify.app. I have not made ANY changes to it recently - my last deploy was Dec 2, 2022. On or around July 2024 I noticed that the site no longer displayed well and all the links were broken. Other details that may or may not be relevant: all code for the site is written in R using Rmarkdown and the blogdown package publishes it using (as I understand it) Hugo. I updated typically by updating a repo on Github, and then Netlify would automatically publish the site with a new deploy. But I haven’t made ANY changes in Github or in Netlify since successfully deploying back in Dec 2022. When I log in to Netlify is still shows as successfully deployed and the thumbnail looks like the correct deplyment. I’ve attached a screen shot showing what it looked like in Feb 2024 which is the last capture in WBM (it still looks to be correctly deployed in Feb 2024, but I first noticed the problem in July 2024). Could you please help me to get it back online functioning and displaying correctly? I will pay for additional support if needed. Please note it is not just the appearance that has changed: the links beyond the front page no longer work.

Thank you.

[nathanmartin]

@rjk

Could you please help me to get it back online functioning and displaying correctly? I will pay for additional support if needed.

No need to pay for additional support, but you will have to make changes to your site.

@rjk

I noticed that the site no longer displayed well and all the links were broken.

The issue is that many of your assets aren’t loading (css/js).

@rjk

But I haven’t made ANY changes in Github or in Netlify since successfully deploying back in Dec 2022.

While you haven’t changed anything, Netlify did change something, which perfectly explains it:

Deprecating automatic .com redirects

Back in 2020 we moved all sites from being served under *.netlify.com to being under *.netlify.app. This was to isolate customer sites from ones run by Netlify, trying to minimize the confusion. In doing this, we built in an automatic redirect for subdomain.netlify.com to subdomain.netlify.app to avoid downtime on customer sites. Now most sites either use the .app url directly, or have a custom domain. Starting on Friday March 29th, 2024, new sites won’t be getting this behavior as we begin pha…

Since that deprecation you can no longer load a URL like:
https://rileyking.netlify.com/css/side-menu.css

Instead it must be:
https://rileyking.netlify.app/css/side-menu.css

This also explains the broken links:
https://rileyking.netlify.com/post/learning-from-failure-nitinol-fracture-mechanics-in-r/ (broken)
https://rileyking.netlify.app/post/learning-from-failure-nitinol-fracture-mechanics-in-r/ (works)

To fix you need to adjust your site so it no longer references netlify.com

You could do this by changing all of your links to Root relative

So instead of an absolute URL of:

https://rileyking.netlify.com/css/side-menu.css

You change the reference to:

/css/side-menu.css

If you cannot easily do that, then changing the .com to .app would suffice.

[rjk]

Thank you for identifying the problem and the solution It makes sense what to do, but could you possibly help possible to get help with how? I know I am exposing myself as a complete novice here, but I don’t know how (or even where) I would edit the url’s of all my links. I was relying on a package to convert my markdown files that I uploaded to github into webpages using a package (blogdown). It did all the backend stuff for me and all I had to do in netlify was connect to that repo and it knew how to build out the site. I asked chatgpt for advice on how to update all the url links on a site deployed on Netlify, but it is not being very helpful.

I know this is a pain but would it be possible to provide the how like you were explaining to a 5 year old? LIke:

Step 1: go to ** this interface ** and change the link there from .com to .app
Step 2: go to ** place 2 ** and update it again
Step 3-X: repeat for all other instances

Or if there is a single top level link/url that could be updated w/o updating all the sublinks (wasn’t obvious from the above answer if the choice was either/or) then that would be great. I need the easiest solution.

[nathanmartin]

@rjk

I know this is a pain but would it be possible to provide the how like you were explaining to a 5 year old?

No.

Just search your code for references to netlify.com and update them to netlify.app

If it’s unclear, you need to change the code that you have in the github repository.

Traditionally you would do this by cloning down the repository, making the change, committing the change, and then pushing it back to the repository.

I’m unaware of any web interface for doing this, as I do it the usual way.

I cannot teach you how to use git, or how to make the changes to your site, doing so is well outside of the scope of support here.

[rjk]

Ok thanks, I’ll figure it out

[rjk]

I figured out how and will post it here in case others encounter the same problem in the future. For anyone using Blogdown package with Hugo and Netlify, the code in github doesn’t reference the url’s for the pages of the site. There is only one thing that links the repo to the baseurl: the config.toml file which contains the base url. Updating that one instance from .com to .app using the code editor on github and pushing the commit will update all the pages and links appropriately. Things are now back to normal.

Thanks!

[nathanmartin]

Excellent, I was going to suggest you probably want to change a ‘base url’ somewhere, but every system is different so it’s impossible to guess how things may work.

It also wasn’t clear from your description if your site was actually set up to ‘run a build on Netlify’ or if you were deploying prebuilt pages.