You can publish Pageflow stories under your own domain. That way permalink URLs of your stories can use your own domain instead of the default *.pageflow.io domain.
In the following steps, we will assume that you are the owner of the domain mydomain.com and wish to publish Pageflow stories under story.mydomain.com. Given there is an entry called my-story in your account named my-account, you want it to be available via
https://story.mydomain.com/my-story
instead of the default permalink:
https://my-account.pageflow.io/my-story
DNS Configuration
You need to make changes to the DNS configuration of your domain. To see the required DNS records, sign in to your Pageflow account, visit the Settings page and enter the desired domain.
Two DNS records need to be created:
- A CNAME record for your domain with the value domains.pageflow.io. This record instructs your DNS server to point browsers visiting story.mydomain.com to the Pageflow server.
- A TXT record with an account specific token. Before associating a domain with an account, Pageflow verifies domain ownership by making sure that the token in the value of the verification record matches the account's verification code.
The DNS configuration itself takes place outside of Pageflow. The exact details of the process depend on the tools you are using to manage your domain. Consult the documentation of your DNS management tool for detailed instructions.
Once the DNS records are in place, click "Save". Your Pageflow stories will now be accessible via your domain. Note that stories must have already been published to be publicly accessible.
Setting up a Redirect URL
Now that your stories are available via your domain
https://story.mydomain.com/my-story
you might be wondering what people see when they visit your domain without specifying a story:
By default, this URL redirects to https://pageflow.io. But you can setup a custom redirect destination by entering a URL in the Redirect URL field just below the Domain Name field on the Settings page.
You can choose whatever URL you like. For examples:
Enter the permalink of one of your Pageflow stories to use it as a landing page. You can use the external link page type to link to other stories in your account.
Maybe you have a website that is hosted at http://mydomain.com or you want to create a custom landing page that lists all your Pageflow stories. Note however that this additional content has to be hosted on a separate server or web space.
Using Domains without a Subdomain
Let's say you want to make your Pageflow stories available via URLs of the form:
For technical reasons, it is not possible to create CNAME records for domains without a subdomain (e.g. the "story" prefix in the above example). For those domains, you need to create a so called A record in your DNS configuration. While it's technically possible to create A records that point to the Pageflow server, we currently do not offer support for this setup.
Instead, you will need to sign up with a third party web provider to host http://mydomain.com. The hosting provider can help you set up a redirect from http://mydomain.com to an URL like http://story.mydomain.com or http://www.mydomain.com that uses a domain with a subdomain. You can then follow the above instructions to configure a CNAME record for one of those domains.