Little Hack to turn a notion page into a website

So we did a cool thing the other day - and a bunch of people asked how we did it. Here’s the story:

We hit 1M downloads for our podcast, and decided that’s a significant enough milestone where we need to have a website.

I wrote an outline in Notion, and then stepped back and said to Ishan:

“this should just be the site”

It was simple, unique, and super easy to edit on an ongoing basis (because it’s just a document).

Notion lets you have public pages, but the URL is super ugly like “notion.so/0329483p2jlskdf230”. So that was a no-go.

Luckily my main man Ishan found a way to make our domain (http://myfirstmillionpodcast.com) load up the notion doc.

It’s not perfect (load time is a bit slow) but it’s pretty cool - and got a bunch of attention:

Andrew Wilkinson @awilkinson

I love this. @theSamParr and @ShaanVP built a website for their (awesome) podcast without even using a website builder. Notion link + domain = a website that is better than most, built with no devs in an hour or two.

January 19th 2020

19 Retweets318 Likes

Anyways enough rambling! Here’s the workaround!

OVERVIEW:

1. Make your notion doc by creating an account on Notion.so

2. Transfer your DNS to Cloudflare (2 min video on how to do it)

3. Use Cloudfare’s Workers to proxy your domain

Go to ‘Launch Editor’

Click ‘Add Script’

Name it ‘notion-worker’

Now, you’ll need to go into the editor and change the two highlighted lines to your own specific website: (https://github.com/IshanHaq/notionworkaround/blob/master/script)

Click ‘Deploy’ and go back to the Workers menu. 

4. Add Wildcard route to handle all the traffic

Click on ‘Add Route’ 

Put your domain as the route but ad a ‘*’ at the end. For Worker, select the one we created before, which we named ‘notion-worker’. Click ‘Save’. 

... and that’s it!