, 2 min read
Deletion Troublesome in Hashnode.com
Before I moved away my blog from WordPress.com to this place, I checked whether another provider would fit my needs. See for example surge.sh, vercel.app, or netlify.app. I also looked at Hashnode.com. I liked Hashnode as it provides Markdown as input. I later learned that Hashnode also provided MathJax support. I didn't notice MathJax support in the first place, although it is clearly written in the help manual when you edit a post. Although it comes at the very end, after all the usual Markdown lecturing.
As an experiment before I imported all my Markdown posts into Hashnode, I just picked a single post and imported it into Hashnode. In contrast to Saaze, which this blog uses, Hashnode needs a slug entry in frontmatter, which contains the pathname of the URL. The import file is just a zip-file with Markdown files. After you import your zip-file, you have to press a "Publish" button. This went fine so far.
This is how a valid-for-import Markdown with frontmatter looks like:
---
slug: "blog-2021-06-21-wordpress-com-bulk-update"
date: "2021-06-21 21:00:03"
title: "WordPress.com Bulk Update"
draft: false
categories: ["www"]
tags: ["WordPress.com", "bulk"]
author: "Elmar Klausmeier"
prismjs: true
---
This post is originally from [WordPress.com Bulk Update](https://eklausmeier.goip.de/blog/2021/06-21-wordpress-com-bulk-update) on [eklausmeier.goip.de](https://eklausmeier.goip.de/blog).
After importing, I deleted the post manually in Hashnode. Then I re-imported the same file. This time the post was marked as already published, but wasn't. Clearly something was wrong here. Next, I changed the slug in the frontmatter of the Markdown file, zipped it, imported again. This time the post was published again after pressing the "Publish" button.
Next, I did the same entirely manually. I created a post on the Hashnode website. I then deleted it. I then created a post again with the same slug. I noticed that Hashnode had already changed the slug and appended -1 after it. I changed the slug, but that didn't change anything.
So, Hashnode has a problem with deleting posts and re-using the same slug. This means, once slugs are used, they cannot be re-used. For importing corrected posts this is quite annoying.
I reported this problem on the support channel in Discord and got below reply:
sandeep — 06/28/2021 Thanks, we'll take a look and send a fix. cc @anand_1.0
That's an answer from Sandeep Panda, the co-founder of Hashnode. Quite remarkable.