whalermike.github.io — vanity-URL redirect

Tiny static site whose only job is to forward any request hitting https://whalermike.github.io/... to the project-pages site at https://whalermike.github.io/uiao/..., preserving the path.

Why

The canonical UIAO docs are served from the project-pages URL https://whalermike.github.io/uiao/. Anything that drops the /uiao/ prefix (typos, autocomplete, old links) hits the GitHub Pages 404. This site catches those requests and forwards them.

How it works

GitHub Pages serves user sites from a repo named exactly <user>.github.io. The repo root becomes the site root.

• index.html — handles requests to / (root). Redirects to /uiao/.
• 404.html — GitHub Pages serves this for any path that doesn't resolve to a file. The page reads window.location.pathname and client-side redirects to https://whalermike.github.io/uiao<path>.

Both pages set <meta http-equiv="refresh"> as a no-JS fallback, but the JS path-preserving redirect is the primary mechanism.

Deploy

# From a clean directory outside this worktree:
gh repo create WhalerMike/whalermike.github.io --public \
  --description "Vanity-URL redirect to whalermike.github.io/uiao/"
git clone https://github.com/WhalerMike/whalermike.github.io.git
cp <this-dir>/{index.html,404.html,README.md} whalermike.github.io/
cd whalermike.github.io
git add .
git commit -m "init: path-preserving redirect to /uiao/"
git push -u origin main

Then in repo Settings → Pages → Source = "Deploy from a branch" → Branch = main / root.

Smoke test

Once deployed (allow 1–2 min for Pages build):

# Root → /uiao/
curl -sLo /dev/null -w "%{url_effective}\n" https://whalermike.github.io/

# Arbitrary path → /uiao/<path>
curl -sLo /dev/null -w "%{url_effective}\n" \
  https://whalermike.github.io/docs/substrate-status.html

Both should resolve under /uiao/.

Caveats

• The redirect is client-side. Crawlers that don't execute JS will see the <meta refresh> fallback (which sends them to /uiao/ root, not the path-preserved target). Acceptable for a vanity redirect; the canonical site at /uiao/ is the SEO anchor (<link rel=canonical> set in _seo-head.html).
• This sits outside the WhalerMike/uiao repo. The CI in this repo does not deploy to it.