Hive Origin: Give Your Hive Posts a Home Address
After building Hive Post Grabber, I used it as the starting point for bringing my old Hive writing onto this website. There were 191 posts, going back to 2016.
That solved one problem. I could find the posts and have a copy here.
Then there was another little job waiting for me: telling Hive which website version I wanted to treat as the preferred source.
Three posts already had that information. The other 188 needed attention.
I didn’t particularly fancy doing that one at a time. So I putzed around and built Hive Origin.
What’s a canonical URL, anyway?
Your Hive post can appear on PeakD, Ecency, Hive.blog, and other sites. You might also have the same article on a website you own.
A canonical URL is a way to say, “This is the version I’d prefer you
to use.” Hive posts can carry that address in their metadata, in a field
called canonical_url.
PeakD used the website address when I checked one of my own posts. Ecency also documents honoring an author’s declared canonical.
It isn’t a magic ranking button. Google treats a canonical as a preference, and other Hive sites make their own decisions about how they use the information. It doesn’t redirect readers or remove your post from Hive.
But if you have a preferred home for your writing, you should be able to declare it without spending an afternoon editing metadata.
How Hive Origin works
Start with your Hive username. The tool loads your authored posts, leaving out replies and reblogs. You don’t need a wallet to browse the list or prepare your links.
Next, search the titles to narrow the list and select the posts you want to link. Only then does Hive Origin ask for your website. It walks you through one step at a time.
If your addresses follow a pattern, such as
/blog/{permlink}/, Hive Origin can suggest them. If your
website uses different addresses, you can import a CSV or JSON map or
edit the URLs individually. Existing canonicals that already point to
your website can be kept.
The final step shows the article links for your selected posts. Check them, change any addresses that need it, and go back if you want to adjust your selection. The extra options stay tucked away until you need them.
There’s also a URL check. It can spot things such as missing pages or a destination that declares a different canonical. Some websites don’t allow browser checks, though, so you still need to open and review those addresses yourself.
Start with one post
Once you’ve checked the links, approve one test update through Hive Keychain.
Hive Origin fetches the current post before preparing the edit. It keeps the text, title, tags and other metadata, changing the canonical URL you selected.
After the test is confirmed on Hive, you can continue with batches of up to five. Keychain handles the approvals; Hive Origin doesn’t ask you to paste in a private key.
You can stop between batches, return to a saved session, export your URL map, and download a change log. If a submission hasn’t been confirmed, the tool keeps it pending so you can check it before trying again.
The idea isn’t new
While looking into this, I found a script @holger80 published in 2020 for fixing canonical URLs on older posts.
Hive Origin takes that sort of job and gives it a browser interface, website URL mapping, a review step and Keychain approval.
It’s another small tool for something I wanted to do with my own writing. If you’ve got a Hive archive and a website, it might save you some putzing around, too.
Cheers!
Ken