Owning your pronouns page

It’s usually a good idea to own your content, especially when it comes to personal things like your website or blog. There used to be a quite popular website for linking your pronouns to a short explainer. But that’s gone now, probably because Heroku discontinued the free tier. There are great alternatives for setting up your pronouns page, but again, at least think about owning your stuff.

In September of 2022 I bought the domain fynn.lgbt. On the same day I created my own pronouns page and pointed the domain to that page. A very basic redirect until I discovered Netlify’s language redirect conditions.

I live in Germany and have a German pronouns page in addition to the English default. With redirects based on browser language, I can automatically point visitors to the correct page in their preferred language.

Let’s look at an excerpt from my netlify.toml configuration:

[[redirects]]
  from = "https://fynn.lgbt/*"
  to = "https://fynn.be/pronouns/en/"
  status = 302
  force = true
  conditions = {Language = ["en"]}

[[redirects]]
  from = "https://fynn.lgbt/*"
  to = "https://fynn.be/pronouns/de/"
  status = 302
  force = true
  conditions = {Language = ["de"]}

[[redirects]]
  from = "https://fynn.lgbt/*"
  to = "https://fynn.be/pronouns/"
  status = 302
  force = true

The interesting part is the conditions = {Language = ["…"]} which conditionally applies the redirect based on language. The third redirect is a fallback in case a client doesn’t send a language preference.

1. If you visit fynn.lgbt with your preferred website language set to English, you are redirected to fynn.be/pronouns/en.
2. With German language preference, the redirect points to fynn.be/pronouns/de.
3. Otherwise, you see the overview page fynn.be/pronouns and can decide for yourself which language works best.

Now I can share a single short domain fynn.lgbt to automatically direct people to a suitable pronouns explainer that I own.