Using Google Firebase as free HTTP & HTTPS redirect service
From time to time you move a website, e.g. a personal blog, to a new hosting service or need to change the URL. Keeping the old links going is a very important aspect of any such move, after all somebody (or even many) linked to your articles and you wouldn't want to disappoint your readers with a blank page or error message. In my case I moved my blog from blog.schlomo.schapiro.org to schlomo.schapiro.org. While there are many free HTTP redirect services available on the internet, I so far found only one that actually also deals with HTTPS. As I enabled HTTPS on my blog many years ago, all the links pointing to my blog also use HTTPS. Also, not offering HTTPS is a no-go in today's security-aware Internet. So I had the problem to find a redirect service that would respond to requests sent to https://blog.schlomo.schapiro.org/some-or-other-path.html and redirect the reader to https://schlomo.schapiro.org/some-or-other-path.html instead. That shouldn't be a big problem, ev