Have you ever thought it would be nice to be able to easily give someone the URL to your Facebook profile? It’s not easy with the id number URL that Facebook uses. Just try saying “go to facebook dot com slash profile dot php question mark id equals six hundred and five million seven hundred seventy six thousand fifty seven“. Bzzzt, nope. Even something as easy as a custom URL for LinkedIn can be hard to remember. It hit me the other day that there is a really easy solution to this!
If you have your own domain name, and host the DNS somewhere, you are almost guaranteed to be able to easily create URL redirects. I use Namecheap and it is very easy to do. I created these URL redirects to make it a lot easier to tell people where to find me!
It’s so much easier to say “Just go to flickr.thingelstad.com” to see my pictures on Flickr! Or “go to facebook.thingelstad.com“. Even Twitter allows people to just know my name, and not need to remember my Twitter username, and just go to twitter.thingelstad.com!
Nice huh? I like it.
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Damn, that’s _very_ clever. I may just have to implement that, just for fun, even though I don’t tend to get asked for my information much. ;-)
Hadar,
Having you qualify something as “_very_” clever pretty much makes my day — and weekend. :-)
Aww, shucks. Now you’ve made me go and implement something that likely no one will ever click on anyway, and it was a few lines trickier than yours, since I run my own server (including DNS).
For people to get to my profile (which will do them no good, since I don’t publicize anything to non-friends), you can now visit:
http://facebook.opticality.com/
or
http://facebook.pedhazur.com/
On your own server (meaning _my_ own server), it’s a two step process:
1) Set up a CNAME or A record for the “facebook” sub-domain (assuming you aren’t using wildcard domains).
2) Put in a rewrite rule for that sub-domain to your Facebook URL. For me, that meant adding a tiny “if” block for my http server, which is NginX. Doing it for Apache is just as easy, but the placement and syntax is different.
Thanks again Jamie! :-)
Cool idea.
Thanks.
I just added another one, github.thingelstad.com.
For people who don’t host their own sites, here’s a potentially cool service (I haven’t dug in, so I don’t know what their specific angle is!):
http://apps.facebook.com/webaddress/
I had actually grabbed that a while back myself and have
http://profile.to/thingles/
but I never, never use it. Something about that profile.to business. Call me old fashioned, but I still like good old .com addresses. :-)