First let me say "Welcome Back!". Not to you, to me! It’s been forever since I posted something here, been busy at EveryJoe.com so hopefully you’re catching some of the stuff I’m writing over there.
I spent some time this evening trying to work out how to set some auto-redirects for URL’s for a client. To practice I decided to setup some links for my domain that automatically redirect to other profiles for me on some social networks.
For example, if you now go to http://bnpositive.com/facebook you’ll be redirected to my long Facebook URL at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=502473549. I also setup the same thing for http://bnpositive.com/twitter which redirects to my twitter page.
This won’t be what we’re doing for a client, but it was a good practice and test. Also, if I change all of the links I use to direct people to my various online presences, I should be able to start tracking how much traffic my website is generating to these other networks for my exposure.
The problem today though was that the process for setting up these redirects. I know how to setup redirects in the header of various web pages in both HTML and .aspx pages. The problem with that solution is that I’d have to setup an actual page for each URL I wanted to use and then manage those pages independently. There’s a better way!
One way would be to modify the .htaccess file to setup your own internal redirects. I didn’t have access to this (I thought I did) with GoDaddy.com. The good news is that GoDaddy.com provides a Site Redirect tool to accomplish this task. The bad news is that it wasn’t too obvious and user-friendly for the end-user in my opinion.
Keep reading for screen shots and details of how I accomplished my goal with GoDaddy.com
I won’t go into the details of how to get to the Site Redirect tool on GoDaddy.com, so let’s jump straight to the information you’ll need once you get into the wizard itself.
First you complete the information for where you’re wanting to redirect from on your site as shown above:
- Type in your domain name. This is important. No "http://", no slashes, etc.
- Next put in the path, which is the portion of the domain you’re redirecting from. Notice again, no slashes, etc.
- Specify whether or not you want both http://www.yourdomain.com and http://yourdomain.com to be redirected identically.
Click "Next".
On the next screen (shown above):
- Specify whether the domain prefix you’re redirecting to is an "http://" or an "https:" (secure) website.
- Specify the root domain of where you want to redirect to. Notice this is just the root and NOT including the previously specified "http:"
- Now specify the path you’re using after the root domain. Notice again, no leading slash.
Click "Next"
The last step is pretty straight forward:
- Specify whether this redirect is a temporary or permanent redirect. In this case the URL doesn’t actually exist and never will, so I’ve chosen permanent.
- I’ll be honest that I don’t clearly understand the differences in the next three items, but I just specified "No Redirect" and moved on.
Click "OK" and you’re done. Kind of?
The only problem now is that for some reason the paths we specified earlier are getting changed by something GoDaddy.com is doing. My redirects will work once or twice, but then seem to break later. I go into my settings and check stuff and there’s been more information and paths added to what I put in earlier.
When I fix one the other one breaks, when I fix the other, the original one breaks. Can’t get both of them to work at the same time.
I can’t figure out why this is happening or what I can do to stop it. Maybe someone from GoDaddy.com will read this and look into it.
Now my next task is to figure out the accurate process to move a paid for email address on GoDaddy.com to one of the free ones I get with hosting with them. This seems to be another not-so-user-friendly process even with guidance from the support desk.
Maybe I’m just a complete moron. Sure hope not though, it can’t be this hard can it?
