[Web4lib] Re: Newbie question -- URL Redirection

[Cary Gordon]

By this measure, the Internet is smoke and mirrors. I don't think that
even Al Gore could argue with that.

The bottom line is that, unless you have control of your domain's
nameservers, you are very limited in what you can do in this and other
areas.

Many reputable domain registrars -- Network Solutions and GoDaddy come
to mind now offer free DNS management at no additional cost. They
often make this a bit difficult to navigate to, as they don't want
folks who don't understand the consequences of changing DNS entries to
muck about blindly. This is not, of course, for altruistic reasons,
merely because the support calls are disproportionately expensive to
handle when your service costs $8/year.

There are also many free DNS services like Zoneedit, but these also
require some technical savvy.

Cary

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 8:41 AM, T Mac <terrannews at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I know I'm beating a dead horse and I'll drop the topic after this. Yes, pbwiki is good and I like and use it myself for several different sites and projects, but it appears that their "custom domains" are just a step up from URL redirection:
>
>
> You must own the domain of the website your trying to set the custom domain for.
> You must have the ability to set up a subdomain on your domain.  Depending on your domain package from your registrar, you may be limited or not have the ability to set a subdomain.
> You must have access to the advanced DNS settings of your domain, and have administrative rights on your wiki (If you're the wiki owner, you automatically have administrator rights).
>
> (Taken from: http://pbwikimanual.pbwiki.com/Custom-Domains )
>
> So, pbwiki isn't actually handling domain name registry or anything like that - you'd still have to register and host the domain somewhere else, and then set up your own subdomain which points to your pbwiki site. Then, this portion of your site will be something like http://wiki.mydomainname.com which would be the same as going to http://mydomainname.pbwiki.com. That's just smoke and mirrors as far as I can tell.
>
> It would be a great advantage to small organizations trying to host their entire site as a wiki for pbwiki (or another wiki company) to allow full-service hosting, so that without using any other domain registration or hosting service, you could have  http://www.mydomainname.com go directly to the wiki. It is quite possible that there are other wiki companies that do this, but I haven't run across it yet.
>
>>>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 12:25:23 -0800
> From: "Cary Gordon" <listuser at chillco.com>
> Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Re: Newbie question -- URL Redirection
> To: terrannews at yahoo.com
> Cc: web4lib at webjunction.org
> Message-ID:
>     <17c28acc0812091225q29252e22s948941e0460357b8 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> PBWiki <http://pbwiki.com> offers custom domain names and is a
> generally great product. FWIW, my friend David Weekly founded and (I
> think) owns it.
> <<
>
>
>
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>



-- 
Cary Gordon, MLIS
The Cherry Hill Company
http://chillco.com