Whilst reading good Mr. Dash's accurate statement about the pending Facebook Vanity URL grab, i remembered that i had acquired a vanity URL of my own last year. Mr. Dash (not to be confused with his delicious, low sodium wife), also raises an excellent point about vanity domains.
My vanity domain is a professional face for myself. It's what i put on personal business cards or tell people when i want to be more than some idiot with a blog. Granted, one can get vanity domains for countless other services as well, and in fact, i have a slew of them. The reason that services like to hand those out is because they're link bait for their own services. (Why not have "facebook.com" appear as the domain of choice for folks doing a search for stuff?)
Still, i don't like the idea of someone else holding sway over me, particularly someone who could cut my account off for any reason. So, no, i'm not going to use that as my on-line calling card, even thought they REALLY want me to. Instead, i'm going to use them to promote me.
What i did was write a tiny bit of PHP that checks the paths of 404 documents against a database. If there's an entry, i redirect to the URL for that entry, if not, i do a search for that term plus my name.
E.g. to get to my amazon profile, you can go to http://jrconlin.com/amazon. Likewise, you can go to flickr, linkedin, or anywhere else i may have an account. LIkewise, if you're looking for stuff about me and "hacking", just go to http://jrconlin.com/hacking yahoo. Heck, in about two seconds, i can set up vanity URLs for services that don't have vanity URLs, and best of all, they get the privilege of being on my site, not the other way around.
It's trivially simple to set this up, by the way, and damn cheap. i know mookie hates them, but Dreamhost is running a sale again. (if not, wait a bit. They're always running some sale).
So, yeah, that whole facebook vanity URLs thing? Not really that impressive.
