Do things on the Web

Get a real domain for your MySpace account

Before we go any further this works for any social networking website that allows you to have your own user id url. So lets get started. First thing you will need is a domain name and a hosting account. You can get both of these from one of the great companies I recommend on the Hosting Page.

After you have set up your hosting account with the domain name of your choice you will need to tell your domain to redirect all of the visitors to your MySpace page or Facebook page. My preferred way to do this is called an: .htaccess redirect. Every hosting account has a public folder where you can upload your website some companies call this folder www and others call it public_html I've seen companies that have both. Either one works and they both do the same thing. The www or public_html folder is the root folder of your account. Whatever you put in there will show up on your domain name. However what we want to do is make it so that whenever someone goes to your domain name they get your MySpace or Facebook account. For that we need to set up a redirect.

First you will need to create a text file I like to use Notepad simply because I am on a Windows machine most of the time. However any text editor should do just fine. Open up a text file and copy and paste this code into it:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domainnnamegoeshere.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domainnnamegoeshere.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myspace.com/usernamegoeshere/ [R=301,L]

Replace domainnnamegoeshere.com with your domain name and: usernamegoeshere with your MySpace url nothing more nothing less. For example If I were to do it with my domain here is what the code would look like for me:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mikewebguy.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mikewebguy.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myspace.com/mikewebguy/ [R=301,L]

You will now need to save this file with the name .htaccess However don't do that just yet. If you are on a Windows system be careful because windows will more then likely not listen to you and add and extension to the file which we do not want there. It might add .txt (Notepad) or .doc (MS Word) In order to prevent this form happening there is a setting you will have to temporarily change. You will have to tell Windows to stop hiding file name extensions so that you can modify them. Don't get scared it's a lot easier then it sounds. You will have to go to: Start > Control Panel > Folder Options > View (Tab) > Then un-check the option: Hide extensions for known file types. Don't close this window just yet. Instead of clicking Ok click Apply as we will change this back after you are done.

After you click Apply go back to the text document and now you should be able to save it as a file called .htaccess without any other extension. If it saves it as .htaccess.txt or .htaccess.doc it's not going to work. All done with the .htaccess file. Go back to the Folder Options window that you left up and check the option: Hide extensions for known file types. Now you may click Ok.

This .htaccess file is very important because it does all the work for you. You will now need to upload it to your hosting account inside of your www or public_html folder. Each hosting company is different but all of them shoudl provide you with FTP access or access to a File Manager in your hosting account control panel from where you should be able to upload/download files. There might already be a default .htaccess file in your www or public_html folder however if you are not using your hosting account for anything else you should be ok with overwriting that file. If you do use your hosting account for hosting other domains then I would recommend to simply add the code to the existing .htaccess file and not overwrite it.

One last thing to keep in mind here is that a domain name usually takes anywhere from 24-48 hours to finish propagating. What this means for you is that during the first two days your domain name might not work as expected as it is still trying to talk back to every server on the intertet and broadcast it's existance That's it if you browse to your domain name after it has finished propagating it should simply redirect you to your Myspace page.