Making A Custom Facebook URL For The Rest Us

April 26, 2009 by Jack · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Tutorials 

I never intended this to be a two part post, but I notice that many people have benefited from my previous post on Making A Custom Facebook Profile Address. Unfortunately, it was a method really only suited for those with their own hosting and willing to hack their .htaccess. While it’s pretty simple to do, I realized that not everyone could do it. The good news is that I figured out another way to get a custom Facebook URL that is easy enough for anyone to do.

URL Shortening Services To The Rescue
An easy way to get a more customized Facebook URL is by using URL shortening services like tinyurl.com. Normally, they work by creating a link like http://tinyurl.com/cur6q6 but they can just as easily create a link like http://tinyurl.com/jackwoodsfacebook.

Nitty Gritty Details
How do you do it? Just visit tinyurl.com. On their page, put in the link to your Facebook profile address. If you have any problem finding it, check out the part 1 post and the directions are there. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Woods/1022785814. There is a little box below that says “Custom alias (optional):.” That’s where you will put in your custom name. In my case, I tried first jackfacebook and that was already taken so I tried jackwoodsfacebook and it gave me the link http://tinyurl.com/jackwoodsfacebook. Easy, right?

Other URL Shortening Services
You are also not limited to just tinyurl.com. Many of the URL shortening services let you shorten the URL to a custom name or alias. Bit.ly allowed me to shorten my long Facebook url to http://bit.ly/jackwoods.

Pretty cool, huh? Granted it’s better to use a redirect from your own domain, but these URL shortening services do really help you get a better, more customized Facebook address and are an acceptable substitute.

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Create Your Own Custom Facebook Profile Address

January 15, 2009 by Jack · 3 Comments
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Tutorials 

Social NetworkingI love using Facebook. It’s a great place to keep in touch with friends as well as network with new potential employers, contacts, and clients. The uses you can find for Facebook are limitless. If it involves any kind of networking, Facebook is the place where it can happen.

To take full advantage of Facebook’s networking benefits, you need to get as many people to your Facebook profile as possible. One way is to put a link to your Facebook profile on your business cards. While Facebook does have a public search page for every user, the link on it is very cumbersome and there is no way, within Facebook, to change it to something more usable. For example, my public search page is http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Maderas/1022785814 . Not exactly svelte on my business card.

Fortunately, if you’ve got your own hosting, you can create your own custom Facebook profile address with a little .htaccess magic. The .htaccess file resides in your root html directory and it’s responsible for passing commands to your web server, including URL rewrites and redirects. For our purposes, we are interested in the redirects.

Note: If you don’t feel comfortable hacking your .htaccess or if you don’t have your own hosting, check out Making A Custom Facebook URL For The Rest Us

How I did it
My Facebook profile is located at http://unfq.com/facebook . It’s an easy to remember address that I can stick on my business card or quickly jot down on any scrap of paper I can find. To create this link, all I had to do was open up the .htaccess file on my server and drop in this code:

redirect 301 /facebook http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Maderas/1022785814

What does the code do? It does a redirect from the /facebook and redirects it to my public Facebook search listing.

Try It Yourself!
Ready to try it yourself? First decide what you want to call the link on your server. You can make it /myfacebook, /notmyspace, /facebook or anything else you want. Replace /facebook in my example with whatever you have chosen for your link.

Next, go to your Facebook profile and click on Setting-Privacy Settings-Search. On the search page, go down to the Public Search Listing and right click-copy link location to get the URL of your public search listing. Replace my search listing in the example code with yours.

Next, open up the .htaccess file on your hosting and add the code that you create from my example to the bottom of the file. Make sure it all shows on one line. Save the file to your server and you are set. Go ahead and test your custom Facebook profile address.

Problems or Comments?
If there are any issues, it’s probably because you didn’t make sure the pasted code was all on one line. Double check that and try again.

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