guioconnor's posterous

Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor's random thoughts, links and tutorials. 
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Posterous Subdomain

Posteroussubdomain

First things first. If you are going to use an external platform for your blogging, you'd like to consider at least owning the domain. If one day you want to leave the service, this is the only way to keep the old links and benefit from bookmarks and blogrolls for the next incarnation of your work. Is nice that posterous lets you do just that.

Now, some people happily dedicate a whole domain to their posterous accounts (or other services with the same feature). Chris Garrett for instance uses www.chrisg.co.uk for his posterous, but he has www.chrisg.org and www.chrisg.com for differnet purposes.

Personally, I'm more keen to see my posterous as a facet of my online personality and make it a subdomain of a guioconnor.com. You may want to do this for many reasons, one of them being that you don't need to pay for yet another domain.

How you do that? Easy! A sub domain is a domain in its own right, so all you have to do is to go to your registar, create the sub domain as an "A Record" and point it to posterous DNS server IP: 67.207.139.81

In Dreamhost, you can go to https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=domain.manage& click on DNS for your domain and add the record as exemplified by the picture.

You can do something similar of other services on the web that allow you to customise your domain. An easy way to keep control of your work on external platforms without having to register a domain for each one.

Comments (38)

Jul 10, 2009
Cindy King said...
Gui, thanks for reminding me about the subdomain option for Posterous - I was toying with a URL but couldn't quite decide on it. Now you've given me more food for thought :)
Jul 10, 2009
I'm glad it helped. Having your own domain on sites is a basic need. Buying a domain to each may be too much. We often forget subdomains are domains on it's own right. Best of two worlds? I'd say so ;)




Jul 10, 2009
Cindy King said...
OK - my CKbiz subdomain for Posterous is now set up! http://posterous.cindyking.biz/ - Thanks Gui!
Jul 10, 2009
Wonderful, congrats!
Jul 25, 2009
Knight Tan said...
i just wonder in term of SEO , will this actually help your main domain ?
Jul 27, 2009
@Knight - I don't think it will, since from an SEO perspective each subdomain is a separate site but keep in mind using a subdirectory here is not an option since you're not hosting the service.

Your choices are either using the whole domain or a subdomain which is the same from SEO perspective, but it keeps a certain identity for a human visitor and saves you to buy another domain.

On the bright side, because SEO for your subdomain will not count towards the SEO for the root domain, you can allow yourself to have a rather offtopic blog on the subdomain without risking the relevance of your main content.

Jul 27, 2009
Rebecca Leaman said...
I like this method of handling a posterous blog, Gui. It's simple and practical, and you make a great point about being able to go madly off-topic in a subdomain without adversely affecting the root from an SEO perspective. If I weren't self-indulgent enough to have two personal domains - hey, they're cheap, compared to all the other hobbies a person might have ;) - it's definitely the way I would go. As a matter of fact, I know a couple people who need to read this post... Thanks!
Jul 27, 2009
Rebecca Leaman liked this post.
Jul 28, 2009
Hey, Jen, I'm as guilty as the next person, we are all addicted to buy domains ;)

In this case, though, I did felt I want posterous to be a part of something else. Although it's not related to guioconnor.com in terms of SEO I think it hints my human visitors that that's not all and it ligtens the burden to have to manually tie it down with the other parts of my online presence.

Aug 11, 2009
Ben Hanten said...
I'm having troubles with Dreamhost and Posterous. I don't want a subdomain - I want the main domain to point to Posterous.
Aug 11, 2009
Hi Ben, the process is mostly the same but remember that if the domain was pointed to somewhere else it may take up to two days until the chanches propagate.

Aug 12, 2009
Allan liked this post.
Sep 01, 2009
Gui, thanks for this. I already have two blogs on my wordpress site, one of them on a subdomain. Now I'm thinking of adding my Posterous blog to yet-another-subdomain! :)

I only need to figure out whether BlueHost allow me to do what you've done in DreamHost or whether I need to contact their support and raise a ticket.

Sep 02, 2009
You are welcome. I wish I could help with that, but I don't know BlueHost, it shouldn't be hard, though. How did you created the subdomain for your wordpress site? It should be the same way.
Sep 02, 2009
Did it already...took me about 10 minutes. :) Bluehost support is lightning fast.
Sep 14, 2009
John Lauber said...
Thank you for posting this. Quick chat with hostgator support and it was done.
Sep 15, 2009
Mike Pilarz said...
This is a great guide. But does your domain have to be *hosted* by Dreamhost in order for this to work?
Sep 15, 2009
Hi Mike. No, not at all. Any registrar that would allow you to create an A record would work fine. I use dreamhost as example because is what I have at hand. Just find out how you create the A record with your registrar.
Sep 17, 2009
Mike Pilarz said...
Problem solved.  Thanks Gui!
Sep 17, 2009
@Mike - Yay!
Nov 13, 2009
Jarin Schmidt said...
Anyone have ideas on how to do this with GoDaddy?
Nov 14, 2009
Ricardo Barra said...
Hello,

I am struggling with my domains, can you help me? I have my blog at http://chuqui.posterous.com and also have 2 domains: placerdigital.cl and placerdigital.net.

I want to dedicate those 2 domains to my Posterous blog, so when people ask me about my blog URL, I can say "go to placerdigital.net" (or .cl). I mean... when people type either one of those 2 domains, they should get to my Posterous blog but still have my own domains in the address bar.

So... I opened an account in Dreamhost, but don't know how to do it. I already added an "A Record" for placerdigital.net and put the 67.207.139.81 address, but t's not working for the .NET

And for the placerdigital.cl domain, I try to add that domain, but Dreamhost says "You can't add that domain: already in our system", although it is not listed in the "Manage Domains" section...

I will appreciate your help. And... am I able to use those 2 domains go to my Posterous blog?

Thanks.

Nov 15, 2009
Buriel Webwerx liked this post.
Nov 17, 2009
@Jarin - I don't know godaddy but posterous help seems to cover some of it

http://posterous.com/help/custom_domain

@Ricardo - on the same help page you'll find info to set your domain (not subdomain) to posterous which seems to be what you want.

Dec 05, 2009
Thomas Ott said...
Thanks so much for this post, it really helped me finally figure out how to migrate my posterous blog to my subdomain.
Dec 22, 2009
Michael Levi liked this post.
Mar 27, 2010
Tahir Akram said...
Hi people;

I am unable to configure my custom subdomain blog.tahirakram.com for my posterous tahirakram.posterous.com.

Following are the steps that I did;

1. Created a subdomain on my hosting panel blog.tahirakram.com
2. Updated name servers to point hosting provider
3. Added A record with name: tahirakram.com with value: 67.207.139.81
4. Added CNAME with name: blog.tahirakram.com with value posterous.com (read here)
5. On my posterous setting page added blog.tahirakram.com as custom domain. But it gave this error message. Virtual host is not currently pointing to the right place. We found the following: A RECORD: 216.108.235.178. Please set your DNS servers to the correct address (A record to '67.207.139.81') and try again

I really appreciate your help in resolving this issue. I must be doing some thing wrong thats why I stuck on it.

May 10, 2010
Dano Manion said...
Thanks @Guioconnor, this totally helped me.
Jul 06, 2010
Joseph Thornton said...
Thanks for posting this, you helped me setup http://blog.artyflores.com
Jul 06, 2010
You are welcome
Oct 06, 2010
Carla Drago said...
Hi there,

Like Ricardo I'm trying to host the actual domain, not a sub domain, using dreamhost. I can't find the instructions you mention...

Oct 09, 2010
Thanks Joseph for the link.
Oct 09, 2010
Carla Drago said...
Thanks Joseph :-)
Nov 12, 2010
John T Davis said...
I've got an odd problem.

I have my domain registered at Dreamhost, configured to use Google Apps for My Domain (mostly for email). I now want to use www.mydomain.com to point to my posterous, but www.mydomain.com is a non-editable A record according to Dreamhost.

I had Dreamhost set to DNS Only (with the google DNS stuff still in the system), and tried to add the posterous A record, and it totally wiped all the A records in the system. For about 10 minutes, I couldn't get email at myaddress@mydomain.com. I had to switch to Google Hosted to fix it.

Is there anything I can do aside from creating a subdomain, seeing as "www.mydomain.com" is an uneditable A record?

Dec 17, 2010
Paul Gorney said...
I just set up my subdomain/blog on my site. Only issue is people click on "photo blog" on my main site and then they go to a page and need to click again to be taken to the actual blog. One extra click. Anyone know how to set this up so the extra click is not needed. Thanks. www.PaulSellsHouses.com - Looked at www.artyflores.com and his goes right to the blog without the extra click.
Dec 17, 2010
Hi Paul, why don't you just change the link on the navigation to point directly to your photo blog?
Oct 20, 2011
Gregory said...
Hi,
There are some changes now on this one. You need to add CNAME record....

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