So maybe you’re not famous enough to get your own Facebook vanity URL like Kevin Rose, U2, alleged girl beater Chris Brown, or even US President Barack Obama……big whoop. Never mind, you can still get a much simpler address than http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=719911306, which makes next to no sense and is pretty well impossible to remember, with your own domain name and a little ol thing called a .htaccess file.
If you’ve already got your own domain name and hosting you’re almost ready to have your own Facebook Vanity URL, all you need to do now is add a sub-domain and a .htaccess file to your hosting server and that’s it. If you don’t have your own domain name, ie. like www.mathewpacker.com, then head on over to GoDaddy and pick one out, register it, and then come on back to this tut.
If your hosting service allows it, go an add a sub domain to your account (you should be able to find documentation at your domain hosting service to show you how to add a sub domain). To keep it easy to remember I’ve added http://facebook.mathewpacker.com to my MediaTemple account. Now that the sub domain is active all I need to do is to add the .htacess file with a little URL rewrite rule in it and voila, I have a very easy to remember Facebook URL.
The htaccess file we’re going to add looks a little like this;
# This allows you to redirect your entire website to any other domain
Redirect 301 / http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=719911306
Open your favourite text editor and paste in that code, just make sure your change the id=719911306 bit to your Facebook ID otherwise you’ll be sending all your friends to my profile….not that they wont thank you for it.. Now when you save the .htaccess file to your new sub domain make sure you name the file .htaccess (the dot is very important!) otherwise it just wont work.
If all has gone well you should now be able to hand out a much easier to remember Facebook URL to all your friends, colleagues, and anyone else you care to tell. Mine is http://facebook.mathewpacker.com if you want to add me to your friend list. You can use this rewrite rule practically anywhere, Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, etc.
Once you’ve set your new Facebook Vanity URL up leave me a comment with your new and improved Facebook URL in it.
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