alright! facebook vanity urls! now you can get one for your fan page. oh, you don’t have 1,000 fans on your facebook page? me neither =( but here is an easy solution if you want a vanity url but don’t meet the current qualifications.
this will allow you to make your own vanity url that is slightly different than what is being offered by facebook. instead of http://www.facebook.com/username this will show you how to create http://facebook.yourdomain.com
first you need to create a sub domain on your server. (example: http://facebook.studiomds.com) how to create a sub domain will vary depending on your host but media temple makes it very easy. if you don’t know try a google search on sub domain creation + your hosting company.
now my actual facebook page’s url is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Athens-GA/Studio-Mds/23276253600 which really sucks. but in order to fix that we just need to add our yucky url to a custom .htacess file on our new subdomain. here’s how to do it in 4 easy steps.
step 1
copy and paste the text below into your text editor of choice (text edit, notepad, etc.)
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.facebook.com/pages/Athens-GA/Studio-Mds/23276253600$1 [R=301,L]
step 2
replace ‘http://www.facebook.com/pages/Athens-GA/Studio-Mds/23276253600′ with ‘http://www.facebook.com/yourextremelylongandyuckyurl’ and save as ‘htaccess.txt’ (without quotations).
step 3
Upload the file to the html folder of the url you have created. in my case it was facebook.studiomds.com > html > htaccess.txt
step 4
once you’ve uploaded the file as ‘htaccess.txt’ you need to change the name to ‘.htaccess’ (without quotations) this will put it into effect and voila your very own (slightly modified) facebook vanity url.
click here to see mine in action http://facebook.studiomds.com
