URL Mistake
Last year, I purchased www.rigling.org and www.riglings.com so I could start to set up a family website to host pictures, a blog, or a place to exchange data (my family is spread across the country). When I gave Jess the opportunity to become part of our Rigling family, I wanted to set up a fancy wedding website for our big day. Some of my friends bought names like www.kayleeandben.com or http://beachyandcovelle.com/ but I already had rigling.org. So I set up www.berens.and.rigling.org for Jess Berens and Justin Rigling's Wedding.
Superhertz (a virtual machine in a garage in Boston) behaves as the DNS server for the superhertz.com domain, so I set it up to provide name resolution for rigling.org and riglings.com and configured apache to redirect this to our actual wedding website at http://www.mywedding.com/berensandrigling/.
This was all going well until we made a small mistake on our wedding invitations. Instead of printing www.berens.and.rigling.org, we had www.berens.and.rigling.com. I would have bought rigling.com, but a company in Germany has had it for quite a few years. This wouldn't be too big of a deal if the website was just on there for extra information. Unfortunately, our website is also our method for our invited guests to RSVP.
I tried to write an email to the website administrator of rigling.com to see if they could help redirect traffic for me. I was worried that the English/German language barrier would destroy my chances, but it turns out that the email address on whois doesn't work...
So the real reason for writing this blog entry (first one in a couple years) is to get Google to index our page a little higher because it has a link to it from this blog.
I also bought Google AdWords to try to help out everyone who searches for us find the real site instead of some wedding registry scavenger. (The top link on Google was a wedding registry aggregator site that we never signed up for, I guess it just searches the internet, finds registries, and gets itself to the top of the list on Google so it can either steal from our guests or make money on affiliate programs)
Superhertz (a virtual machine in a garage in Boston) behaves as the DNS server for the superhertz.com domain, so I set it up to provide name resolution for rigling.org and riglings.com and configured apache to redirect this to our actual wedding website at http://www.mywedding.com/berensandrigling/.
This was all going well until we made a small mistake on our wedding invitations. Instead of printing www.berens.and.rigling.org, we had www.berens.and.rigling.com. I would have bought rigling.com, but a company in Germany has had it for quite a few years. This wouldn't be too big of a deal if the website was just on there for extra information. Unfortunately, our website is also our method for our invited guests to RSVP.
I tried to write an email to the website administrator of rigling.com to see if they could help redirect traffic for me. I was worried that the English/German language barrier would destroy my chances, but it turns out that the email address on whois doesn't work...
So the real reason for writing this blog entry (first one in a couple years) is to get Google to index our page a little higher because it has a link to it from this blog.
I also bought Google AdWords to try to help out everyone who searches for us find the real site instead of some wedding registry scavenger. (The top link on Google was a wedding registry aggregator site that we never signed up for, I guess it just searches the internet, finds registries, and gets itself to the top of the list on Google so it can either steal from our guests or make money on affiliate programs)
posted by Justin at
6:09 PM
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