Neat and tidy Posterous

I use a (free) Posterous blog as a tidy frontend to “serve” my CV at the end of emails and so on.  Here it is jojordan.org.

Redirect a Posterous blog to your own domain name

First, of course, you must buy a domain name.  Once you’ve done that, you will need to direct your Posterous blog to the domain name.

(PS You can buy a domain name through Posterous .  I didn’t; but it looks possible.)

Dreamhost

I bought my Domain name through Dreamhost and I intend to keep other assets on their computers, that is, use them to host some of my online assets.

“Redirecting” my Posterous account to Dreamost

My Posterous account will stay on the Posterous computer though.  But I want people who look for jojordan.org to be redirected there without them having to do anything extra.

The word “redirecting” is confusing, because it suggests the Posterous blog moves over to Dreamhost.  The opposite happens.  People looking for my Posterous blog will be sent by the world-wide internet system to Dreamhost who will redirect them, without them even noticing, to Posterous.

Settings on Dreamhost to “redirect” my visitors to Posterous

To setup Dreamhost to perform this magic redirection, you need to login in to Dreamhost and look in the left sidebar.  Pick manage domains.  Choose the domain that you will be linking to Posterous.  Then choose DNS.  You will get a wider screen. In the middle is the following information.

Copy the settings.  The numbers  in the second last line is the IP address of Posterous.  You will use your domain name throughout, of course, not mine.  The CNAME setting has the effect of allowing people to type your domain name without the www and finding you nonetheless.

Posterous settings

On the Posterous side, all you have to do is login, go to Manage (top menu bar), choose settings (tab one-third down) and type in your domain name.  It all looks like this.

The link up will take at least 30 minutes (the world wide web is a physically big place!).  Beware too, that once Posterous is directing to your domain name, if you break the Dreamhost side you won’t be able to get into Posterous because the WWW will still redirect anyone looking for http://yourblogname.posterous.com  to the domain at Dreamhost.  You are effectively locked out!  So remember to disconnect the Posterous end before you fiddle!

Problems

Let me know if you have any problems and I’ll adjust these instructions.  It’s sometime since I did this; though I did manage to lock myself out of Posterous today.  I got back in again with a bit of Googling and reading so, all good.  Patience and tolerance of geeky English and it comes together.