Dealing With DNS

When I registered my website wmmclarke.com , I had no idea what a DNS was. According to wikipedia , the Domain Name Sysstem (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. Not exactly immediately obvious…

The most common analogy for DNS records is probably a phonebook, which translates addresses that computers like (93.184.216.119) to addresses that humans like (wikipedia.org).

See my post about IP addresses .

This link is especially good at dealing with what happens when you navigate to a URL .

Anyway… I’m getting sidetracked. I’m going to show how I delt with Heroku & 123-reg.co.uk to set up my DNS properly:

I found this quite fiddly to get working… so here’s what I did:

1). Dealing with DNS#

  • Click on ‘Manage DNS’ and navigate to ‘Advanced DNS’
  • Add 2 new CNAME :

- www#

- DNS Entry: www
- Type: CNAME
- Destination Target: <your URL without the 'www' and with a '.' at the end>

- Everything else#

- DNS Entry: *
- Type: CNAME
- Destination Target: <your URL without the 'www' and with a '.' at the end>

2). Getting rid of that pesky ‘www’ subdomain.#

  • Go back to the main list of options

  • Click on ‘Web Forwarding’

  • Add a permament (301) redirection:

    • Domain Name: <Your URL without the www. I just put ‘wmmclarke.com’>
    • Forwarding Type: 301
    • Forwarding Destination: <Your URL with http://www prepended to it.>

That should be it!