Acronyms can be used as well, but again, make sure the full domain is available. One of the main reasons this is important is that your political adversaries will buy the domain name if you don’t. They will then use this to circumvent and distort your message and efforts by stealing your visitors.

The next step is to make use of your entire domain identity. You do this by pointing each extension to your main site URL. You can do this with the following steps.

1. Choose which extension will be your main URL. Most will be the .com extension unless you are an organization, then choose .org. this example use .com as the main url
2. Park the secondary extensions on top of you main domain. This is done via your hosting company.
3. .htaccess specifics (Save a copy of your .htaccess file before making any changes just in case something goes wrong
   • WordPress Blog Example (assuming name permalinks being used)
     • Make all links remove the www
       

       RewriteCond !^www\.yourdomain\.com !^yourdomain\.com

     • Make all .org extensions become .com
       

       RewriteCond !^yourdomain\.org !^yourdomain\.com

     • Make all .net extensions become .com
       

       RewriteCond !^yourdomain\.net !^yourdomain\.com

     • Repeat for all other extensions
   • Mediawiki Example (assuming name permalinks being used)
     • Make all links remove the www
       

       RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain\.com

     • Make all .org extensions become .com
       

       RewriteCond !^yourdomain\.org !^yourdomain\.com

     • Make all .net extensions become .com
       

       RewriteCond !^yourdomain\.net !^yourdomain\.com

     • Repeat for all other extensions

There are couple of benefits to following these steps besides protecting your domain identity. The first is that it allows people who forget which domain extension to use to still get to your site. Second, all the different extensions now get counted as 1 by Google and other search engines.

To change Permalinks, you do so under Control Panel -> Options -> Permalinks. The best choice is Date and Name based, This is better for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Unless you are familiar with wordpress paramaters, I would stay away from the custom choice.

Once you choose the option you want click “Update Permalink Structure”. You should see a message at the top saying “Permalink structure updated.” My first issue was that the .htaccess file was not writable. You can read more about these at httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html. I won’t get into the discussion of whether these files are good or bad at this time. Simply put they are required for wordpress blogs if you do not control your own server.

.htaccess files (or “distributed configuration files”) provide a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. A file, containing one or more configuration directives, is placed in a particular document directory, and the directives apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof.

I created the .htaccess file in my root web directory and make it writable by the web server, i.e. on linux it is 664. This time when I clicked update the file was saved and the Rewrite Rules were written into the .htaccess file. Here is a sample of what it wrote:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

I still had a problem though. The permalinks still did not work. Since I was controlling the apache configuration I tend to keep it more locked down. So I went to my configuration include file for this domain and made the following additions:

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride FileInfo Options

These were added inside the tags. I then restarted the apache service. Everything now worked.

I am planning on taking you through the entire process of setting up WordPress and even a web server as I have time.