Learning Blog

The social news and bookmarking site Reddit recently announced the ability to create fully customizable sub-reddits . In addition to creating your own look and feel you can also point them your own domain.

How it works:

Step #1) Create your Reddit

First Create your own Reddit by filling out the form

In this step you are asked to pick a name for this reddit. This is important and will be needed later

Here's one I created:



Step #2) Customize your Layout

After saving your site (the reddit name must be unique), you can customize the CSS and image logo from the site you are taken to. Normally this will be something like

http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophycorner/

Step #3) Add a CNAME (alias) record to your domain

The specific steps on this will depend on how your DNS is hosted, but basically you will add a CNAME type record to your DNS's nameserver. The new record will contain the name you defined for "domain:" when you created the site. In this example it was philosophy.bwebcentral.com

For the points to portion of the record you use the name you defined for the reddit (in this case philosophycorner and reddit.com -> http://philosophycorner.reddit.com

This is important, you cannot redirect to www.reddit.com/r/philosophycorner! It must be [subreddit].reddit.com

It can take up to 24 hours for your DNS settings to be propagated, once they are you can access the site

Congrats Your Done!

One additional tip!

The "bookmarklets" button on the bottom of your main page is the standard bookmarklets for submitting to reddit. However, you can send users to your own bookmarklets page at

[sub-reddit].bwebcentral.com/bookmarklets
http://philosophy.bwebcentral.com/bookmarklets

The Cons [edit: Aug 27]

As I've been playing around with this, I've noticed that the way reddit is redirecting to your blog isn't really "web/search engine friendly". When they detect your web address request to their site, they are generating a frameset to mask the page. So should a search engine visit the page they will see the real content they will just see the frame pointing to the actual page on reddit.

I think it would have been smarter if reddit, simply used somethign like a ReWriteRule to softly redirect and actually send the content to the browser instead of just a frame. Although it seems like reddit might be using IIS 3.0 (that can't be right can it?) to serve the pages.

[Submitted Feature Request (135)]

Hope this tutorial has helped you! If so, Please grab my bookmarklet and start submitting your philosophy entries to my reddit!

Labels: how-to, reddit, social bookmarking