I may explain first that there's a difference between domain names (personal domains) and domain (or domain.sites2) files. Domain names are used to reach your website on the web, like yourdomain.com. Domain files instead are on the computer and used by iWeb to store its files. They are NOT directly linked to each other. You could still use your different personal domains with leaving all the sites in one domain file. Just point the personal domains to the site it applies to. For infos about domain files go to this page.
Chapter 1: What is a personal domain? What does it do?
Chapter 2: Normal set up for .Mac
Chapter 3: When your domain registrar asks you to provide ns server names or you can’t edit CNAME or WebForward
Chapter 4: Multiple websites and multiple domains on .Mac
Chapter 5: Personal Domains yourname.com and personal e-mails whatever@yourdomain.com
Chapter 1: What is a personal domain? What does it do?
A personal domain name is a url of the type of yourdomain.com to access to your website. There are three ways to use a personal domain, so let me introduce you to the difference between WebForward, WebForward with cloaking and CNAME:
- WebForward: after you typed yourdomain.com in the browser you get forwarded to web.mac.com/username/ and web.mac.com/username/ will display in the browser
- WebForward with Cloaking (or masking): after you typed yourdomain.com in the browser yourdomain.com will display in the browser and will not change while people browse through your website
- CNAME: yourdomain.com will display instead of web.mac.com/username/ and while browsing through your website it will look like yourdomain.com/sitename/nameofpagepeoplelookatnow.html
If you buy and activate a personal domain like yourdomain.com it will enable you to access your site also by typing yourdomain.com in the browser and not only by typing web.mac.com/username. However the .mac address will still exist and they can be used both. That’s because on personal domains there's no content, it's only an alias hiding/substituting the web.mac.com/username/ name with yourdomain.com. But the web.mac.com/username/ address is still there behind the personal domain and as previously told can be used to visit your site too.
Everything else is business as usual. You publish your website by hitting publish button in iWeb and so on just as you did until now. All your pages are stored on .Mac and so on. The only thing changing is how you can access your website from browser.
Note 1: If using .Mac hosting and other hostings as well you can have multiple domains pointed to different sites so that each site will have yourdomain.com. However on .Mac you can have only one CNAME, the other personal domains should be WebForward or WebForward with cloaking.
Note 2: If you have multiple domain.sites2 files the CNAME using personal domain will redirect to the site for which you last did a ‘publish all’. As long as you just hit ‘publish’ the site to which you get redirected inserting the personal domain using CNAME doesn’t change. The same happens entering web.mac.com/username/
If you have multiple domain.sites2 files and publish them to the same folder the same thing is happening. As you can see the result of the publishing is an index.html file and a folder with the name of the site. The index.html file is the one which redirects people to the first page of your site. When you publish a second site the index.html file gets replaced with the one you published last, thus people are redirected to a new first page.
Note 3: If you have a CNAME and multiple websites all your websites will be accessible using yourdomain.com and web.mac.com/username/sitename/ (there’s no way to avoid that unless not using CNMAE or having multiple .Mac accounts)
Chapter 2: To set up .Mac to use a personal domain name:
1) If you haven't already registered a domain name, visit an accredited domain name registrar on the Internet and register the personal domain name you want to use.
For information about registering a domain name, search the Internet for "domain name registrars."
2)If you're not already logged in to .Mac, go to www.mac.com, and log in.
3)Click Account in the left column on the .Mac homepage, and confirm your login.
4)On the Account Settings page, click the Personal Domain button, and then follow the instructions that appear.
When asked to enter your domain name, be sure to type the entire domain name (including the extension, such as .com, .net) that you've registered without www (as it’s already written). Example: yourdomain.com and not www.yourdomain.com
5) When you see a screen confirming that .Mac is configured to host your domain, go to your domain name registrar's web hosting area, and point your domain (by adding or changing a "cname record") to web.mac.com
Note 1: For instructions on changing the CNAME please contact your domain registrar as every single registrar handels it a bit differently.
However you might find a field called “Alias” there you type: yourdomain.com
And another field called “Actual name” or “Host name” you type: web.mac.com
Here are the links to the instructions for the most popular registrars:
How to set up CNAME for .Mac with GoDaddy
How to set up CNMAE with Network Solutions
WebForward with GoDaddy; masking
Chapter 3: When your domain registrar asks you to provide ns server names or you can’t edit CNAME or WebForward
Some domain registrar don’t allow you to change cname, they only allow you to point the domains to servers.
Usually names of DNS servers are something like
ns1.xyz.com
ns18.xyz.com
So the solution would be going through a third party service (it's free):
1. Signup for an account at http://www.zoneedit.com/
2. In your account in zoneedit click on "Add Zone" and enter your Personal Domain
3. Click on "Edit Zone" => "What zone do you wish to edit?" click on your domain
4. Now you get to a panel and there you will see "Nameservers" in the format nsX.zoneedit.com and nsXX.zoneedit.com
5. Provide these to your Domain Name Registrar (usually you don’t have to contact your registrar’s support, simply type them in the appropriate field in your account)
6. In zoneedit click on "Aliases (CNAME)"
7. In "Alias" you type your personal domain
8. In "Actual Name" you type web.mac.com
9. Go to MailForward and be sure to turn it off if it isn’t yet, a message will display saying “MailForwarding is currently turned off for this zone”
10. Register the personal domain in your .mac account (look at chapter 2 to see how)
11. It works! That's it....
You could also use "WebForward" in ZoneEdit instead of "Aliases (CNAME)"
-New Domain Name (your domain will show up) redirects to http://web.mac.com/username/ => add
and repeat for www. domain name
Chapter 4: Multiple websites and multiple domains on .Mac
As stated in Note 1 in Chapter 1 of this page each .Mac account can only have one personal domain using CNAME linked to it. The others have to be WebForwards.
If you want to have multiple CNAME personal domains you have to have multiple .Mac accounts or Sub-accounts in case you have a Family Account (which I’d recommend you if you want to have multiple personal domains using CNAME).
Otherwise if you don’t want to have multiple .Mac accounts and don’t want to have multiple CNAME using personal domains to have multiple personal domains you can use simple WebForward with or without Cloaking/Masking (have a look at the definitions in Chapter 1). To have multiple personal domains using WebForward just point them directly to the site you want to point them to in your domain registrar account.
You find the links with instructions about how to set up WebForward with 1&1 and GoDaddy in Note 1 at the end of Chapter 2, you may have a look at them even if you don’t use those registrars as they might work in a similar way as yours does.
If your domain registrar doesn’t provide WebForward services have a look at Chapter 3.
Note 1: Read Note 2 of Chapter 1.
Note 2: Read Note 3 of Chapter 1
Chapter 5: Personal Domains yourname.com and personal e-mails whatever@yourdomain.com
Wether you get e-mails from the type of whatever@yourdomain.com or not depends on your domain registrar.
With GoDaddy for example you get one you@yourdomain.com for free (19.99$ for five e-mail addresses you@yourdomain.com ).
If your domain registrar doesn't provide this feature you could manage your domain using zoneedit
explained in Chapter 2 and you will get MailForward e-mails.
I think mostly at domain registrars you get MailForwards means that I send e-mails at you@yourdomain.com which forwards e-mails to another address like whatever@yahoo.com and you can set you2@yourdomain.com to be forwarded to another e-mail or the same so they aren't real e-mails themselves. You can also set *@yourdomain.com and all e-mails sent to no matter which e-mail @yourdomain.com gets sent to you@yahoo.com no matter what people put in front of the @ as long as they put @yourdomain.com e-mails will be forwarded.
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