When you own a custom domain like me (pboehm.org), there are unlimited possibilities what you can do with it. One thing is to write a redirector to use subdomains pointing to your profile-pages on several services like Flickr or Github. Another purpose could be the redirection of www.DOMAIN and DOMAIN to blog.DOMAIN, which could be hosted on Github Pages that is limited to one CNAME per page.

DNS settings

To do this kind of redirection, you need access to some host on the internet (where Nginx is available), which should have a subdomain pointing to it, through a CNAME-, A- or AAAA-Record. In this post, it is redirector.example.org.

For each subdomain, which should be redirected later, you should create a CNAME entry, pointing to your redirector host (redirector.example.org).

Nginx setup

Nginx should be available as a binary package in most linux distributions and should be installed first. On Ubuntu/Debian you can do it with:

sudo apt-get install nginx

As the last step, you have to configure Nginx to redirect all your stuff. The following path to the configuration file is valid for Ubuntu/Debian. Please look for the right path if the path is not valid on your distribution.

vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

server {
	root /usr/share/nginx/html;
	listen 80;
	server_name example.org www.example.org;
	rewrite ^ http://blog.example.org$request_uri? permanent;
}

server {
	root /usr/share/nginx/html;
	listen 80;
	server_name github.example.org git.example.org;
	rewrite ^ https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME permanent;
}

server {
	root /usr/share/nginx/html;
	listen 80;
	server_name flickr.example.org;
	rewrite ^ http://www.flickr.com/photos/YOUR_USERNAME/ permanent;
}

With these lines, you will redirect the standard subdomains example.org and www.example.org to blog.example.org. git|github.example.org to your Github profile and flickr.example.org to your Flickr profile.

For each target you want to redirect to, you have to write one server-block, which listens on the specific subdomains.

Now you have to restart Nginx:

service nginx restart