Down with WWW

The WWW subdomain has been a staple of the Internet since before AOL was the most prominent figure in CD manufacture dail-up.  Just about everyone knows that you can substitute that wonderful TLA with others like “mail” or “blog” and get a different, more specialized piece of a website.  However, not many people realize that the WWW is just a vestigial appendage that has long since been rendered useless.  If you are Internet savvy at all you would have noticed a trend towards cleaning up the URLs we use everyday (see: gdgt.com, digg.com, slashdot.org not so much: cnn.com). Actually, this movement has been in motion for many years.  If you look at no-www.org, you’ll see that they have had a mission to get web admins to switch away from using www since 2003.  They even have a handy checker for validating your website.  Go ahead, check your site.  You better not fail.  But, if you do, head straight to your admin portal and switch it up.  I’m hosted at squarespace.com (which fails the above test…grrr) and here is a handy resource for easily switching your default URL.

First, login to the admin console and then select the “Custom Domain” option:From there  you should see both the www and non-www version of your domain.  You will want to select “make primary” for the non-www version.  See, easy as pie.

Now, if only someone would get rid of that damn “http://” (oh wait, Google’s Chrome is already doing that for us).