To give an example, let’s say I had a custom short domain of “amit.st” that I wanted to use for redirecting people to “amitstreet.com”.  The standard approach is to point the A-Record of that domain to Bitly’s IP address.  And for any shared link, this will redirect fine, but if someone gets curious and wants to type in just “http://amit.st” they’ll get redirected over to “http://bit.ly” which is not what I want.

So after a quick Google search, I found the answer, and I’ll share it here:

First: Point your DNS at your own server (i.e. do NOT point your A-Record at Bitly’s IP Address)

Next: use this code base in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^$ xUniVT [L]
RewriteRule ^custom$ yX3Lbm [L]

RewriteRule ^/?$ http://amit.st/ [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bit.ly/$1 [R=301,NC]

To use this code

1) replace “amit.st” with your own custom domain

2) In your bitly account, create a redirect to your home page

3) In Line 4 of the .htaccess code, replace the “xUniVT” with whatever bitly generates for the hompepage redirect you made in step 2

4) Line 5 is a little bonus: Instead of giving people “amit.st/4rReses” (which is bitly’s autogenerated URLification), you can make your own human-understandable shortness (i.e. amit.st/cool) and replace the “custom” with “cool” (remember, see line 5), and replace the “yX3Lbm” with whatever bitly autogenerates for you.

Yet when the limits of a design cause us to have a conflict with another person, it’s easiest to blame that other person instead of the system which made the conflict highly likely.

The problem is not that the world is so unoptimized but that there is rarely any protocol whatsoever for improving the design of anything.

“Really great artists are scientists, and the really great scientists are artists and both are inventors. I call them artist-scientist-inventors. I think that all humans are born artist-scientist-inventors but that life progressively squelches the individual’s drives and capabilities. As a consequence, by the time most humans mature they have lost one, two or all three of those fundamental self-starters. When I speak of an artist or an inventor, I speak of circumstance-pruned specialization. Most of the universally born artist-scientist-inventors have one, two or all three of their innate capability values shut off in childhood. The original artist-scientist-inventor may retain his artist’s or his scientist’s critical faculties, or only his inventiveness.

World science has come to concede during the last decade that it is now feasible, within the scope of known technology, to support all of humanity at ever higher standards of living than any humans have ever known. In view of that scientific information, I intuit that artist-scientist-inventors who have reached maturity without critical impairment of their original faculties will now become responsible for initiating and industrializing the remainder of technology advancing inventions, for realizing the comprehensive physical and economic success of world man, and that with universal abundance, the warring, official and unofficial, will subside to innocuous magnitude. With that artist-scientist- inventor’s accomplishment, humanity may, for the first time in history, come to know the meaning of peace.”

“The Bartleby Project begins by inviting 60,000,000 American students, one by one, to peacefully refuse to take standardized tests or to participate in any preparation for these tests; it asks them to act because adults chained to institutions and corporations are unable to; because these tests pervert education, are disgracefully inaccurate, impose brutal stresses without reason, and actively encourage a class system which is poisoning the future of the nation.”

Read John Taylor Gatto’s full statement on the Bartleby Project (it’s long).

123.234.343.34 domain.com

dscacheutil -flushcache

1) Open Terminal

2) write:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

3) then Finder needs to be restarted, so write:

killall Finder

To reverse the process just use “FALSE” instead of “TRUE”

But if you have balloons unfilled and untied, then each balloon needs your dedicated focus as you fill it with air and then tie its spout. If one balloon takes 30 breaths to mature, you can not multiply your results by giving 10 breaths to five balloons.

So what are you holding in your hand? Is it a ball or a balloon?