The Official Genwi Blog

Genwi is releasing newspapers today. Newspapers make it easy for anybody to publish their own website. TechCrunch calls these “vanity URLs,” we first heard this term last week.

What is so exciting about “vanity URLs?” Vanity URLs can lead to a web of individuals – not just a web of websites. With a newspaper, every person online can publish all of their public content, favorites and updates at their own domain. With vanity domains, people are free to go out and get their own followers and share their content with their audience on their own site. Newspapers are a straight forward solution to putting stuff in one place for friends, family and followers to find.

Newspapers can be published at custom URLs

There are so many dozens of great web services available today. Newspapers help people publish what they choose, from the services they use in one place. Newspapers solve the problem many face with consolidating their content while maintaining access to a variety of the best services. Newspapers make this easy and automatically update activity from linked services. Friends, family and followers will always be able to catch updates. Newspapers enable sharing with a single web address compared to a myriad of usernames.

The default newspaper web address is newspapertitle.genwi.com. The web address is completely configurable. Genwi can map any domain name or sub domain to a newspaper page. The configuration settings are under the domain tab under newspaper settings. Genwi charges $15 per year to map custom domains to newspapers. Newspapers are an off the shelf solution for providing individuals their own web address. They enable access to the best web services and provide a single place for sharing with friends, family and followers. What if everybody had their own website?

Setting up a Go Daddy domain for a newspaper is straight forward. A domain name can be redirected from the Domain Manager. The domain name to be changed must be selected. Once selected, Go Daddy provides a status report for the domain. In this report is a section called Total DNS. “Total DNS Control and MX Records” is a link at the bottom of the Total DNS section of the report. This link is where the domain name can be easily mapped to a Genwi newspaper.

Go Daddy Domain Manager

Total DNS Control and MX Manager

For the domain to go to Genwi all that needs to be changed is the first item under A (Host). There is an Edit button in the table under Actions. The Edit button is a pencil in a small square. The Edit button opens up a popup with the fields: Host Name, Points to Address, and TTL. Only “Points to Address” needs to be changed. Points to Address should point to: 68.142.96.178. This is Genwi’s IP Address (web address). Now the domain is ready to map to Genwi. The Domains tab under Newspaper Settings at Genwi contains a field to enter the Go Daddy domain. Once entered, the Go Daddy domain will start going to the newspaper page and the newspaper page will have the Go Daddy domain name.