UPDATE: Of course I grabbed my URL (http://www.facebook.com/mattsingley) in the interest of keeping my name every place I can get it, but I still will use the following information to direct people to the page.

A little later today the great URL grab of 2009 will be upon us…Facebook is releasing “vanity” URLs and they’re going to go quickly.  What this means is that instead of having to go to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=682259362 to find me you will be able to type http://www.facebook.com/mattsingley and get to the same place.  Nifty?  Perhaps, but not really necessary.

I like to keep everything in one place, and feel very strongly that this is a best practice for brand management.  With that said, my solution for complicated (or even not so complicated) URLs like Facebook has been to create pages within my own domain that forward to the site in question.  If we have ever met at a trade show or convention and we have traded cards, you will notice that mine do list a link to my Facebook page: http://mattsingley.com/fb

You can do the same, and it’s relatively simple.  I think the easiest way is to add a bit of HTML code to a page that you create, here are the steps.

Although WordPress 2.7 was released some time ago, a lot of people are just now getting around to upgrading their blogs with the latest version of the popular platform.  Now that people are doing this, I am started to get asked questions about why things don’t work or look the same.  One that has come up multiple times recently has to do with links in the comment section fo a post.  After a 2.7 upgrade, many users are noticing that when a person leaves a comment, their URL link in that persons name goes to their URL but with the addition of some garbled mess that looks like “%20%20do-not-follow”, landing you on a “401 page not found” link.  The solution to fix this is pretty simple.

Every person that asked me about this, upon further investigation, was using the Google Analyticator plugin, which tracks site traffic with Google Analytics.  Older version of the plugin didn’t work so well with 2.7, but fortunately there is an update.  If you are experiencing this problem, go to the Google Analyticator page, download the newest version of the plugin (2.3 as of this writing) and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory.  Problem solved!