DEV Community: Segun Aderinola

How to Forward a domain to another domain

Segun Aderinola — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 05:34:14 +0000

Do you have a new domain name for your website and you are thinking of how to link the old and the new domain together such that if people visit the old domain it will forward or redirect the user to the new domain name?

In this article, we will be learning domain forwarding, how we can handle domain forwarding, and the reason why it is necessary.

What is Domain forwarding?

Sometimes a website is so good you have to name it twice, three times, or more. Included in the cost of the domain name, domain forwarding allows you to point one or more domain names to an existing website. You may be wondering why or how you would use additional domain names to drive traffic to your primary website. Misspellings, alternate extensions, abbreviations, or keywords are all popular examples of different domain names pointing to the same website.

For example;
If your domain is registered with GoDaddy (one of the most popular web hosting companies where you can host your websites) and your website is hosted by another web hosting company, you can forward your GoDaddy domain to a site you've created with Wix, WordPress, or any other URL.

Reasons why you need domain forwarding

Misspelling: How many times have you accidentally typed facebok.com into your web browser? Think about how much traffic a domain name like that gets from people mistakenly entering the wrong address.
Facebook combats this by redirecting facebok.com, fasebook.com, and many other misspellings to their main website, facebook.com. If they hadn’t their users could end up on someone else’s website, a competitor perhaps. Web forwarding creates a seamless experience for users who might not have even realized their mistake.
Abbreviations: Businesses, universities, and other such cases can use abbreviations as either their main domain name or as their redirect. Kelly Blue Book uses web forwarding for this purpose. When you type kellybluebook.com into your web browser you will be redirected to their main website address kbb.com.
Keywords or Phrases: We don’t always get our first choice when it comes to usernames for our social media profiles or domain endings. If you didn’t get your name in .com you can always find a short and keyword-specific new domain ending to redirect to.

With the introduction of hundreds of new generic domains, web forwarding (also known as “Domain forwarding” or “URL forwarding”) is a great tool to have.

Why do we use hosting?

To build a website you will need both a domain name and a web hosting account. You need web hosting to store your website’s files. After you get hosting, you need to update your domain name settings and point it to your web hosting service provider. You can also buy both the domain and hosting from the same company.

Why webpage redirection is useful for website development?

A website redirect points your old URL to a new page. When anyone types in or click on that original URL they’ll be taken to the page you set the redirect up to instead. It ensures visitors don’t end up on a 404 page and instead find something relevant to what they were originally looking for.

Different types of Domain forwarding

There are two main types of domain forwarding;

1. Forward Only or HTTP 301 Forwarding

Forwarding as 301/redirect forwards your domain name to another URL while changing the name to the forwarded-to site’s address in the browser location bar. This is the most popular option of web forwarding.

Redirects visitors to a destination URL of your choosing
Keeps the destination URL in the browser address bar

For example, you have a domain name called www.old.com and you forward the domain to another domain say www.new.com. If the user visits www.old.com, the user will be redirected to www.new.com, but www.old.com will be displayed in the URL bar. The good reason you want to do this is probably that you do not want the user to feel insecure seeing another URL, knowing that was not the URL the user entered. So for that sake, you might choose the forward-only option.

2. Forward with Masking (Cloaking Forwarding)

Forwarding with masking forwards your domain name to another URL while keeping the original name in the browser location bar. This prevents visitors from seeing your forwarded-to domain name.

Redirects visitors to a destination URL of your choosing
Keeps your domain name in the browser address bar
Allows you to enter meta-tags for search engine information

For example, you have a domain name called www.this.com and you forward the domain to another domain say www.new.com. If the user visits www.old.com, the user will be redirected to www.new.com, and www.new.com will be displayed in the URL bar.

How do I redirect a domain to another?

Redirecting a new domain or subdomain (legacy)
I think I should specify that different hosting providers have different ways of forwarding domain, but the most important thing is to locate the domain forwarding section.

Using **GoDaddy **for example:

Log in to your GoDaddy Domain Control Center.
Navigate to the Manage Domains page. The Manage Domains page opens.
Select your domain to access the Domain Settings page.
Select Manage DNS under Additional Settings.
Under Forwarding, select Add domain next to Domain or Subdomain. If you select a subdomain, enter the subdomain (maximum of 63 characters) in the Subdomain field.
Choose http:// or https:// from the dropdown menu for the destination URL your domain will forward to.
Enter the forwarding address in the Destination URL field. This is where we'll send visitors when they type your domain in their browser's address bar.
Select your Forward type, either Permanent (301) or Temporary (302).
Select Save.

I hope you found this article helpful 🙂.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

Happy coding 💻!

Understanding Object Oriented Programming (OOP) with real world concept

Segun Aderinola — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 17:42:33 +0000

Hi guys, today we are going to be learning Object-Oriented Programming - OOP with real-world examples. Take a seat and Grab your popcorn.. chuckles.

What is OOP?

Object-oriented programming (OOP) refers to a type of computer programming (software design) in which programmers define the data type of a data structure, and also the types of operations (functions) that can be applied to the data structure.

In this way, the data structure becomes an object that includes both data and functions. In addition, programmers can create relationships between one object and another. For example, objects can inherit characteristics from other objects.

An Object can be defined as a data field that has unique attributes and behavior.

An object has two characteristics:

attributes
behavior

Let's take an example:

A parrot is an object, as it has the following properties:

name, age, color as attributes
singing, dancing as behavior

The concept of OOP focuses on creating reusable code. This concept is also known as DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself).

In this article, we will understand the four main pillars of OOP.

Polymorphism
Inheritance
Abstraction
Encapsulation

Polymorphism

It simply means, "Many forms". A man can be a father, brother, son, or student. This means that the same person can have different roles. Just like that, in programming, one method can have various forms.

E.g, if you have played with MS paint, you will agree that selecting various shapes such as squares, rectangles, circles, etc was something we all loved.

There is one main method, createShape(), but it has different forms such as square, rectangle, circle, etc. This is done via polymorphism!

Inheritance

Inheritance is a way of creating a new class by using details of an existing class without modifying it. The newly formed class is a derived class (or child class). Similarly, the existing class is a base class (or parent class).

Let us look at cats. They can have the same color, name, size, fur, etc but they are not the same cat.
A Maine coon, tabby, tiger cat, Persians, pussy cat, etc are all cats.

They come under the main class cat but have various properties of their own.

Just like in programming, we can have one main class, with child classes as well. The child classes will all inherit methods and attributes of their parent class but may have methods and attributes of their own too.

Abstraction

A laptop can do many things. You can code, make documents, do video calls, play games, etc.

It doesn't show you the inside process of how it performs all these tasks.

So implementation is hidden!

It only displays the relevant attributes and hides unnecessary info.

Abstraction is a way of hiding implementation details from users and only displays the features to them.

Encapsulation

Using OOP, we can restrict access to methods and variables. This prevents data from direct modification which is called encapsulation.

A company can have several departments such as HR, IT, Marketing, etc. Marketing does not have access to HR, HR does not have access to IT or Marketing but all of these make up a company.

We can use encapsulation to hide data and get more flexibility such as setting variables as write-only or read-only etc.

Key Points to Remember:

Object-Oriented Programming makes the program easy to understand as well as efficient.
Since the class is sharable, the code can be reused.
Data is safe and secure with data abstraction.
Polymorphism allows the same interface for different objects, so programmers can write efficient code.

Hope you found this article useful!

Thanks for reading.

Happy coding!