Set up "yourdomain.com/+" Redirect to Google Plus, Facebook and Others

With the launch of Google+, several web services such as gplus.to and iplus.im were born that let users create a vanity URL to their profile. They are quite handy considering the long profile URL that Google provides, that’s both ugly and hard to remember.

Now,  if you have your own personal website or blog, you don’t have to rely on those URL shortening services, because with a simple trick you can have a URL like “yourdomain.com/+” that takes a user to your Google+ profile, or a URL like “yourdomain.com/fb” that takes them to your Facebook profile.

To do that, you just need to edit the .htacess file that’s in your website’s root directory, and add the following line at the end:

Redirect /+ http://plus.google.com/yourid/

That’s all. Now you can share this shortened URL to anyone, and it will thake them directly to your Google+ profile. Only addition is a single character ‘+’ to your regular blog address.

Remember to take a backup of the .htaccess file before editing, just in case any error happens.

If your blog is hosted on Tumblr, naturally you don’t have access to the .htaccess file. So here’s what you can do for a Tumblr hosted blog.

In your Tumblr dashboard, head over to the Customization (http://www.tumblr.com/customize/) page and choose the ‘Pages’ menu item. Now create a new page, configure it as shown below and save.

In the ‘Page URL’ field add ‘+’ and in the ‘Redirect to’ field enter your profile URL.

Similarly you can create URLs for your other social networking profiles too.