Yes WWW

October 15, 2020

Recently I changed the server config for this site such that upon navigating to “gridbugs.org”, you are forwarded to “www.gridbugs.org”. This was in response to reading www.yes-www.org which explains the technical (and societal!) benefits to serving web content from a subdomain (such as “www” but it can of course, be anything), rather than a naked domain (such as “gridbugs.org”).

In the past I’ve used naked domains for my main sites, and subdomains for spin-offs (such as my browser games at games.gridbugs.org. I considered my reason for this and concluded that “it’s because short URLs are sexy” and upon realising this, promptly halted the practice.

Well sort of. It is true that short URLs are sexy, but as long as web traffic reaching the naked domain gets forwarded to the “www” (or whatever) subdomain, you can still impress your friends with short URLs. They likely won’t even notice the sneaky “www.” prepended to the domain name when they reach your site.