Got a cool new javascript project that you want to have a website for, but you don’t want to cough up for a pricey domain and webhosting as it’s really just a labour of love and unlikely to provide any income? Then I have the perfect solution for you… a free JS.ORG subdomain.
We don’t mind whether it’s a User-, Organization- or Project-Page – as long as you provide some reasonable content!
And it’s super easy to do, in just a few simple steps.
- Create a Github Pages site – so you need to sign into Github (or create an account if you don’t already have one) and create a new repository – if it’s for you personally then make it your username (eg. riklewis.github.io), or you can use your project or organisation name here instead. You can use themes, or a static site generator such as Jekyll, or a simple HTML or Markdown page.
- Choose your new subdomain – this needs to be relevant to your new Github Pages URL (eg. riklewis.js.org) – for projects you can use a folder name within this URL (see wiki for more information).
- Create a CNAME file with a single line containing the new URL you have chosen (eg. riklewis.js.org) – this is used to allow the DNS mapping from js.org to github.io – publish this into your repository created in step 1.
- Go to the “cnames_active.js” file in the JS.ORG repository and make a pull request, adding your new domain into the list in alphabetical order (not at the bottom!). The line should look something like this…
"riklewis": "riklewis.github.io",And there you go, as long as there’s no naming conflict, your new URL should be live within 24 hours. Enjoy!
You can get more details at https://js.org (where you can also donate towards their registrar fees, if you’d like to).