Redirecting to an existing web location

It’s quick and easy for TIG to set up a redirection from some CSAIL domain (say, myproject.csail.mit.edu) to any arbitrary URL (say, http://myproject.mit.edu, or https://myuser.github.io/myaccount or http://people.csail.mit.edu/amini/myproject or whatever). So you can give out a CSAIL domain name and actually host your content anywhere.

This is a very quick option, and it’s a reasonable choice if you want an easy-to-remember, possibly shorter, CSAIL-branded URL to give out, but you don’t mind that people can see the content is hosted elsewhere (and might bookmark it’s actual hosted location).

One advantage is that as long as the target of the redirect is up and serving your content, TIG can set up the redirect without any configuration support on the server actually hosting it (you don’t have to coordinate with the hosting provider to figure out how to get them to have their webserver serve a CSAIL domain).

To get a redirect, send mail to help@csail.mit.edu giving us the CSAIL domain name you want (ending in .csail.mit.edu – and this can’t already be in use, of course) and what website URL you want it to redirect to.

(Asking for a change in the target of the redirect is done the same way, although of course we prefer not to get too many such requests. Of course, changing the content is done on whatever server hosts it.)

This can also be used to create a shorter or easier to remember URL for data hosted elsewhere at CSAIL. For instance, if you have a corpus of videos of animal motion hosted at

https://data.csail.mit.edu/animalmotion

and the cutest cat videos are at

https://data.csail.mit.edu/animalmotion/video/tagged/mammalian/cat/cutest

you could set up a redirect so http://cutecats.csail.mit.edu takes people right to the cute cat videos (but they see the longer URL in their browser).