Articles

Google’s FLoC Promises a Radically Different Web

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Advertising knows you better than your friends, better than your family, perhaps even better than your partner.

Look up pizza recipes, and advertising will show you promotions for pizza ovens. Download a marathon training plan, and advertising will show you the latest running shoes. Buy a car, and advertising will show you adverts for other cars because no system’s perfect.

Advertising does this with a simple trick: it watches you constantly. It’s watching you right now. The web is one giant machine for making money, and you’re the fuel.

On the one hand, advertising’s insidious invasion of our privacy is enough to make you paranoid; on the other hand, I really love my pizza oven.

The largest facilitator of advertising on the web is Google Ads — reportedly worth $134.8 billion per annum; it’s Alphabet Inc’s primary source of revenue.

Last year, Google Ads announced that it would be ending its reliance on third-party cookies for delivering targeted advertising as part of a wider industry trend towards greater privacy protection for individuals. This week, we received more details confirming that Google Ads will not replace third-party cookies with comparable tracking technology.

Google Ads intends to maintain relevant advertising, without user tracking, by anonymizing your identity within a crowd. The technical term is a Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), essentially Asimov’s Psychohistory, in capitalist form, some 45,000 years before Hari Seldon is due to be born.

In simplistic terms, someone who buys a pair of running shoes can reasonably be expected to be interested in GPS watches. The complexity arises when grouping becomes more complex: people who watch Netflix on a Tuesday evening purchase a particular soup brand and read the Washington Post, for example. The system requires billions of groupings that are too complex to express in English. And yet Google claims to already be making some progress.

As with any fledgling technology, the implications of its widespread adoption are unclear. FLoC is Chrome-based, so there’s the looming specter of a monopoly. Then there’s the issue of how groups are built; does Google need individual tracking to generate crowds of individuals? It’s unclear, but what is clear is that if Google succeeds — and it’s likely that it will — other networks will have no choice but to follow suit. It seems inevitable that there will be a wide-ranging impact across not just advertising but analytics and marketing as a whole.

The back door that’s being held open is one-to-one relationships. If you visit a site, that site can attempt to entice you back with targeted advertising. This means the next few years will see a growth in the number of companies developing ongoing relationships in the form of newsletters and memberships.

How ever it plays out, a fundamental change to the system that funds most of the web is certain to have a long-term impact on day-to-day user experience.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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The Role of Relays In Big Data Integration

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The very nature of big data integration requires an organization to become more flexible in some ways; particularly when gathering input and metrics from such varied sources as mobile apps, browser heuristics, A / V input, software logs, and more. The number of different methodologies, protocols, and formats that your organization needs to ingest while complying with both internal and government-mandated standards can be staggering.

Is there a clean and discreet way to achieve fast data integration and still reap all of the benefits of big data analytics?

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Technical Debt Affects Everyone

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If you’ve read our piece about the habits engineers need to beat tech debt, you might recall Conway’s law, which states that organizations which design systems […] are constrained to produce designs that are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

It’s one of the forces that can push us towards technical bankruptcy because the systems designed by software engineers are constrained by their company’s organizational structure, over which they have little control. The right way to fight these forces is to talk about tech debt across the whole company so that everyone can understand why it’s vital to manage it carefully.

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Celebrating 20 Years of Wikipedia

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20 years ago, Wikipedia was started with the ambitious aim of creating a free encyclopedia for the whole world.

Looking back 20 years, the world was a very different place: the Dot Com Bust had just passed; the average US house price was just $136k; Jack Bauer was only 24 hours into saving the world; President Obama was several years away from the US Senate; Destiny’s Child were topping the charts; the appalling events of 9/11, and everything that followed, were still months away.

Some startups from the same era have gone on to raise billions of dollars, a few have even turned a profit, while most have slipped into the realm of permanent 404s, Wikipedia has determinedly stuck to its original altruistic intent.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Wikipedia is highlighting some of the 280,000 volunteers who edit entries every month, keeping the site on point.

With 21,000,000,000 searches per month (give or take) Wikipedia has become an unparalleled authority for the web. With most-viewed articles from the past ranging from Darth Vader to Avengers: Endgame, to COVID-19, humans across the planet have a source of news that is transparent, independent, and democratic.

So happy birthday to Wikipedia, may we be celebrating again in 20 years.

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Serverless Visitor Counter Badge with Azure Functions

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We all love web badges. You might have spotted many of them in README of repositories, including the repository of my blog, The Cloud Blog. In general, web badges serve two purposes.

  1. They are visually appealing.
  2. They display key information instantly.

If you scroll to my website’s footer section, you will find GitHub and Netlify badges that display the status of the latest build and deployment. I use them to quickly check whether everything is fine with the world without navigating to their dashboards. In essence, a badge is an SVG image with dynamic content embedded in it.

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L’expérience client future : des marchés aux communautés

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Les marchés de clients individuels, optimisés par les plateformes et les algorithmes, peuvent désormais devenir instantanément une communauté ouverte pour des actions collectives et coopératives.

L’essor des communautés numériques

La technologie aide les clients à interagir plus facilement et à s’organiser en un nombre infini de communautés numériques exigeantes, parfois même révoltées.

Ces communautés se forment souvent de manière spontanée et se développent de façon exponentielle à un coût quasi nul. Nous le voyons, par exemple, lorsque de simples histoires individuelles deviennent virales ou lorsque des entreprises ont à affronter, quasiment du jour au lendemain, des foules qui entreprennent des actions difficiles à gérer.

La création et le partage d’objets sociaux sont au cœur de cette révolution des communautés numériques (1). Les communautés numériques étaient initialement basées sur des intérêts communs et se sont formées autour de points de rassemblement en ligne tels que des groupes de discussion et leurs artefacts numériques, les publications. De nos jours, les objets sociaux numériques prennent toutes sortes de formes, comme les tweets, les photos, les évaluations par les pairs et les mises à jour de statut (c’est-à-dire à peu près tout ce qui suscite un intérêt et une participation de masse et qui peut être facilement partagé).

Plus de 140 000 communautés mondiales se sont formées sur Reddit, couvrant des sujets très sérieux, et d’autres beaucoup plus obscurs. Par exemple, un groupe de 71 000 membres partage des photos de coussinets d’animaux.

La facilité avec laquelle des groupes comme celui ­ci peuvent se former, communiquer et agir implique que ces communautés sociales ne sont pas limitées à des objectifs de divertissement. Certaines sont clairement formées pour déstabiliser ou disrupter des entreprises. Les téléspectateurs, par exemple, ont réussi à faire revivre des séries télévisées, à faire pression sur celles qu’ils n’aimaient pas et à exiger que certaines soient réécrites.

Pour réussir, les entreprises doivent être capables de créer des objets sociaux importants aux yeux des groupes numériques et, par extension, de devenir la pièce maîtresse du fonctionnement du groupe. Il s’agit de trouver le bon équilibre : elles doivent éviter de déclencher la colère d’un groupe et de devenir l’objet de leur mépris.

Les clients se regroupent pour influencer les entreprises de quatre façons :

Ils utilisent les produits comme objets sociaux

Plusieurs sociétés de jeux en ligne ont donné naissance à des communautés participatives en transformant leurs jeux en objets sociaux. Les gamers peuvent partager des stratégies, créer de nouvelles versions des jeux et y jouer ensemble. Les sociétés de services musicaux transforment les playlists favorites en objets sociaux, qui sont ensuite facilement partagés avec d’autres personnes à la recherche du mix parfait.

Ils font des choix informés

Aujourd’hui, les sites d’avis sont généralement utilisés pour complimenter ou critiquer une entreprise en fonction de l’expérience vécue. D’autres utilisent ces avis pour décider quel produit acheter. De plus en plus de communautés numériques optimisées par l’IA se formeront pour partager opinions, conseils, bonnes pratiques et expériences personnelles autour d’intérêts communs.

Des ressources groupées

Les plateformes de données permettent aux clients de se regrouper pour acheter des articles à prix réduit. Les plateformes basées sur les coupons offrent des prix réduits sur des quantités minimums définies par le fournisseur. Les sites de financement participatif (Crowdfunding) permettent aux clients d’attirer l’attention sur une cause charitable ou de proposer leur aide pour développer de nouveaux produits. En échange d’un paiement initial, les donateurs reçoivent généralement le nouveau produit dès son lancement.

Ils font travailler collectivement les robots d’IA

Chargés par les clients d’obtenir le meilleur prix (par exemple via des comparateurs), les robots d’IA pourraient à l’avenir collaborer pour négocier et acheter collectivement des marchandises. Les robots d’IA apprendront à rechercher et à mobiliser d’autres robots d’IA pour aider à servir au mieux les intérêts de tous leurs clients.

Que peut faire votre entreprise ?

Rendre le partage social naturel

Utilisez le Big Data et l’IoT pour concevoir des objets sociaux qui s’intègrent à vos produits, plateformes numériques et à votre présence en ligne et que les gens veulent créer et partager. Oubliez la création et le contrôle de tout le contenu pertinent de l’entreprise, et optez pour le développement de communautés au sein de l’entreprise afin de partager du contenu qui bénéficie à l’entreprise dans le cadre de leurs interactions sociales.

Devenir le centre d’attention de votre communauté

Votre produit peut représenter la raison d’être d’une communauté, en permettant aux gens d’interagir de manière utile entre eux. Par exemple, de nombreux fabricants d’appareils de fitness utilisent des applications pour créer des communautés autour de ces appareils et accroître les interactions via des plateformes numériques.

Aider les communautés à trouver un sens

Aidez les communautés numériques à comprendre ce qu’elles veulent être, à défendre leurs valeurs et à atteindre leurs objectifs. Plusieurs entreprises de prêt-à-porter, par exemple, ont tiré profit de la volonté de leurs communautés de faire une différence à l’échelle mondiale, en associant l’achat d’un produit à une aide destinée à des communautés dans le besoin.

Publié en anglais sur insights.sap.com

Références

(1) « Social objects » (Objets sociaux), Wikipedia, consulté le 2 octobre 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_objects.

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State Design Pattern In Java

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State Design Pattern — a behavioral design pattern that allows an object to change its behavior when its internal state changes.

State Design Pattern

  • The State Design Pattern is a Behavioral Design Pattern and one of the Gang of Four design patterns. 
  • The State allows an object to alter its behavior when its internal state changes.
  • The State pattern is similar to the concept of finite-state machines.
  • The State pattern is also similar to the Strategy Design Pattern which provides a way to switch a strategy through invocations of methods defined in the pattern’s interface.
  • The State pattern encapsulates varying behavior for the object based on its internal state change.
  • The State pattern provides a cleaner way for an object to change its behavior at runtime.
  • By using the State pattern, the object changes its behavior when its internal state changes.
  • If we implement State-Specific behavior directly in the class, then we will not be able to change it without modifying the class.
  • In-State pattern, State-specific behavior should be defined independently because adding new states should not affect the behavior of existing states.
  • The context class delegates state-specific behavior to its current state object instead of implementing state-specific behavior directly.
  • This allows us to make our context class independent of how state-specific behavior is implemented. New state classes can be added without modifying context class.
  • The context class can change its behavior at run-time by changing its current state object.
  • To implement the State Design Pattern, we create a State interface to define some action. And then concrete classes that represent various states and a context object whose behavior varies as its state object changes.
  • The mixer in the kitchen is a good example of a state pattern, which has a motor and a control interface. Using the knob we can increase/decrease the speed of the mixer. Based on the speed state the behavior changes.
  • The TV which can be operated with a remote controller is another example of a State pattern. We can change the state of the TV by pressing buttons on the remote. But the state of TV will change or not, it depends on the current state of the TV. If the TV is switched OFF then only possible next state can be switch ON. And if TV is ON, we can switch it OFF, mute, or change aspects and source. But if TV is OFF, nothing will happen when we press the remote buttons. 
  • Java Threads are another good example of State pattern since they have defined states as New, Runnable, Blocked, Waiting, Timed Waiting and Terminated. 

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Create a Scale-Out Hive Cluster With a Distributed, MySQL-Compatible Database

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Hive Metastore supports various backend databases, among which MySQL is the most commonly used. However, in real-world scenarios, MySQL’s shortcoming is obvious: as metadata grows in Hive, MySQL is limited by its standalone performance and can’t deliver good performance. When individual MySQL databases form a cluster, the complexity drastically increases. In scenarios with huge amounts of metadata (for example, a single table has more than 10 million or even 100 million rows of data), MySQL is not a good choice.

We had this problem, and our migration story proves that TiDB, an open-source distributed Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) database, is a perfect solution in these scenarios.

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Exciting New Tools for Designers, September 2020

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It’s fun to see new website design tools that reflect current times and the state of the world. That’s very true this month with new databases devoted to diversity and women in technology, as well and resources to make your design life easier.

Here’s what’s new for designers and developers this month:

Ztext.js

Ztext.js is an easy to implement, three-dimensional typography tool for the web that works with any font you want to use. With the popularity of 3D effects and animation, this tool has a lot of practical applications. Everything you need, including documentation, is available from developer Bennett Feely on his website and GitHub. (It’s free but you can show appreciation with a donation if you like it.)

Gradient Magic

Gradient Magic is a free gallery of fun and interesting CSS gradients. You can sort through a random selection or by category of color to find just the right gradient for your project. Some of them would make really neat backgrounds or image overlays.

Impossible Checkbox

Impossible Checkbox is a fun little divot that you’ll want to play with and emulate. Click or tap the slider to activate and a nifty little friend pops up. Now here’s the fun part: You can’t leave it checked, and take note of the changing expression of the checkbox character.

Diversify Tech

Diversify Tech isn’t your average job board; it is a collection of resources – and opportunities – for underrepresented people in technology. It includes a weekly roundup and everything from scholarships, to events, to jobs, to speaking opportunities.

Women in Tech

Women in Tech is a list of apps made by women. The apps are ranked and chosen based on upvotes and is a good resource if you want to help support women-owned projects. Search or submit an app for inclusion.

Devello Studio

Devello Studio is a tool that allows you to write code in the cloud. You don’t have to install anything and no matter where you are, just can open a project in-browser, and continue development where you had left off last time. Plus, it works with GitHub support built right in.

Hustl

Hustl is a premium Mac app that allows you to create time-lapse videos of your screen. Use it to show off work or projects or create a cool video for your portfolio. Plus you can use it to capture just one active app so you don’t have to do a lot of editing later.

FeedBaxley

FeedBaxley is a user feedback tool that helps you (and users) figure out what’s frustrating before it becomes a real issue. You can customize everything to match your brand and set it up with copy and paste tools. Feedback integrates with Slack, making it easy for you to analyze information with a team.

BestTime

BestTime launched a major update with a new tool that makes it possible to analyze visitor peaks of public business (cafe, gym, etc) for whole areas. Using the heatmap API you can find businesses at popular times, locations, or by business type.

Pixeltrue

Pixeltrue is a new collection of free SVG illustrations and Lottie animations in a trendy style. They are available for commercial and personal use and add a bit of whimsical delight to website projects. (The error illustrations are particularly fun.)

Previewed

Previewed has tons of cool and realistic mockups that you can use to create the perfect setting for digital projects. You can find mockups for a variety of devices and cool panoramas that work perfectly for elements such as app store previews.

Alt Text Overlay Bookmarklet

The Alt Text Overlay Bookmarklet solves a common problem: It shows what images use alt text and what that text is. The tool was created by Christian Heilmann and he’s put it on GitHub for you to play with and test.

MergeURL

MergeURL allows you to merge and shorten up to five links. Enter the links and mergeurl.com/o/xxxxx, for example, will open all the URLs associated with that link. The tool is free to use and you don’t have to register to use the service.

Infinity Search

Infinity Search is a new search engine that lets you look for things privately and efficiently. Search the web, images, or videos. Here’s a little about how it works: “While we retrieve results from other search engines like Bing and Wikipedia, we also have our own indexes of links that are displayed in our search results. We are actively working on improving these indexes and they will only get better.”

Blade UI Kit

Blade UI Kit is a set of renderless components to use in Laravel Blade Views. It’s built for the tall stack and is completely open source. It includes 26 components and you can contribute as well.

Trusted News

Trusted News is a Google Chrome extension that uses AI to assist in evaluating the quality of the online content. In its first release, it scores the objectivity for a selected article, testing whether it is written from a neutral perspective as opposed to a subjective one.

BaseDash

BaseDash allows you to edit production data without coding. You can make changes to the database with the ease of a spreadsheet. This tool makes it easy to find and edit information in a hurry. It works with all major databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshirt, Microsoft SQL Server, and more.

Email2Go

Email2Go is a service that helps you create email templates and test them on dozens of physical devices and applications. It’s free right now while it is in early release.

Iconscout Converter

The Iconscout Converter allows you to convert icons and images from one file format to another for free. Convert SVG, PNG, JPG, and PDF with a single click.

Shape 2

Shape 2 is a massive collection of 5,000+ unique icons and illustrations with a full-blown web editor. Customize colors, stroke width, size and full variations that can export to SVG, PDF, PNG, GIF, and React. This is a premium tool and includes a discounted release price for now.

Aestetico

Aestetico is a beautiful sans serif that includes a massive family with 54 styles. This premium typeface is highly readable and has modern lines and curves that make it a great option for a variety of uses.

Arcades

Arcades is a modern display font with a retro, 1980s-style vibe. It includes regular and italic styles.

Brimington

Brimington is a handwriting style typeface with rough strokes and smooth curves. It includes a set of 227 characters and 219 glyphs in a readable design.

California Signature

California Signature is a typeface duo with a slab serif and handwriting style that are perfectly paired. The thick and thin options provide a yin and yang effect.

Eastblue

Eastblue is a script typeface with long swashes and interesting curves. It includes a solid character set and is free for personal use only.

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Finding Your Way With Domain Mapping

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It’s no secret that having a custom domain name is an essential piece of any company’s branding strategy. While there are a myriad of hosting plans available that offer domains like your company.webhost.com, making the shift from one of those to simply yourcompany.com is an important step.

However, your domain branding strategy need not end there. Domain mapping offers an opportunity for web developers and online business owners the ability to improve their marketing campaigns, protect their brands from competitors, cut down on costs, and develop a more efficient workflow.

What is Domain Mapping?

Domain mapping refers to how visitors to your website are directed to different domains and subdomains and what URLs will be displayed in the visitors’ browsers.

When you first set up your online business, one of the very first things that you do is register a domain name for your company website. But depending on the business, it could be wiser to actually register multiple domain names at once. This is because you will want to lease the primary domain name you plan on using in addition to all related TLDs. This way, cybersquatters will not be able to hold your domain name hostage, especially once you have grown into a more established brand.

For example, if you register the name yourcompany.com, you might also want to register yourcompany.net and yourcompany.org. Then you might set up a URL redirect so that visitors to the latter two sites will be redirected to yourcompany.com. However, with a domain redirect, visitors to yourcompany.net and yourcompany.org will be redirected to yourcompany.com, meaning the URL in their browser will appear as yourcompany.com no matter what they typed.

With domain mapping, this isn’t the case. A visitor to yourcompany.net will still see that URL in their browser even if the content is actually being hosted on yourcompany.com.

Benefits of Domain Mapping

Although domain mapping may seem a bit esoteric and complex at first, it serves several purposes and offers many benefits:

1. Make Web Addresses Easier to Remember

Imagine that your restaurant chain, Larry’s Lunches, just opened a new chain on 116th Street in New York City. Your first instinct may be to direct customers to larryslunches.com/116thstnyc, but that domain is a bit long and hard to remember. Instead, you might want to register the domain larrys116th.com for customers for that specific store.

With domain mapping, you can serve up the content from your main domain, larryslunches.com, while still having your visitors see larrys116th.com. This makes it easier to brand your sites without having to manage several different sites.

2. Boost Your Web Development Career

If you are a web developer yourself but are not admittedly well-acquainted with domain mapping already, you would do well to change that.

One of the easiest ways would be to look at online web development programs that one can take to read through documentation to get caught up to speed on how domain mapping can help their efforts and how to implement it. These kinds of programs can be more comprehensive than university courses and offer an impressive 88% job success rate for those who successfully complete the programs.

3. Shield Your Brand from Competitors

Remember, it’s a good idea to purchase several different related domains in anticipation of competitors snatching them up from you. Choosing the right domain names is essential to protecting your brand.

For example, Larry’s Lunches might want to snag larrysnyclunches.com and larrysfamouslunches.com as well. However, simply leaving those domains parked can be a bit of a waste, and managing multiple domains can be a pain in and of itself.

But with domain mapping, you can manage those domains just as easily as if they were your primary site, so you no longer need to leave them empty.

4. Save Time and Lower Development Expenses

Development isn’t cheap, and time is money. While the maintenance costs for a website are already high enough, adding in separate domains can sometimes break the bank due to the increased complexity of managing so many different moving pieces.

Domain mapping can lower expenses and save time by keeping everything tidy and in one place. By managing everything from a single WordPress installation, for example, you can push updates to all your subdomains at once, saving you from the tedium of going through each domain and making the same updates.

5. Manage Client Sites from One Place

If you’re a freelance developer or run an agency, using domain mapping for some of your clients’ sites can save you time as well. For example, if several clients want blogs, and you use the same infrastructure for them, you can easily push updates and changes to all of them at the same time. In short, domain mapping can make maintaining sites much easier and quicker.

How to Implement Domain Mapping

If you’re sold on the benefits of domain mapping, here’s a quick primer on the steps you’ll need to take to get started:

  1. Choose a domain registrar: The ideal registrar you choose should come with a number of important features including adequate hosting for keeping your website visitor friendly, SSL certification to ensure security, 24/7 customer support, comprehensive packages that make it easy to operate your online business.
  2. Register the domains you’re interested in: These can either be domain misspells (otherwise known as typosquatting), like youcompany.com, yourcmpany.com, etc, or related domains like yournewproduct.com, yournewlocation.com, etc. Whatever you decide to go with, you’ll need to have it registered before you can get started.
  3. Install WordPress Multisite: WordPress is one of the easiest ways to develop websites, and that holds true for domain mapped sites as well. Plus, considering WordPress sites account for over a third of the entire internet, you can’t go wrong with the famed CMS. All you need to do is install WordPress and, once that’s installed, open wp-config.php and add define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true) above the /*.
  4. Configure your DNS settings: Next, you’ll need to point all your name servers to your hosting account. These changes can take up to 72 hours to go into effect.
  5. Add domains to your hosting plan: From your hosting platform, you’ll need to link your custom domains. You can usually do this from your cPanel.
  6. Map subsites to your custom domains: Once you have your domains set up, you’ll need to link them through WordPress. To do so, simply login and navigate to Sites -> Add New. After you assign them a subdomain or subdirectory name, you can click Edit and add your custom domain. Then just hit Save Changes, and you’re good to go.

Take note that domain mapping is not necessary for transferring a domain name. When you map a domain, you’re simply telling your domain where it can find your website on the internet through having your name servers updated. When you change your name, it only affects where the domain has been resolved.

The Bottom Line

While domain mapping isn’t necessary for all websites, it can still be a major timesaver. By utilizing it properly, you can greatly improve the standing of your online business by saving time and money, making website management easier, and improving the branding of your sites.

 

Featured image via Unsplash.

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