Posted by Gordon Burditt on 07/10/05 02:30

>Hi - Any help or pointer on this would be greatly appreciated. I'm
>working on something similar to blogger.com. Users sign up and they get
>their own webpage, with a domain name of 'username.blogger.com'.
>
>Since blogger.com is doing it on the fly (as you sign up), I'm sure
>they are doing it programmatically. Anyone has any clue on how they do
>that?

This isn't a domain, it's a host name.

They probably add an entry to their DNS zone when someone signs up.
This does not require the involvement of a registrar since it's
under an already-registered domain. Generating a DNS zone file out
of a database is not a big deal, especially if they run their own
DNS server. Any program-driven way of modifying their DNS zone
(it's hosted by Google) would also work. Lots of DNS hosting
companies provide web pages to let you add/modify/delete entries.
This could be driven by PHP using CURL or various other methods.

They don't seem to be using a wildcard DNS record, which is ugly
but would also work.

Then, either they add the virtualhost to the Apache config file
(they do use Apache), or they let the CGI/PHP look at the hostname
it was called under, or both.

Gordon L. Burditt

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