For my personal blog post this week, I thought I would focus on domain mapping on the Commons in case this information proves useful to others in this class, or future iterations of this class.

We decided to use CUNY Academic Commons for our website since WordPress is a platform we’re familiar with and find that it will be an appropriate tool to showcase our project. It’s great that we have access to this resource with our CUNY credentials.

But, the Academic Commons URL may not be the catchiest, user-friendly, or most discoverable way to find a site that may potentially have broad appeal. On the advice of Dr. Maney, we decided to purchase the domain http://www.carouselsofnyc.com/

But how to map it to our CUNY Academic Commons page? Well, if you’re viewing this within moment of posting this, you may find that there’s errors/glitches to viewing our site. We are currently in the process of working the with the Commons Team to troubleshoot, but in any case….

We thought we might be able to do this domain mapping on our own, perhaps through the dashboard of out site, with a WordPress plugin, or through the domain registrar. BUT, then we found these instructions:

https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/domain-mapping-commons/

Turns out- we need to request this service directly through the CUNY Academic Commons support team. I followed directions to assign our domain a CNAME record in the domain registrar and took a screenshot showing those settings. I then sent an email to [email protected] with that screenshot and our website information to request the mapping. I was very quickly re-routed to a specific support team member who reached out to the parent company of CUNY Academic Commons to connect the domains. Unfortunately, this initial mapping either went to a blocked page (if on a CUNY campus) or the CUNY Academic Commons sign in page.

This issue has been somewhat resolved, but there continues to be issues- it seems that it may have something to do with the original mapping including www. on the domain registrar where there may need to be one that does not with a focus on the https://.

Although we are the process of troubleshooting, I hope that this is helpful for those starting the process of domain mapping via CUNY Academic Commons.