It has been two months since the popular social news site reddit decided to release (most of) its code into the wild and allow others to create reddit clones of their own. Now, those parties (known as "redditors") can take their individual reddits a step further by customizing them however they please with a design, and even domain name, of their very own.

No longer will custom reddits be restricted to a subdirectory on reddit's domain or just a customized logo. "Starting today, you'll be able to totally modify your CSS and use custom CNAMEs," reddit wrote on its blog. "Now your reddit can be restyled to look however you want — like any WordPress blog." The team cites Bacon Reddit as an example of a reddit that could benefit from a more customized design and domain name, like BaconBuzz.com.

When reddit decided to go open source in June, it generated a lot of buzz—mostly because it was hard to understand exactly why a successful social news site would essentially give away all of its secrets for free. The site's cofounder, Steve Huffman, told Ars that reddit wasn't worried about competitors one-upping the site with its own bread and butter. If the competition was going to pounce, "they would've replaced reddit by now."

Indeed, the decision to release 95 percent of its code seems to have only made users happier by allowing them to create whatever crazy specialized reddits they want while generating more buzz for reddit itself. The company wants to continue fostering its new community of redditors, and so it is also announcing a new contest to go along with the customization announcement. The contest involves creating a new reddit (or being the owner of one that has fewer than 250 users) and trying to grow it as much as possible over the next month. The idea is to get friends, family, other bloggers, and the general Internet community excited about the spinoff sites (without spamming, of course), and the winner will get a MacBook Air, a $1,500 Apple gift card, and "a stockpile of schwag."

Disclosure: Reddit is owned by Condé Nast, Ars Technica's new parent company.