Saturday, February 03, 2007
Well, the new Blogger didn't eat my template, but it sure effed up my DNS when I tried to use it's "custom domain" option.
Here's how I had this site set up before: I used Blogger hosting at a blogspot.com address. Then, I registered a domain, hellaholdem.com, and via my domain host's control panel, set up that domain to forward to the blogspot address. It worked, so I could advertise my site as hellaholdem.com, but the down side was that the address would always revert to the blogspot.com domain as soon as a visitor got here.
Well, the NEW Blogger has a "custom domain" option, where basically the redirect goes the other way. Anyone trying to get to the blog at the blogspot address would be forwarded to the hellaholdem.com domain. Blogger still hosts the blog, but allows for it to be displayed under the domain address via CNAME records in your domain's DNS settings. Sweet, right?
Yeah, if it worked....
It turns out that the redirect would only work for people going to http://hellaholdem.com. But you see - most people use http://www.hellaholdem.com. But that later URL (with the www) is broken in Google/Blogger's forwarding system.
There were some horrific looping domain alias solutions people had posted online, but it's really bad practice to set up DNS records that way.
So after 2 days of being offline due to Google/Blogger's broken DNS forwarding, I gave up and reinstalled "the old way."
Did anybody get the custom domain option to work for both root domain requests AND www requests?
I set up a blog and converted it from being hosted off site to the custom domain option ... so far the www.domainname.com works flawlessly and the domainname.com doesn't -- the reverse of your situation. (I haven't tried to fix the one that doesn't work yet).
THG - I think if I'd have had your problem, I would have left it, too. Most people use the www.