How To Point Your Domain Name To A Blog

This post has been updated and is current as of 9/14/08. It receives a steady stream of search engine hits so I must be helping someone somewhere! I have left the comments in place, but this post may have taken care of some of the issues raised.

After locating The Real Blogger Status blog through Blogger help, I finally got this to work. No thanks to the half dozen techs at Network Solutions who came up with nothing better than an additional cost "address forwarding" upgrade to my account to lazily accomplish what I did for free (although at my going rate of $75/hr, it wasn't really "free" free.) I'm going to email them the instructions and suggest they send me a check for $500 for all the research I did because their techs in India, while polite, provide sub par support.

Here's a "How To" that should save folks a lot of time and aggravation.

I created a new blog, ECCO, and used a standard blogger address of "http://eccopac.blogspot.com". The "pac" stands for Political Action Committee.

The ultimate goal was to ditch my old ISP and FTP site and convert the whole thing over to the simple format of the blog. Much easier to update and it's a good way to stretch a small budget. The yearly cost of ~$200 for hosting charges will be eliminated and we always used a free Yahoo email address so email accounts weren't an issue.

I want users who type in the original "www.eccopac.org" address to go directly to the new blog site rather than the old FTP site. Sounds easy, you say? I thought I'd just need to switch around some pointers and be done with it. Don't point there anymore, point here instead. Uh, not so much. Google servers, where Blogger's free blogs reside, are load balanced to accomodate their huge traffic volume and IP addresses are dynamically assigned. In other words, your blog doesn't have a set IP address so you can't just input a xx.xxx.xxx.xx number for the pointer as you normally would.

The Blogger help instructions kept talking about creating a "CNAME" but didn't really elaborate. It defined what a CNAME was but not how to create one. The help page linked to many company that sell names, but not Network Solutions, which is where my domain name was purchased many years ago. I think they are still one of the most popular. But based on my experience with their support department, not for long.

The following is what I did. I think my 2.5 years of work experience answering phones in the hell known as Tech Support has helped me explain things concisely and methodically. After you talk to thousands of people, you learn the fastest way to get them to do what you need them to do so they get their ass off your phone!

I recommend that if you aren't sure about your particular circumstances after reading these instructions, that you contact the appropriate Tech Support department. Also, as I did, print out the pages as you go so you have a record of your original settings in case you need to put things back as they were!

THIS IS FOR MY SPECIFIC CASE. I already owned the domain name through Network Solutions and my blog is through Blogger. If you don't own a domain name, you'll have to get one, and you can choose any number of providers for that. However, the instructions I list below won't work exactly but may give you some guidance.

First, you need to tell your domain name where to find your new blog:

Network Solutions Portion
• Go to www.networksolutions.com and log in.
• Go to Manage Account | "Account Manager Home".
• Go to Domains | "Manage Domain Names".
• Click on the domain name you want to redirect.
• Click on the "Designated DNS" button.
• Click on "Apply Changes".
• Click on "Manage Advanced DNS Records".
• Click on "Add/Edit" under "IP Address (A Records)"
• Delete the entry under "Numeric IP" on the line starting with "www".
• Leave other entries as they are.
• Click on "Continue".
• Click "Add/Edit" under "Host Aliases (CNAME Records)".
• On the first line, enter "www" under "Alias"
• Leave "Select" as is in the pull down menu under the "Refers to Host Name".
• Click the button to the left of the first box under "Other Host" and type "ghs.google.com" in the box.
• Click "Continue" at the bottom of the screen.
• The next screen should show you that a CNAME alias "www.yourdomainname.yourextension" has been created.
• Click "Save Changes" and you're back to the "Domains" screen.
• Log out.

You'll have to wait a couple of hours for the process to propagate throughout the Internet. This process is where Internet servers tell each other there's been a change so they all know where to route future requests for your domain name.

Next, you have to tell Blogger that you're using a custom address rather than the standard Blogger address:

Blogger Portion
• Log in to your Blogger account.
• Go to your Dashboard.
• Click on "Settings" for the blog you want to set up the redirection.
• Click on the "Publishing" tab.
• Click on "Custom Domain".
• In the first open box, next to "Domain Name", enter your desired address...for example, "www.xyz.com". In some cases, I was prompted with the ability to purchase a domain name here. If you already have your name, click "Switch To Advanced Settings."
• Type in the domain name that will point to the blog in the "Your Domain" box.
• Click on "Save Settings".

You're done!

This took me several hours over many days of looking through help files, online Q & As, and calling customer service. I'm not quite sure why such an easy process was made so difficult. I'm essentially a techie and knew what I had to do. Pretty easy when you see it mapped out in logical steps.
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How To Add A Favicon To Your Blogger Blog

I've been trying to figure out how to add a favicon (short for favorite icon; pronounced fav-eye-con) to my blog ever since I started writing it. That's the little picture in the URL address line of your browser. I made several aborted attempts that ended in frustration.

This week I mentioned that I wanted to add my Simpsons avatar as my blog profile photo. Alas, I can't seem to figure out how to change the photo despite hours of reading various instructions. I suppose I'll waste another chunk of time because the people running these sites can't seem to explain anything. "Why Oh Why?," I ask, "can't people explain things with easy to follow instructions?"

With that in mind, and on the heels of writing up instruction on how to point your web name to a blog, I now present you with how to add a favicon to a Blogger blog. This is probably different for other blogging programs, but it will at least give you a decent base of information in those cases.

I started with the instructions at Blogger Tips And Tricks that I found through Blogger help. It didn't work as directed but I futzed with it until I got it right.

First, you have to get a square image that you want. It's going to be really small so pick something simple. Even the Simpsons avatar up above is a bit hard to see. For my Why Oh Why? blog, I started with my large rectangular Simpsons avatar in Photoshop. I resized and cropped it because favicon images need to be at least 96 x 96 pixels square and either in .jpg, .gif, or .png format. For the ECCO blog, I opened a clip art file in Illustrator, changed the color, and saved it as an .eps file. I opened that in Photoshop, resized it, and saved it as a .jpg file.

Generate the Favicon .ico File And Host It Free Online
• Go to www.MyFavatar.com and set up a free account.
• Click on "Change Avatar".
• Click on "Choose File", select your .jpg, .gif, or .png file, then click "Submit".
• The image should appear on the upper left of the screen next to "My Favatar".
• Click on "Edit Blog" and input your blog information, then click "Submit".
• Click on "Favatar Codes".
• Highlight and copy the Favicon Code in the fourth box of sample code.

Next, you have to tell Blogger that you're using a Favicon and where to find it:

Blogger Portion
• Log in to your Blogger account.
• Go to your dashboard.
• Click on "Template" for the blog you want to set up the Favicon.
• Click on the "Edit HTML" tab.
• Look for the "head" tag towards the top.
• Paste the code that you generated and copied at www.MyFavatar.com under the head tag.
• I FOUND THAT BITS OF THE CODE FROM MYFAVATAR WERE OUT OF ORDER AND THE CODE DIDN'T WORK. WHEN I CHANGED IT TO WHAT THE TIPS AND TRICKS SITE'S INSTRUCTIONS, SHOWN BELOW, IT FINALLY WORKED.
• This portion of your Blogger template's HTML should now look like this:

head

link href="http://favatar.myfavatar.com/alzmoments.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" /

link href="http://favatar.myfavatar.com/alzmoments.png" rel="icon" type="image/png" /

/* b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/

title

$BlogPageTitle$

/title

• NOTE: Each of the seven lines of code above start with a "<" and end with a ">". They would be interpreted as real HTML if I include them that way here.
• In the "ECCO" template, I had an extra line of code "b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/" that messed things up. I turned this into a comment by adding "/*" to the front of the line.
• Click on "Save Template Changes".

You're done!

This took me several hours over many days of looking through help files, online Q & A's, and calling customer service. Pretty easy when you see it mapped out in logical steps!
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