Publishing Externally? Republish To Blog*Spot Before Publishing To A Custom Domain

If you're currently publishing your blog externally, because you want to use a non-Blog*Spot address, you may have looked at your friends who are now publishing to a Google Custom Domain, and envied all of the shiny features in New Blogger that they can now use.

(Note): This post has been migrated to (and improved in) The Real Blogger Status: Publishing Externally? Republish To Blog*Spot Before Publishing To A Custom Domain.

Now publishing externally was how you got to use a non-Blog*Spot address for your blog, under Old Blogger. But with New Blogger, and the HTML served dynamically, blogs published externally couldn't use all of the features. So Blogger developed Custom Domains, where the blogs could be published to the Google servers (enabling dynamic HTML), and use externally hosted DNS to point a non-Blogger domain into the Google servers (enabling non-Blog*Spot addresses).

Let's say that you have a blog, published to a section of your website, as "mydomain.com\blog".

1. Setup the rest of your website, to point to your blog as "myblog.mydomain.com".
2. As I describe in Custom Domain setup Step2, point "myblog.mydomain.com" to "ghs.google.com".
3. Republish your blog back to Blog*Spot, let's say as "myblog". Go to Settings - Publishing, select Blog*Spot Address, and provide "myblog" for the Blog*Spot Address.
4. As I describe in Custom Domain setup Step3, now publish your Blog*Spot blog "myblog" to "myblog.mydomain.com", on Google servers.

If you only have your blog, and nothing else, the task is a bit simpler.

1. Republish your blog back to Blog*Spot, let's say as "myblog". Go to Settings - Publishing, select Blog*Spot Address, and provide "myblog" for the Blog*Spot Address.
2. As I describe in Custom Domain setup Step3, now publish your Blog*Spot blog "myblog" to "myblog.mydomain.com", on Google servers.

The key step here is that your blog has to be hosted on Blog*Spot, before a Custom Domain forwarding can be successfully setup. Your Blog*Spot URL ("xxxxxxx.blogspot.com") will forward, automatically, to your custom domain. This saves those with an established blog at "xxxxxxx.blogspot.com" from losing that address to sploggers.

Complicated? Not really. Just take it one step at a time. Just pray that you don't get the old monolithic error

Another blog is already hosted at this address.

>> Forum thread links: bX-*00028

>> Copy this tag: bX-*00028

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Custom Domain Names and the DNS Settings

The Google Custom Domains, and the possibility of having a non-Blog*Spot address without the lack of functionality from setting up an external published blog, are a major improvement over plain old Blog*Spot to some folks. But be aware - some technical expertise is required.

Setting up a DNS entry is not a normal task for Bloggers. The draw of Blogger One Button Publishing is that you

• Choose a Blog*Spot address.
• Choose a template.
• Post and publish (and for New Blogger, forget the "publish" too).

So what's up with setting up DNS?

There's some occasional confusion in the forums.

The site says to create a CNAME for example.com.. CNAMES are not for DOMAIN NAMES, they are for subdomains.. i.e, www, pages, users. DOMAIN NAMES use A records to point to an IP address.

But the difference between an A record, and a CNAME record, is pretty simple.

An A DNS record directly equates a hostname to an IP address.

A CNAME DNS record does not directly resolve to an IP address. Instead, it refers to a relative or absolute hostname.

When a DNS query is made for a CNAME, the hostname that is pointed to is used to obtain the actual IP address. The pointed-to hostname may itself be another CNAME, or it may directly provide the IP address using an A entry.

As an example, let's look at Google Apps for Your Domain: Creating Your Canonical Name (CNAME) Record: GoDaddy.com.

• Click Add New CNAME Record. If you've already created a CNAME record for your website's address with Google Apps, click Edit next to the existing CNAME record.
  
• • Enter the part of your website's address that you picked in your Google Apps control panel. For example, if you picked urban.mydomain.com as your address, enter urban for step one.
    
  • Enter ghs.google.com as the host name.
    
  • Leave as default selection.

Not too much confusion there. As long as you decide upon your domain names before you start, it's just another recipe. Mix a, b, and c, and serve.

(Note): For some detail about DNS records, see PCMagazine Definition of: DNS records. For still more technical detail, you can see FAQs.Org: How DNS Works. Or see my case study, Google Custom Domain - Case Study #1

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Setup Your Google Custom Domain Name Properly

To let you have your blog using a custom domain name (not yourblog.blogspot.com), but without most of the drawbacks of a New Blogger blog published externally, Blogger now provides custom domain names, where you can have, besides yourblog.blogspot.com, yourblog.com.

(Note): This post has been migrated to (and improved in) The Real Blogger Status: Setup Your Google Custom Domain Name Properly.

To setup a custom domain name, you simply

• Setup DNS (at your expense) to point your blog's URL to a Blogger server.
• Setup your blog to publish to the custom domain.

Like all Blogger products, this one is a little Beta still.

• Don't Cause A Redirect Loop
  
• Wait Until DNS Points To Google
  
• A Possible Problem With The .Info TLD?
  
• Your blog may not be addressed both as "yourblog.com" and "www.yourblog.com".
  
• Don't publish straight from FTP to Custom Domain.
  
• Blogger Plus blogs can't be used with a Custom Domain.
  

Don't Cause A Redirect Loop
If you currently have your blog hosted as yourblog.blogspot.com, and you republish it as yourblog.com, Blogger will even maintain yourblog.blogspot.com for you, and forward all traffic to yourblog.com. And there is one problem.

If you observe my advice for transferring your blog to external publishing, you'll create a stub blog as yourblog.blogspot.com, and you'll setup a forwarding from the stub blog (either a manual link, or an automatic redirect) to yourblog.com.

In some cases, you might try the reverse. Maybe put your blog on yourblog.blogspot.com, and forward traffic from yourblog.com to yourblog.blogspot.com. This, however, is not a good idea. If you setup an automatic redirect from yourblog.com to yourblog.blogspot.com, then publish a second blog to your custom domain yourblog.com, your readers will watch their browsers try to load yourblog.com, which will redirect to yourblog.blogspot.com, which will then redirect to yourblog.com. And so on.

So, if you are going to publish to a Google Custom Domain, forget about the stub blog. Blogger will handle that for you.

• Custom Domain Issues
  

Wait Until DNS Points To Google
In Blogger Help: How do I use a custom domain name on my blog?, we see

It appears that Blogger checks out your domain name, and if it points to somewhere other than "ghs.google.com", responds with

Another blog is already hosted at this address.

If you get that response, verify the IP address of your domain, by pinging. If the ping comes back with

Pinging ghs.l.google.com [64.233.179.121] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 64.233.179.121: bytes=32 time=93ms TTL=245
Reply from 64.233.179.121: bytes=32 time=111ms TTL=245
Reply from 64.233.179.121: bytes=32 time=116ms TTL=245
Reply from 64.233.179.121: bytes=32 time=116ms TTL=245

or the like, your domain is ready. Otherwise, you need to wait until it is ready. Or face getting

Another blog is already hosted at this address.

A Possible Problem With The .Info TLD?
Jon Anderson writes

In a nutshell, it doesn't work with the TLD (top-level domain) of .info. More than one person is experiencing, and writing about, this problem.

Maybe a timing issue with the .Info TLD servers? I hope this one isn't just solved in silence.

(Edit 2/4): Blogger Buzzer states that

Currently .info doamins are disallowed due to the large number of spam blogs on these kind of domains.

Don't republish straight from FTP to a Custom Domain.
When you republish your blog from Blog*Spot to a custom domain, the blogspot URL of the blog is forwarded to the custom domain. So the blog starts out with the "xxx.blogspot.com" address.

When you have a blog published to an address outside of Blog*Spot, using FTP, then republished to a custom domain, you don't have a corresponding Blog*Spot URL - just the external address that you have just forwarded to "ghs.google.com". So what gets forwarded? Apparently nothing, and that may be a problem.

So, before you publish to a custom domain, take your FTP blog, and publish it back to a Blog*Spot URL. Blogger will forward the Blog*Spot URL to the custom domain, when you republish the blog to the custom domain.

Blogger Plus blogs can't be published to a Custom Domain.
Blogger Buzzer explicitly states that

Unfortunately currently there is a limitation that plus blogs cannot be converted to be served from a custom domain.

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Custom Domain Names Hosted By Blogger

Up to now, if you wanted a blog (web site) named myblog, you had 2 choices.

1. Setup myblog.blogspot.com, hosted by Blog*Spot, and with all of the shiny features of (now) New Blogger.
2. Setup myblog.com (myblog.org, ...), hosted by a host of your choice (and extra cost in most cases), but with less features than a Blog*Spot hosted blog.

Note: This post has been migrated (and significantly enhanced) as The Real Blogger Status: Custom Domain Names Hosted By Blogger.

Now, there is a third choice. Setup myblog.com (myblog.org, ...), hosted by Blog*Spot.

1. You pay for the DNS listing, which tells your reader's computers where your blog is.
2. You setup a DNS entry, pointing "myblog.com" to "ghs.google.com".
3. You setup Blogger to publish to the custom domain.

(Note): Set the domain up carefully.

This solution has its good, and its bad, points.

• The Good:
  • Save money. No need for an extra cost hosting service.
  • All of the shiny features of New Blogger.
  • None of the unstable publishing problems, reported of late.
  • Your current Blog*Spot address will continue to work, and to forward to your new, custom domain.
  • No more abandoned Blog*Spot address, and no more subsequent splog hijackings.
• The Bad:
  • If you opted for external publishing to get away from Blog*Spot hosting, this isn't for you.
  • If your domain contains more than a blog - ie maybe a chat room or FTP server, this may be a problem. You have two possibilities here.
    • Have two named domains - one inside Blog*Spot, the other outside, and links between the two.
    • Setup a subdomain DNS record, pointing to "ghs.google.com". Make sure that all of the links between the website and the blog are absolute, ie "http://myblog.mydomain.com", rather than "/blog".

(Note 1/16): There's a lot of theory here. See Google Custom Domain - Case Study #1 for an actual exploration of the facts. And see Setting Up A Custom Domain? Here's Advice, for a review of the essential steps that you must follow.

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Publishing Externally? Here's What You Get

Every day now, you see the question

I just upgraded my account and blog to New Blogger. Where is my Layouts template / my Label list / my link to Upgrade my template?

and you look at the blog URL (when it's included), and it's not yourblog.blogspot.com.

And the answer is always that, when you publish externally (aka FTP publishing), you don't get any of those features. New Blogger 2006 requires publishing to blogspot.com, for maximum benefit.

The New Blogger 2006 Blog*Spot servers publish the blog as the reader retrieves each page. They don't publish static HTML, they publish dynamic XML. When you publish by FTP, Blogger is copying old static HTML code to your FTP server. HTML won't get you

• Improved Archives, with multiple selectable views, and individual titles.
• New Layouts template, with GUI configured page elements.
  • Feeds.
  • Labels.
  • Linklists.
• Improved Main Page view, multi-paged, with each page limited in size by the "Show days / posts" setting.
• Improved Template editor, with scripted save and restore of template code.
• The ability to require authentication, and to designate readers, to view the blog. Any blog published by FTP is open to view by all.

What it will get you is

• Authentication by Google account.
• Labels for the posts. You can use the labels in various ways, without the Layouts template based Label page elements.
  • Make your own Label lists, from the labels shortcuts after each post.
  • Select a label shortcut after a post, and view all posts with that label, in a single page Main Page view.
• Improved Edit Posts menu, again with labels.
• The new, more stable Blogger.
• The shiny new Navbar (that you can continue to turn off).
• The continued spinner of death, when you publish (sorry, but static publishing will continue to have this).
• Your own, externally published website, that you can control (though not protect) as you see fit.
• A domain name that you can choose. This may not be exclusive to external publishing.

Nor can you have private blogs. See Settings - Publishing.

Hint: If you want to publish to an external FTP server, you will need to Set 'Blog Readers' to 'Anybody' and use a Classic Template.

Now, if the above issues are a problem for you, but you don't want your blog hosted on Blog*Spot, check out Google Custom Domains. Read my case study, and read about the possible complications, too.