You probably know that you can use Blogger (*.blogspot.com) with your own domain. We use that for Web Upd8. Well, there is one issue with this which needs a little tweaking: you can either have http://myblog.com or http://www.myblog.com (the myblog.com domain is used just as an example) domain for your Blogger blog, not both because Blogger does not support multiple domains.
On the Blogger Custom Domain help page, it is stated to use 5 CNAME records to be able to have http://myblog.com redirect to http://www.myblog.com. But that info is not correct and it won't work. So here is what I did to properly redirect http://myblog.com to http://www.myblog.com (in our case: http://webupd8.org to http://www.webupd8.org) using a 301 (Permanent) redirect.
I used Godaddy to register the domain name, but any other service will do. Log in to the service from which you bought your domain, select your domain and you should have an option called "Forwarding" (or something similar). Use this to redirect your naked domain (without WWW) to the domain using WWW, for example: redirect myblog.com to www.wmyblog.com. Make sure you select "Forward only" and under the dropdown, select "I am permanently forwarding my domain" - this is how the option is displayed for Godaddy, for other services make sure you select "permanent redirect" or "301 redirect" (anything similar will do):
On the Blogger Custom Domain help page, it is stated to use 5 CNAME records to be able to have http://myblog.com redirect to http://www.myblog.com. But that info is not correct and it won't work. So here is what I did to properly redirect http://myblog.com to http://www.myblog.com (in our case: http://webupd8.org to http://www.webupd8.org) using a 301 (Permanent) redirect.
I used Godaddy to register the domain name, but any other service will do. Log in to the service from which you bought your domain, select your domain and you should have an option called "Forwarding" (or something similar). Use this to redirect your naked domain (without WWW) to the domain using WWW, for example: redirect myblog.com to www.wmyblog.com. Make sure you select "Forward only" and under the dropdown, select "I am permanently forwarding my domain" - this is how the option is displayed for Godaddy, for other services make sure you select "permanent redirect" or "301 redirect" (anything similar will do):
Now you must enter all the data Google provides for using a custom domain with Blogger. You can find all the info HERE.
If following the procedure above (but firstly allow it up to 48 hours to see if it really did not work) you get a 404 Page Not Found error, you can also try the tweak below.
After you set up everything, go to your domain name control panel and under Total DNS/MX, remove any "A HOST" you may have and create a new one for "@" (without the quotes) and point it to the following IP:
(don't forget to also create the CNAME for "www" (without the quotes) to point to ghs.google.com and remove any other "www" CNAME, as stated in the Blogger help). Here's how it should look:
If following the procedure above (but firstly allow it up to 48 hours to see if it really did not work) you get a 404 Page Not Found error, you can also try the tweak below.
After you set up everything, go to your domain name control panel and under Total DNS/MX, remove any "A HOST" you may have and create a new one for "@" (without the quotes) and point it to the following IP:
64.202.189.170(don't forget to also create the CNAME for "www" (without the quotes) to point to ghs.google.com and remove any other "www" CNAME, as stated in the Blogger help). Here's how it should look:
That's it. You can see this is working by going to both http://webupd8.org and http://www.webupd8.org - both will point to http://www.webupd8.org.
Coming soon: how to use Google Apps for Domains and using Gmail for your name@myblog.com email address.
Coming soon: how to use Google Apps for Domains and using Gmail for your name@myblog.com email address.
