Saturday, March 20, 2010

Now Aren't I Clever? =)

I know some of you stay up all night, just wondering, "What is Ryan doing?" Well, let me tell you about some of the exciting things I've managed to complete tonight.

Ever since I set up Another Long Walk on Blogger as a "custom domain"--that is, it points to my own domain name rather than a generic name that looks like http://mysubdomain.blogspot.com--I've wondered if I could get the rest of my blogs off of blogspot.com hell. Okay, maybe hell is too strong a word, but whenever I see a blog that uses that as the domain, I think it looks just a little bit tacky. Like wearing a thong to Taco Bell. There's just something that says, "I'm cool," by hosting one's thoughts on your very own domain name. Domain names are cheap--I get mine from GoDaddy for about ten bucks each per year. Less than a dollar per month. All thing considered, it's a cheap way to look somewhat professional on the Internet.

I've been using http://atlasquest.blogspot.com for my letterboxing blog, which works, but like I said, I think it looks tacky. I could have moved it to one of the many atlasquest.XYZ domain names I do own--atlasquest.biz, atlasquest.org, atlasquest.mobi, and probably a few others I've forgotten off the top of my head, but those aren't atlasquest.COM! It's just not the same....

So I've left it at http://atlasquest.blogspot.com all this time... until now! While figuring out how to host my Another Long Walk blog at http://www.anotherlongwalk.com, it seemed like I could tweak the directions a bit to have my blog point to http://blog.atlasquest.com. I wouldn't use www since that's used for the main Atlas Quest website, but wouldn't it be slick if my letterboxing blog were hosted at http://blog.atlasquest.com? Yeah, I thought so too.

But I was scared to make any changes to the DNS settings. If I screwed something up, it could take AQ down for days! DNS settings are not my forte, and they're awfully temperamental. Since DNS entries propagate through the Internet relatively slowly, even if I fixed the error quickly, the incorrect entries could linger for days in some systems making AQ all but inaccessible during that time.

But I really, really wanted to use http://blog.atlasquest.com, so I decided to test changing the DNS settings with a website that wasn't mission critical--my RyansATotalGoober.com website. I tweaked some DNS settings to redirect the blog to blog.ryansatotalgoober.com, and.... it didn't work. Took me the better part of a half hour, but finally figured out that a missing period was causing the trouble and got the changes to take. (However, depending on how much that DNS setting propagated, some people might see an error if they try that URL at the moment.)

Now that I knew the correct way to set DNS settings, however, I decided to try it with the real blog on a real domain--atlasquest.com. I added the CNAME setting, pointed blog.atlasquest.com to ghs.google.com, crossed my fingers, and clicked "Save Changes."

Then I logged into Blogger and told it to change my blog into a custom domain, pointing to blog.atlasquest.com, crossed the rest of my fingers, and clicked the button to save changes. I got a message saying the changes were saved and my blog was successfully moved.

I went to http://blog.atlasquest.com.... and it worked! There was the blog! This blog! Woo-who! The old location at http://atlasquest.blogspot.com will redirect to the new location. And now the blog is hosted within the atlasquest.com domain name. Sweet. The best of both worlds. =) The blog is actually hosted on Google's web servers--I basically just direct any traffic to the blog to Google to handle as needed. All other traffic stays on my own server.

Then I went into Atlas Quest to update my blog settings to the new location. The setup was complete. My job was done. =)

9 comments:

Mama Cache said...

Good morning, Mr. Clever! *smile*

Okie Dog said...

Way to Go!

The 121 said...

Very clever!

Laughing Orca Ranch said...

Yep. Clever you.

Looks like I'm going to remain tacky for a while, though.
My brain can't wrap around all that technical stuff.

And well, my blog theme doesn't fit the professional definition anyway. Just me posting photos of my llamas, goats, sheep, chickens and all our snow. bleh!


~Lisa

Caitlin T. said...

Pretty nifty! :D

But if you wanted your blog to be hosted on blog.atlasquest.com, why not just host your blog right there using WordPress or Movable Type or something? You're still on the blogspot.com servers here.

Ryan said...

I'm actually perfectly happy to let Google eat the costs of bandwidth and disk space for my blog. I'm running severely short on disk space as it is. (Bandwidth I still have quite a bit available, but disk space has been a problem for quite some time.) So I never really felt a pressing need to host the blog myself--I just wanted it on a better domain than blogspot.com! =)

-- Ryan

DIXIE said...

now you need to teach me how to do this ;)

Caitlin T. said...

Fair enough!

dbltall said...

"finally figured out that a missing period was causing the trouble "

Yeah, that happens a lot ;)