Blog Baby Blog Week 2: Dot Com Yourself

Blog Baby Blog is back this week with how set up your blog domain redirect.  If you missed last week's epic three part post on Rich Pins, you can catch up here, here, and here.  You may need a nap afterwards though!

What the Heck Are Rich Pins?

Setting Up Rich Pins on Pinterest

Make the Most of Your Rich Pins

This week's post is on how to .com yourself, also known as redirecting your domain.  You absolutely can purchase your domain through Google.  It's pretty easy too.  For the majority of people, that should work just fine.  If you ever think you may want to switch to Wordpress though (more on that next week), it's a good idea to consider somewhere else because it can get a little sticky to make the switch later.

This tutorial takes your through the steps using GoDaddy.  There are other places you can purchase from.  This is the host I'm familiar with and many people use.

Let’s take a side trip on forwarding vs redirecting (feel free to skip this part):

You want to redirect your domain instead of mask/forward it.  What's the difference?  Say your address is www.mycuteclassroom.blogspot.com, and you purchased the www.mycuteclassroom.com domain.

•With forwarding, typing in either of those addresses brings you to the blogspot.com address.

•With a redirect, typing in either of those addresses brings you to the .com address.

Bought a .com and not sure if your site is set up with a redirect or forward?  Go to your blogger dashboard and click "View Blog".  Look at the address.  If it says blogspot, you have forwarding set up.  If it just says .com, you're all set!

On to the tutorial!

First you need to purchase your domain on GoDaddy.  The domain is cheap.  They’ll stick you with a bunch of add ons.  You do want the privacy add on.  Otherwise, people can use this site to look up the name and address associated with the domain.  All the information listed for my site is Go Daddy’s information.  If I had not added the privacy protection, it would have my phone number, address, and email address listed.  Yikes.

Blogger

Go to Settings-->Basic-->Publishing-->Setup a 3rd party URL for your blog-->Put in the address with www included-->Save

You’ll get a screen that looks like this:

**The second row of information is specific to each blog.  I blocked out the actual information from this blog and replaced it with a similar looking but made up sequence.

You’ve got an error, but no worries.  We needed that second row of information for our Go Daddy work.

Go Daddy

In your Go Daddy account, Click on My Products-->Domains-->Manage DNS

**You can add privacy from here if your need to.

Once you click on Manage DNS, you will be at your Records page.  You’ll need those two pieces of information from Blogger.

1.  Find the CNAME row with www as the name and @ as the value

•Click on the pencil to edit

•Change @ to ghs.google.com

•Save

**TTL is the amount of time it will take to go live.  I select custom and change it to 600 seconds for everything I do. 10 minutes used to be one of the their dropdown options, and it now longer is, but I still change it to that.  It may not even make a difference.

2.  Click ADD

•Type: CNAME

•Host: the first piece of information in that second row of craziness

•Points to: grab that really long sequence

•Save

**Don’t worry if you get an error message.  Just hit refresh.  It will be there.

3.  Click ADD

•Your will need to do this 4 separate times.

•Each time you will select A as the Type and
your domain with no www (ex: teaching superpower.com) as the Host.

•For Points to, add one of these in each time:
216.239.32.21

216.239.34.21

216.239.36.21

216.239.38.21

•Save each time

•You may get an error message.  Sometimes I get it on all four, sometimes I don’t get it on any of them.  If you get the error message, just hit refresh and your information will be there.

It will look like this when you are finished:

Blogger

Go back to Blogger, and click on Save again.  Now that your information is all set up in Go Daddy, it will look like this:

•Click on Edit

•Check the box as shown below:

•Save

**FYI-Check your link in Chrome first.  It usually works immediately.  Firefox usually takes 10 minutes or less, and Safari can take up to an hour.

**If you have confirmed your site in Pinterest, you will need to reconfirm the .com site and revalidate your pins.  You can read how to do that here.

Good luck!