Surviving the Blogging Sandbox

How To Change A Blog's Username (or How To Move A Blog Between Accounts)
Thursday, March 12, 2009

I was confronted with this issue when I lost focus in one of my blogs because of the pressures of work, but felt that somebody else might want to continue what I started. Fortunately, a friend was only too willing to pick up where I left off, thus saving the many precious hours I spent developing that particular blog. The solution is simple enough: move the blog you want to give up, from your account/username to your successor's account/username.

The solution is the same if the scenario is a little bit different. Like for instance, you have several blogs which you created under different usernames. It's so confusing to recall so many usernames and passwords so you'd want now to consolidate these blogs under just one username. This is how to do it:

1. Login to the blog whose username you want to change.

2. Go to the "Settings" >> "Permissions" tab, then click on the "Add Authors" button.

3. Enter the email address of the person or account you'd like the blog to be transferred to, then click "Invite."

4. The invitee or recipient of the invitation (which could be another person or you yourself) should open his email Inbox, open the email invitation, then click on the link provided, in order to join the blog.

5. After clicking the invitation link, a dialogue box will appear. The recipient should "accept" membership by filling up the dialogue box with his pertinent email address/username and password.

6. Login again to the blog whose username you want to change.

7. Go to the "Dashboard" >> "Settings" >> "Permissions" tab.

8. Click "Grant admin privileges" to the new email address/username which was added under "Blog Authors".

9. Click "Remove" for the old email address/username that you want replaced.

From here on, the blog can only be accessed using the new username and password.

Posted byS@RZI at 12:22 PM 1 comments

Labels: Blogger blog, changing username

How to Shift to Blogger's Custom Domain
Sunday, June 22, 2008

After learning how to verify or authenticate one's blog, there are still a number of little things that a newbie blogger needs to know and do for his/her blog. But I have decided to defer talking about these things for now because I can see from the Official Blogger Help Group site that, despite the numerous explanations already published there, one of the most complained-about topic remains to be how to successfully shift from a Blogspot blog (a subdomain) to a "custom domain" (or a URL/address owned by the blogger). This is my take on the "custom domain" issue, based on my own experience. Before I proceed, however, here are a few clarificatory words.

First, this post is limited in its application to the Blogger platform.

Second, although I could have acquired my domain name thru Blogger and registered it through a Google partner, I have decided to source it from GoDaddy.com after some preliminary Web research. As such, the step-by-step procedures that are discussed here pertain only to domains parked with GoDaddy.com. Having had no benefit of actual experience with domain names parked with other hosts, I can't tell how different or similar the procedures are when one shifts from Blogspot to a custom domain.

Third, what most step-by-step procedures about shifting to a custom domain lacks is a simplified overview on what the whole exercise is trying to achieve. This is superfluous for a techie, but quite basic to a non-techie who is trying to do this himself for the first time. I wish somebody taught me this on my first attempt. Anyway...

Blogger's "custom domain" feature is like having your cake and eating it, too--a normally impossible feat in the real world, but only made possible by Google. With this Blogger feature, you can enjoy the respectability of blogging from your own URL or personal blog address without the attendant monthly costs of a hosted blog. This magic is achieved by having a domain "parked" with GoDaddy.com (free of cost if you bought it from them) and "pointing" (take note: I didn't say "forwarding", because that's a different matter altogether in the Internet world) that domain or address to a Blogger/Google server, which is your "host". Thus, all the procedures below are intended to "point" your "parked" domain to your cost-free "host." On that note, here we go:

1. Login to your GoDaddy account:

2. Click on the My Account link:

3. Click on Manage Domains to open the Domain Control Center:

4. In your list of domain names (assuming you have more than one parked in GoDaddy), click on the domain you wish to substitute (as "Custom Domain") for your present Blog*spot sub-domain:

5. Click on the Total DNS Control and MX Records link, located just under Nameservers in the mid-portion of your screen:

DNS stands for "Domain Name System", a system which allows the translation of a human-readable hostname (ex: Typhoon.com) into an IP (short for "Internet Protocol") address of the form 208.77.188.166, to enable the delivery of digital data over networking equipment.

An MX or "Mail Exchange" record, on the other hand, is a type of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS). Each MX record contains a "priority" and a "host" name, so that the collection of MX records for a given domain name point to the servers that should receive e-mail for that domain, and their priority relative to each other.

6. Set up a CNAME referral for the alias www by clicking on Add New CNAME Record (found at the right portion of your screen, below Add New A Record):

CNAME is short for "canonical name" record. It indicates the true, or canonical, host name of a computer that its aliases are associated with. A machine or a computer can have an unlimited number of CNAME aliases, but a separate CNAME record must be in the database for each alias.

6. Fill up the CNAME (Alias) form:

Before you fill up that form, let me just digress a little bit to the concept of "domain name," which most tutorials on custom domain presume you know. According to Google Apps: Domain names are easy-to-remember names (URLs and email addresses) that are associated with one or more IP addresses. Since a web page is defined by its URL, the page can move to a different IP address without affecting visitors. If we have "www.typhoon.com" as the domain name, "com" is called the top-level domain, "typhoon" is the second-level domain, while "www" is the subdomain, third-level domain, alias or CNAME.

Having said that, type "www" on the space provided for "Enter an Alias Name" and "ghs.google.com" on the space provided for "Points to Host Name," then set the "TTL" using the dropdown box. I don't know with you, but I kept the "TTL" at the default setting of 1 hour, which means that's the time increment for which the server should cache the information. Once you're done with the form, click OK. (In case the "www" alias is rejected, if you already have several domain names under the same GoDaddy account--like what happened to me recently--use your second-level domain in place of "www", e.g., "typhoon.com" in the above example)

7. After successfully completing the CNAME referral process, you can now delete the A-Record by clicking the highlighted button shown below, before logging out of GoDaddy:

8. It's time now to set up Custom Domain by logging-in to your Blogger blog , going to the Settings tab and clicking the Publishing link:

9. Click the Advanced Settings link in the Custom Domain Page, since you already own a domain parked with GoDaddy:

10. Type your Custom Domain (which is parked with GoDaddy and by now pointed to Google's server) on the space indicated, then click Save Settings, as shown below:

11. After saving your Custom Domain successfully, check the Redirect box (which I highlighted), then click Save Settings:

Bloggers who shift to Custom Domain very early on, when they still have not published much, could practically confirm right away if they did the whole process correctly by clicking on the View Blog link, and checking their Browser's address box. The address displayed should correspond to the Custom Domain. For older blogs with plenty of published posts, however, it may take longer. According to Google Apps, it could take as much as 48 hours for the Custom Domain to substitute for the Blogspot subdomain.

Posted byS@RZI at 9:29 PM 0 comments

Labels: Alias, Blogger Help Group, blogging, BlogSpot subdomain, CNAME, custom domain, DNS, ghs.google.com, GoDaddy, Google Apps, MX control, second-level domain, third-level domain, top-level domain

How to "Authenticate" Your Blog Using Yahoo Site Explorer
Monday, June 9, 2008

My last post was meant to help you gain more visibility on Google's search engine. Yahoo has its own search engine, so you must be asking how you can similarly improve your chances of getting included in Yahoo! search results.

If you want guaranteed inclusion in all Yahoo! search results, that is possible but it would come at a certain price. It is called a "Sponsored Search," which is keyword- and click-driven (meaning you pay only when your ad is clicked in search results—not every time it is displayed). If you're a novice, hobbyist blogger like me, why spend at all?

Fortunately, it is possible to have your cake and eat it too at Yahoo! You see, Yahoo! has its own blog "authentication" procedures, using Yahoo! Site Explorer. To use Site Explorer, however, you need to create first your Yahoo account, if you don't have one yet. It's free anyway, so that should not be a problem. Once you have a Yahoo account, follow these procedures:

1. Login to Yahoo! Site Explorer.

2. Input your blog's address or URL in the indicated box, then click the Add My Site button:

3. Once your blog gets added to the list, click the Manage button:

4. Input your blog's Feed address or URL in the indicated box. If yours is a Blogger or Blogspot blog, simply type "Atom.XML" on the box provided, because that's the default Feed address of all Blogger/Blogspot blogs. Afterwards, click the Add Feed button:

5. Once you see your blog Feed listed, click the Authenticate button:

6. You will be presented with 2 authentication procedures as shown below. Choose Add a META Tag and copy the code provided for your blog:

7. Open a new tab in your browser so you can login to your blog, without logging out of Yahoo! Site Explorer (you need to go back after pasting the META tag to your blog template).

8. For Blogger/Blogspot blogs, login then go to your Layout Page. Click the Edit HTML link, then on the Edit Template page which contains your blog's XML coding. Locate the opening "Head" tag in the template (not very far down from the template's first line of code) then insert your META tag below the Head tag. Enclose the META tag with a forward slash (/) at the end, as highlighted in yellow below, so that you won't encounter any "parsing" problem like I did during my first-ever attempt last year (don't forget to click Save Template before logging out of your blog):

9. Go back to the Yahoo! Site Explorer tab, then click the Ready to Authenticate button. After you do, this is what you will see in a new window:

10. When you go back to your Yahoo! Site Explorer dashboard after clicking the My Site link, this is what you will see.

The "Pending" status is usually replaced with "Authenticated" after 24 hours. With your blog verified by Google and authenticated by Yahoo!, your posts should now appear in search engine results. Look, I didn't say on page 1 of the search results, did I? This is because there is more to blogging than just being "visible" to the search engines. You will find that out as you go along.