To The Moon And Back

I bought a new domain just recently and wanted to try using blogspot as my host. One, it’s free and two, there are so many cool blogger templates out there that I’d like to try. You’ve all probably tried using a custom domain successfully but I wasn’t fortunate. I tried to follow all the steps from the Blogger.com help page but my changes are not taking effect. So I asked a friend who’s currently hosting her blog at blogspot and she sent me the following:

 The steps are for domains registered at GoDaddy but I’m sure it’s almost the same with other registrars.

1. Log in to your blogger account and go to Settings > Publishing

2. Set the publishing to your blogspot address

3. Log in to your GoDaddy account and access the domain that you want to update

4. Select ‘Enable Forwarding’
- Select 302 Moved Temporarily
- Forward to http://name.blogspot.com

5. Select ‘Enable Masking’ and click OK

6. Open a new browser and type your new domain http://name.com. It should now redirect to your blogspot address (http://name.blogspot.com). It might take a while before the domain gets redirected to blogspot so be patient

7. When the domain redirection is working, go back to GoDaddy account and access Namerservers

8. Check Hosting Name Servers then click OK.
Your namerservers should now say:
Name Server 1: NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
name Server 2: NS52.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

9. Now, click ‘Total DNS Control and MX Records’

10. Under the CNAME section, click ‘Edit’ for the www entry

11. Under points to host name, change @ to ghs.google.com

12. Login to your blogger account then go back to Settings > Publishing

13. Change publishing to custom domain and type in your new domain:
http://www.name.com

14. Save Settings

15. Check redirect name.com to www.name.com

16. Save Settings

Now this may all seem redundant and the original instructions might have worked with you. However, I know a couple of friends who experienced the same problem using their custom domains so I don’t think there’s any harm following the steps above.

Whenever I stumble upon a blog that’s so cool whether because of the graphics or articles, I make sure to make a post about them here.

For today, I will tell you about Mark Flavin’s internet marketing blog. If you want to know all there is to know about viral marketing, traffic generation, email marketing, blog advertising and basically anything related to online marketing, I recommend you bookmark this site. With the right keywords, you can easily double or even triple your site’s daily traffic. Once your visitors are done checking out your blog, how do you make them come back? One thing that I learned from Mark Flavin’s article, “7 Ways To Get Repeat Traffic To Your Blog or Website”, is to make it possible for customers to sign up for future discounts, newsletters, weekly tips, anything that you think would interest your visitors so you will have a reason to contact them. The other tips are a given, use rss, social bookmarking plugin, constant communication via comments, etc. but the ‘opt-in’ tactic is a surefire way to give them a reason to visit again.

And for those of you who want to know how to make money on your blog, you will definitely appreciate the article “How To Start A Blog That Makes Money”. There’s also an article on how you can use Twitter to drive targeted traffic to your site. I’ve been using Twitter for sometime now and I admit it’s very useful for article marketing. Some people just can’t resist clicking on a link especially if it might benefit them.

I’ve only spent 30 minutes on Flavin’s site and I’ve already learned so many tips and tricks on maximizing my sites/blogs. And even if his articles suck (which they don’t), I’d give him credit for using a photo from the movie, “The Anchormen” on his newsletter signup box.

I came across a new web design blog today called Stylish Weblog. As a designer myself, I make it a habit to view other web designer sites and blogs because you always learn new things. The first thing that I noticed when I saw this design blog is the wordpress theme. It’s so stylish, very web 2.0 and unlike any other themes that I’ve seen. I scrolled down immediately to check the name of the theme but there wasn’t any info about it so I’m guess this is a customized one. The flickr photos on the right panel give the page the color that it needs, making the overall look and feel not only stylish but very professional. Of course, if you call your blog ‘Stylish’, then you absolutely have to walk the talk.

Atila, the author talks mainly about design, custom web design, web development, design technologies, etc. I enjoyed reading the design articles especially this one - Why do you need to redesign your Website? This article is what every website owner, client, web designer should read. Some of the clients that I’ve worked with ask me to re-design their sites but they are not willing to let go of the styles that they’ve accustomed to, ten years ago. Back then, optimizing your site for better search engine placement may not be as important so you can do what you want (or not do anything at all) but now, hundreds of web sites are being created daily so keeping up with the latest trend should be a top priority. Aside from design, you can also read about finance, health, Internet and technology from this Stylish Weblog.

From the wordpress.org website:

The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.5) is available in two formats from the links to your right.

Three Step Upgrade
These are the short instructions, if you want more check out the extended upgrade instructions. If you experience problems with the Three Step Upgrade, you may want to review the more detailed upgrade instructions.

It looked promising, easy and exciting. Plus my main blog desperately needed an upgrade after using WordPress 2.0 for more than a year. After a quick review of what I need to do, I immediately backed up my files, database and started doing the WordPress 2.5 upgrade.

The more detailed upgrade instructions were great. It was very easy to follow even for a non-techie person. I was even able to load WordPress 2.5 on my local and played around with it for a while. The new interface design is really nice and I noticed that tons of new features have been added. However, things started messing up when I tried to comment, add or edit post, and change themes. Most of the errors have to do with database. I decided to sleep then hoping things will look better in the morning (it usually do). When I woke up, not only I can’t comment but it won’t even allow me access wp-admin anymore. I searched and searched the net for solutions but eventually just decided to downgrade to 2.3.3. I didn’t see any instructions on downgrading so I just closed my eyes; overwrite the 2.5 files with 2.3.3 files while hoping that it will work. It’s still a huge improvement from 2.0 so it will probably do. It did work after a few minor tweaking here and there.

The thing is there are still no sidebar widgets under Presentation when I know it’s already included in the latest versions of WP. I had to make do with copying and pasting codes on the sidebar.php just to make things work. I might take a look into this further but I’m so beat that I’d rather take a break reading about database, Wordpress, PHP codes for a while.