Thursday, June 19, 2008

Godaddy Domain and Blog with Blogger / Blogspot

I want to apologize to everyone for the domain being down recently. I have been trying to figure out what happened and went through a million different iterations before I realized what it was. i had accidentally changed the nameserver of the domain to point to a parking service when I was updating some of my other domains. I basically figured this out through reverse engineering, by finding other people who had domains published by blogger but who were using their .com rather than the "blogspot" default that google provides. Maybe this information will help other people who are trying to figure out how to get their Godaddy domain to point to their blog with blogger.

So here is what I did to fix the problem.

First, I signed in to GoDaddy, clicked on "My Domains". Then "jumped" to this domain by typing in the first few letters "nnn". Clicked on the domain name. Then clicked on "Nameservers", sleected "Custom Nameservers" and for "Nameserver 1" typed in "NS25.DOMAINCONTROL.COM" and for "Nameserver 2" typed in "NS26.DOMAINCONTROL.COM". Then I clicked on "Forwarding" to make sure it says "Domain is not forwarded" (apparently you can use forwarding to get your domain to point to your blog, but that is not how I have done it).

Then click on "Total DNS Control and MX Records." Since I had been messing around with these trying to fix the problem I clicked on "Reset to Default Settings" under CNAMES (Aliases) and MX (Mail Exchange) just to be careful. Then I clicked on the CNAME record where the "Host" is specified as "www" and changed the "Points To" information to be "ghs.google.com". I have read suggestions that say you have to type "www." and "ghs.google.com." with the period at the end of each entry but it worked for me without the period. Then I clicked "Add New CNAME Record" again and for this one entered "nnnnndomains.com" in the "Host" filed and "ghs.google.com" again in the "Points To" field.

Lastly, I went to Blogger, logged in to my account, clicked on "Settings", then "Publishing" and clicked "Custom Domain". Then for the field where it asks you to type in the custom domain I put in "www.nnnnndomains.com" and selected the option "redirect nnnnndomains.com to www.nnnnndomains.com".

And that's it, the blog is back up and running. Sorry for the down time and I hope anyone that is having similar problems is helped by this information.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank You So Much .... I bought a custom domain through google about ten days ago and NOTHING I did would make it work, until I followed the instructions here. They don't make it easy do they.

Anonymous said...

thank you so much for this post. i have been trying to figure out what i was doing wrong and yout led me right to it. God Bless!

Anonymous said...

Thanks. You just brought days of hair pulling to an end. Really a good person for doing it and I wish all the best and many blessings.

Natasha said...

Dear God you have no idea how thankful I am for this blog entry!

I've been spending the past 9 hours trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with my site and I stumble on this and it's fixed in literally minutes!

A big smooch and a hug and maybe even a bouquet of roses assuming you aren't allergic.

I was just about ready to just cancel my hosting. I love you so much right now man.

- Someone very grateful.

Anonymous said...

Yeah thank you I don't know why either GoDaddy or Blogger can't make the instructions as clear as this.