GoDaddy v. Blogger, IndigoJake Style

It all started Sunday afternoon, when I was tinkering with some settings in my blogger account. Minor profile adjustments and what-not. But then I thought, "Gee, back when I first signed up, there was an option to utilize a domain instead of a 'user.blogspot.com' address (Blogger accounts are 'housed' at username.blogspot.com)... I wonder if I can manually transfer my indigojake.blogspot.com blog over to www.indigojake.com?" Ohhh, and guess what I found out! Blogger not only supports it, but they have a tutorial for several popular hosting providers, and number one on their list: GoDaddy, my domain provider.

History
Since I only tried out web hosting once (Andrew, my former roommate was the web-hosting provider), and I didn't really take to it, IndigoJake.com has never truly had a "web-site" per se... I never really enjoyed managing a website, and with the hosting options that Andrew had, including Coppermine and Xoops and C-Panel, there was just too much for me to really want to tinker with. So, for six months or so of operation, IndigoJake.com was just a directory listing. So very pathetic for a website designed in 2005. I nearly gave up on the domain, but at the same time, I was also working on my Blogger "professional-esk" blog, and decided that I wanted to have my blogger associated with IndigoJake.com... It seemed simple enough at the time...

So, I decided to go into my GoDaddy account and enable domain forwarding. Ever-since I gave up on the web site hosting and just forwarded the domain to indigojake.blogspot.com, I was quite happy, and so lived IndigoJake.com for over a year.

But there was a flaw in my Blogger <3 GoDaddy merger... If one went to (www.)IndigoJake.com, they would indeed be redirected to http://indigojake.blogspot.com... However, the domain would change in the address bar, something I did not like. I wanted it to stay "http://www.indigojake.com" --it just looked cleaner. I enabled masking with my GoDaddy account, but for some reason, it never worked. I grew frustrated and just left it as is... That is, until Sunday, September 9, 2007.

The Horrors of DNS
I totally hate DNS. With a passion. Now, don't get me wrong, but the Domain Name System is a god-send for the internet... Without it, there just wouldn't be much out there. No more "www.google.com" nooo... we'd be going to "http://64.233.167.104" Try to remember that! Or we could still use the hosts file and WINS... Oh joy. So, DNS is better. Yet, it still sucks. And I still just cannot fathom the concept of it. Web stuff is difficult for me to grasp, but DNS is just horrid.

Well, guess what the primary requirements for me to get indigojake.blogspot.com swapped over to www.indigojake.com... You guested it, I had to just do a little DNS modification, and I'd be all set. Yea, right.

I did exactly what google said, "change your 'www' data entry from '@' to 'ghs.google.com' and click apply. Save your 'forward to 'http://--yourwebsitehere--' at blogger and you are all done!"

Sounded simple enough. But, as soon as I did that, I got an error message at my blogger account: "Another blog is already hosted at this address!" For one thing, there shouldn't have been a blog already there, I had broken the domain forwarding, and waited for that to propagate though the DNS system (took a few hours) and then I was ready to transfer from blogspot to godaddy. But I kept getting that error message.

Since I thought it might have been something that I was doing/did, I decided to try it a second time, this time around, suggesting that http://indigojake.com be the site, instead of just http://www.indigojake.com. This, while it didn't generate any error messages, it didn't work out so well on the godaddy side of things, since I didn't have a C-Name record I could modify, there wasn't much that I could do.

So I tried part three, creating a new sub-domain, blog.indigojake.com... "blog" had a data-entry of "ghs.google.com" and I then went back to blogger and told it to transfer indigojake.blogspot.com over to blog.indigojake.com... And within an hour, it was up an running. But each time I tried to do www.indigojake.com, no matter how hard I tried, I kept getting the "Another blog is already hosted at this address." Frustrated, I finally went to google and did a search on the error message, and came up with site after site about the issue. It seems that this error is something that crops up every now and again, usually when moving from a username.blogspot.com blogger to a custom-configured domain_name.XYZ... It didn't really seem to matter about the domain provider or anything like that, it just seemed to happen on occasion. And there was little to nothing that blogger could do to fix the issue, as there have been numerous trouble-tickets lodged with nearly no rectification yet. And the basic help, "delete the 'www' entry and save it, wait for it to propagate and then recreate the 'www' entry with the 'ghs.google.com' data again, and try a second time," didn't help at all.

At one point, I had a dozen tabs open from blogger, another dozen from google searches on the error message, and then two or three open from my godaddy account. It was really starting to drive me insane. And things were acting really weird... www.indigojake.com was getting "infinite loop" errors in Firefox, blog.indigojake.com was getting 404 errors, while indigojake.com kept forwarding me to http://www.google.com. I was really starting to lose my sanity. I even started writing a trouble ticket to blogger, but I decided that it wasn't worth it, and I decided to just give up on it all an reset indigojake.com to just forward to indigojake.blogspot.com and be done with it.

So that's what I did. I enabled forwarding and masking (just for giggles) and guess what... Masking worked. And not only that, but http://www.indigojake.com and http://indigojake.com both go to my blogger page... What I wanted in the first place.

Keeping Tabs
DNS
The Negatives: Confusing, Slow, Complicated
The Positives: Simplifies the internet, enables otherwise impossible features of the internet

Blogger
The Negatives: Easy to enable features that aren't exactly "working" correctly
The Positives: Very easy to use, very configurable

GoDaddy
The Negatives: ...nothing really, can be a bit complicated if you go into the advanced features area though.
The Positives: Very configurable, "reset to defaults" for some areas.

Over all, the whole thing just sort of sucked. I'm glad that things are back up and running again!