Take your LJ and run with it...

Photo from (Vijeth)

I was always skeptical of shifting to another blogging platform because I thought that all of my earlier posts would be lost. I did recently shift however and thanks to the requirement of a friend, learnt that I can now safely backup my posts as well as comments and move.

We’ve both had our blogs on LJ and she recently shifted over as well. So she asked me if I knew any way to transfer the posts as well as comments. A little Googling and I found this tool called LJArchive. It allows you to take a complete backup of your data on LJ and export it to a XML file that Wordpress can then import.

Amazingly (and I’m not sure since when), Wordpress can consume quite a few formats. Plus I can also now take a backup of my existing wordpress blog, which is a feature I’ve always looked for in blogging platforms. I believe the same should hold good for any web application out on the Internet. You should be able to take your data and run with it. If not, its not “your” data per se.

Blogging with your own domain

I always wanted to host my own blog on my domain, but I never got around to figuring out how to do so. So over the past week I decided to take a look and get it done. What gave me a head-start was Blogger’s configuration panel wherein it allows you to configure your blogspot address. By default it is “your-cool-name”.blogspot.com, which is good, but I’ve been having a domain name that has been rotting for a while and decided to make use of it.

So you click on the ‘Custom Domain’ setting and then you have an option of purchasing a domain (Google has partnered with registrars but does not register domains themselves. Although they do give a Google Apps for your domain free if you register via them).

If you already do own a domain then you can go ahead and put in the address you want so that it points to your blog. So you have told Blogger what address you want for your blog (Ex: http://mylovelyblog.mydomain.com). But how does your domain know where to point to when it sees mylovelyblog as the subdomain.

Luckily Blogger gives you directions on how to do this. Add a CName record to your domain that points to ghs.google.com. Ability to add CName’s should be part of your registrar’s administration pages.

So once your CName is setup in your domain administration panel, and blogger knows what subdomain you are going to use, anyone who goes to http://mylovelyblog.mydomain.com is automatically redirected to your blogspot blog.

In my search, I read a lot about DNS and Apache. More on that later.

Destiny

Photo from ( Vijeth )

Go confidently in the direction of your DREAMS!

Live the life you’ve always IMAGINED.

– Henry David Thoreau

Move is in progress (to blogger)