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.