Blogger with Your Own Domain

The goal I set out for is simple. I own the blog digitalcartel.blogspot.com and I have a few posts, but I wanted it on my own domain. I didn't want to migrate the existing posts and content to another blog system. I browsed blogger's management interface a little and noticed that in the Settings section there is a publishing tab that has domain options. Once your there, google has a very helpful link on the domain setup process. Okay, so now you know that we have to create a CNAME record for our domains DNS. Well, this goes one of two ways...Either your registrar is hosting your DNS or you are hosting it on your own. If you have it hosted by a registrar, go ahead and check this google page for more information. I happened to be hosting my own DNS and I'm running djbdns. You can only choose one host to point at google. I choose www.digitalcartel.org to avoid any conflicts involved with using a CNAME on your base domain. My CNAME alias entry in djbdns:

Cwww.digitalcartel.org:ghs.google.com

So now you have the CNAME alias in place so you just complete the rest of the steps from previous links. Once www.digitalcartel.org was working with my blog I was happy. But!!! I wanted the base domain digitalcartel.org to work with the blog as well. My solution of choice is mod_rewrite since I've been using it alot lately. I went ahead and made an DNS A record for digitalcartel.org and pointed it to one of my webservers. My A Record in djbdns:

+digitalcartel.org:1.8.7.0:3600

Basically, I just added the following to the apache webserver configuration to redirect anything heading for digitalcartel.org to www.digitalcartel.org. You could also put this in a .htaccess file.

ServerName digitalcartel.org
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)$
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www\.%1 [R]

Once this was put into position, now I'm satisfied. :)