Publishing on a custom domain

Whoa, I did it! Notice that my url doesn’t have blogspot anymore? I am now publishing on a custom domain! Woohoo. Anyway, I don’t know yet how this is going to change my blogging activities, but I like the thought of having my own dot com. I’ve been blogging on White Sky Project for a few years now, so I thought it was about time that I own it. I did my research, learned a few things, and finally took the plunge. Basically, here’s what I did.

First, I backed up my blog. This was my main concern about switching to my own domain. I was terrified of losing all my content. I went to my Blogger dashboard, clicked on Settings, then Basic, then Export Blog and saved the file in my computer. Just to check if that little file really contained my blog content, I created a new blog and imported that file. The new blog looks just like my blog. I didn’t publish that new blog though to avoid having a duplicate blog. That’s just weird.

Second, I bought a domain at GoDaddy. They have an ongoing promo so I got my domain for $7.67/year. That’s roughly 400 pesos for the year. I’m not sure though if that price will still apply when I renew next year. You can actually purchase a domain through Blogger, but I read quite a number of not-so-good feedback about that route so I decided to purchase directly from GoDaddy.

Third, I changed my settings by following instructions I found here. There are a lot of tutorials out there about switching to custom domains, but this was the simplest one I found.

My new domain started working within minutes. I had to figure out a couple of things like how to redirect my naked domain whiteskyproject.com (without the www) to this blog. Apparently, I have to tinker more with my settings to get it to redirect to my blog. My next steps now are to update my profile in online networks. Actually, my old blogspot address will redirect to the new url, but I think it’s cooler if I put my new site address.

Interested in switching to a custom domain? Here are the tutorials I found useful:
Domain mapping with Blogger and GoDaddy
Blogger – how to use custom domain
Blogbloke – Custom domain