Now that blogger supports custom domains I’ve been splashing out on the plastic and bought a couple of new domain names. So, all being well, you should now be viewing this blog at the new home of www.anotherjunction.com. Along the same lines I’ve updated my personal allotment blog too (this is where I tried it out first).
It’s a straight forward exercise. You just need to ensure that you purchase your chosen domain from a seller that allows you to modify the DNS setting cname (all new to me!). I’ve been reading good reports about names.co.uk (no affiliation) and as they got back to me immediately to confirm they offered full DNS configuration, I went with them. Configuring the DNS stuff was dead easy, as was the modification to the “publish to” parameter in blogger. The allotment blog took a few hours to sort itself out (as indicated) but today the swap was immediate.
Why have I bothered? Well, partly just because I can and partly because I could register the .com domain (and the .co.uk too – it just redirects to the .com). But more-so because it seems to make sense that if I’m going to slowly build any sort of online reputation (page rank, back links, etc) for my blog then having it on my own domain (as opposed to blogspot) gives me more options in the future. The old blogspot domain was page rank 3 and for now it appears that I’ve lost that.
Next stage is to update all links under my control to the new domain. One thing I’m not so sure off though – do I update my entry in my list of sites in webmaster central to include this new domain or leave it as the blogspot url? Think I’ll email them that one.
