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Make A Blogger Blog Cluster

If you're like me, and have a blog, maybe what you write about in your blog isn't all of what you are.

Most of us are more than one person. I'm a blogger, I work with Windows Networking, plus I have a private life. Really. I enjoy cooking, some miscellaneous humour and philosophy, and various other pursuits too.

If you're going to blog about your non-technical abilities too, would you put the non-technical stuff in the same blog as your technical stuff?

If you have different areas of your home, maybe different blogs make sense.

Do you park your car in your kitchen, or sleep in your garage? Hopefully not - you have separate areas of your house, each one for a different purpose. Maybe you should with your blog, too.

If you have one blog, with multiple topics, you can separate and index the various posts by using labels. But maybe you would like something different for each topic - maybe a topic relevant blogroll for each.

Different friends / readers deserve different blogs to read.

I have many friends with their own web sites. Some, I met through blogging. Others are experts in Windows Networking. And I know some folks with cooking blogs. It would be stupid to put a cooking blogroll on a web site about Windows Networking, though.

Some folks will tell you to use conditionally displayed widgets, so you can display one blogroll when a certain label search is active. If you want to hack the HTML Template code, you can learn how to do this. But, there's an easier solution.

You can publish as many blogs as you like.

Blogs are free - you can have as many as you can setup. I have a BlogSpot based cluster. Here's 3 of the blogs, in the cluster.


Had I planned my blogging activity when I started, I could have made a more organised cluster.


You can publish each blog to a non BlogSpot URL.

For a small fee - just $10 USD / year, for domain registration / DNS hosting, you can even have a non BlogSpot based cluster, published as a Google Custom Domain. You can host as many blogs as you wish in the domain, for that single $10 USD. If you already have a (non Blogger) web site, you don't even pay that - there's your domain, already setup.

Once you have a domain, just add one or more virtual hosts to your domain. Publish your blogs to the virtual hosts in your domain, one blog / virtual host pair.


Just a single "CNAME", to define each one.

blogging.nitecruzr.net. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
networking.nitecruzr.net. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
recipes.nitecruzr.net. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

If you already have a domain, with a web site, there's the start of your blog cluster. If you just setup your domain, you may wish to setup a home blog, similar to my Nitecruzr Dot Net. A home blog is an option, not a necessity. I could alternately use my Buzz blog as a home blog.

If you keep your domain registration active, your blog will last.

Either way - with a BlogSpot or non BlogSpot based cluster - what you setup will be yours forever (at least, as long as you pay the yearly fee).

So, I setup Nitecruzr Dot Net, my collection of Blogger blogs all in one domain - my own domain - not a part of "BlogSpot.Com". Each blog will be part of the whole, yet as unique as I like to make it. Setting the domain up took 30 minutes, and writing about doing it, another hour or so (not that I'm done writing).

And once you setup your blog collection, you can merge them.

Once you've setup a collection of blogs, there are a variety of possible ways to dynamically merge them, in relevant ways that your readers should appreciate. And there are variations of this setup - some righteous, others spurious - that you need to consider, carefully.



Separate Your Blogs, Yet Keep Them Together
http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2008/04/separate-your-blogs-yet-keep-them.html
Make A Blogger Blog Cluster

Comments

Christine Ho said…
I'm glad to find your blog here. That's exactly what I want to keep separate blogs in my custom domain. But howe can I set up the subdomain like, www.blog.mydomain.com and how to move one of my existing blogspot blog into it?
Thanks for help in advance!
Nitecruzr said…
Christine,

If the above article doesn't give you the details, I ask that you start a thread in GBH: How Do I?, and provide the actual domain URL so I can help you better.
Christine Ho said…
Chuck:
Thanks for your helpful info. Now I can integrate my another blog into my new custom domain. However, I still can't configure the www. and non-www. together.
I have checked the box of "Redirect www.en.christinesrecipes.com to en.christinesrecipes.com" on my dashboard and saved successfully.

But there's a message of "address not found" bounced back when I hit www.en.christinesrecipes.com.

Did I miss anything? Thanks again for your help.
Nitecruzr said…
Christine,

Please, continue this in GBH: How Do I?. Interaction using Blogger commenting sucks.
Admin said…
Hi,

Thank you for writing answer to my query in blogger help group. I liked ur blog
and shall keep visiting
Rowena said…
Will this work if I have two domains and want both domains to redirect to one of the domains?

I have in place, http://thebookbinge.com (custom domain) and while that's fine and what we're known for, our book blog is called Book Binge not THE Book Binge. We had to use thebookbinge.com because bookbinge.com was already owned by someone else. Just recently, bookbinge.com became available and I snatched it up.

Without getting rid of thebookbinge.com, how could I redirect bookbinge.com to automatically go to thebookbinge.com?

Does that make sense? Is there a post on your blog that explains how to do this? I've looked but am not coming up with anything that could help me on your blog? If there is, can you direct me to it please?

Thank you.
Nitecruzr said…
Rowena,

You publish the blog to one domain - that will be the primary domain, and it will be the one non BlogSpot URL that will receive the reputation.

You can use the second - and any more, as needed - domains, all forwarded using "301 Moved Permanently" to the primary domain.
H S Apley said…
This sounds like exactly what I want to do, but not being very tech savvy, I just want to make sure I get it right. I have 3 blogs and under the publishing tab of each, I have to option to "switch to: custom domain". Am I correct that I will only have to do this from one of my blogspot blogs AND that it doesn't matter which one? Then once it is established I think I need to go to the original 3 and "add virtual host". then once I have all three linked, I can index or list them separately there. does this sound right or am I way off?

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