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Publishing Externally? Republish To Blog*Spot Before Publishing To A Custom Domain

If you're currently using FTP publishing to publish your blog externally, because you want to use a non-Blog*Spot address, you may have looked at your friends who are now publishing to a Google Custom Domain, and envied all of the shiny features in New Blogger that they can now use.

Now publishing externally was how you got to use a non-Blog*Spot address for your blog, under Old Blogger. But blogs published externally, and statically, can't use the dynamic features of New Blogger 2007. So Blogger developed Custom Domains, where the blogs could be published to the Google servers (enabling dynamic HTML), and use externally hosted DNS to point a non-Blogger domain into the Google servers (enabling non-Blog*Spot addresses).

Let's say that you have a blog, currently published to a section of your website, as "mydomain.com\blog". Depending upon how you setup your FTP Publishing, it may be redirected from "myblog.blogspot.com".
  1. Update your website, to point to your blog as "myblog.mydomain.com".
  2. As I describe in Your Blog, Custom Domains, And Righteous Solutions: Additional Virtual Host, setup a "CNAME" referral for "myblog.mydomain.com" to "ghs.google.com".
  3. Republish your blog back to Blog*Spot, let's say as "myblog.blogspot.com". Go to Settings - Publishing, click on "Switch to: • blogspot.com", and provide "myblog" for the Blog*Spot Address.
  4. As I describe in Google Custom Domains - The Two Step Domain Referral, now publish your Blog*Spot blog "myblog" to "myblog.mydomain.com", on Google servers.


If you only have your blog, and nothing else, the task is a bit simpler.
  1. As I describe in Your Blog, Custom Domains, And Righteous Solutions: Additional Virtual Host, setup a "CNAME" referral for "myblog.mydomain.com" to "ghs.google.com".
  2. Republish your blog back to Blog*Spot, let's say as "myblog.blogspot.com". Go to Settings - Publishing, click on "Switch to: • blogspot.com", and provide "myblog" for the Blog*Spot Address.
  3. As I describe in Google Custom Domains - The Two Step Domain Referral, now publish your Blog*Spot blog "myblog" to "myblog.mydomain.com", on Google servers.


The key step here is that your blog has to be hosted on Blog*Spot, before a Custom Domain forwarding can be setup. Your Blog*Spot URL ("myblog.blogspot.com") will forward, automatically, to your custom domain. This saves those with an established blog at "myblog.blogspot.com" from losing that address to sploggers.

But note this small detail. If you started publishing the blog externally, so you could host photos without a storage limit, and the photos are stored on the FTP server, note that externally hosted photos will stay on the FTP server, until you move them, manually.

Complicated? Not really. Just take it one step at a time. Just pray that you don't get the old monolithic error
Another blog is already hosted at this address.



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Comments

Anonymous said…
I've read your posts to the Google "How Do I" section of the "Blogger" group and also your posts on this blog.

I have switched my publishing options from FTP to host on blogspot, but the images are all links back to my server. I would like all images hosted on blogspot.

From what you've written, it seems as if the images should be on blogspot.

Also, it seems that you can't "republish" when you move to blog spot and I assume by "republish to blogspot" you mean simply switching the publish options.
Nitecruzr said…
Paul,

When you reset the blog, to publish on BlogSpot, any future images will be hosted on Blogger. The existing posts don't get edited though, just republished to use BlogSpot URLs for text components (comments, labels, posts). Any non-text content like images have to be moved, by you, by your editing each post.
Anonymous said…
Okay, thank you. I guess I'll leave the old images on my server.

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