Blogger Magic - Custom Domains and Redirected Feeds

Ever watch a magician do "sleight of hand", say the old disappearing quarter?

Here's an ordinary quarter (in my hand). Nope - not in my hand! Where did it go? What's that, behind your ear? There it is (behind your ear)!

How did he do that?

Blogger / FeedBurner / Google has a magic trick for you, and it's just as mysterious to many bloggers.

If you publish your blog to a Google Custom Domain, and you use FeedBurner, you have 3 "magic tricks" aka "URL redirections" which you enjoy.

Your old BlogSpot URL redirects to your custom domain URL. "yourblog.blogspot.com" --> "www.yourdomain.com".
Your custom domain root redirects to the custom domain "www" alias. "yourdomain.com" --> "www.yourdomain.com".
Your Blogger native feed URL redirects to your FeedBurner URL. "www.yourdomain.com/atom.xml" --> "feeds.feedburner.com/YourDomainCode".

When this works, someone subscribing to the original BlogSpot based feed gets the FeedBurner feed.

"yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml" --> "feeds.feedburner.com/YourDomainCode".

That's sort of like

My hand to behind your ear (nope, nothing there either). But, do you feel anything when you walk? Check your shoe! There it is!

Unfortunately, not everybody likes magic. Some folks just want the quarter back in their pocket. The Google Webmaster Tools based sitemap, and many external services, are written for a plain old Atom feed. What FeedBurner does to the feed isn't acceptable. In those cases, we use a feed modifier.

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Embedded Comments And Main Page View

The option to display comments, embedded below the post, was made a blog option relatively recently. This was a long requested feature - and many bloggers added it to their blogs, as soon as the option was presented to us. Some blog owners like this feature so much, that they request it to be visible when the blog is opened, in main page view. I would like all comments, and the comment form, to be shown underneath the relevant post, automatically, for everyone to read without clicking on the number of comments link. And this is not how embedded comments work.

Adding A Link To Your Blog Post

Occasionally, you see a very odd, cryptic complaint I just added a link in my blog, but the link vanished! No, it wasn't your imagination.

What's The URL Of My Blog?

We see the plea for help, periodically I need the URL of my blog, so I can give it to my friends. Help! Who's buried in Grant's Tomb, after all? No Chuck, be polite. OK, OK. The title of this blog is "The Real Blogger Status", and the title of this post is "What's The URL Of My Blog?".

The Real Blogger Status

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