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Blogger Custom Domains, And Mapped Services

I've been observing custom domain publishing, and how it's affected by applications mapped through various Google services, for a few years.

The well known "Another blog", and it's successor "Key already exists", have three possible causes.
  • Actual content, published to the URL.
  • Bogus DNS addresses.
  • Database corruption.

If you map a Google service to a URL in your domain, even temporarily, then simply disable the service, you can end up with a domain URL that remains mapped to the service. When you try to publish your blog to that URL, you're going to see "Another blog ..." or "Key already exists ...".

When there is an service mapped to a URL, that you need to use, reset the service.

Resetting a service is not difficult - as long as you have access to the dashboard, for the service that's mapped to your domain URL.
  1. Create a new DNS address in the domain.
  2. Enable the service.
  3. Change the service mapping, to the new address.
  4. Publish some content, using the service.
  5. Delete the published content.
  6. Disable the service.
  7. Re publish the blog, to the domain.
  8. You're done.


Create a new DNS address in the domain.
In this example, with the service being a Google Apps Engine project, we'll remap to "project.mydomain.com". Create a new "CNAME".
project.mydomain.com. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

Enable the service.
The service has to be enabled, for the settings to be changed.

Change the service mapping, to the new address.
Change the app to publish to "project.mydomain.com". This will free up the current URL, "mydomain.com" or "www.mydomain.com", so you can publish the blog.

Publish some content, using the service.
This ensures that the service remapping becomes active.

Delete the published content.
Be tidy, and remove residual content, before disabling the service.

Disable the service.
You are now done with the service - until you wish to continue working on it later.

Re publish the blog, to the domain.
Publish the blog back to the BlogSpot URL (if necessary), then again publish to the domain URL. And don't forget to redirect the domain root, if you just published to the primary domain URL (generally, the "www" alias).

You're done.
And finally, complete the migration.

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