The Real Blogger Status

Some bloggers, who want to publish their blog to a Google Custom Domain, elect to not purchase the domain using the " Buy A Domain " wizard, still decide to accept their domain DNS configuration from a third party - the domain registrar. Many registrars advise use of URL forwarding, and this is known to cause problems with Blogger . DaVe L, in Google Blogger Help - Publishing Trouble: 404 Error/Register.com domain issue , writes Since this past sunday, my blog www.shortandsweetnyc.com has been getting that 404 error when I enter the URL. I registered the domain name through register.com and have called them several times to try to figure out what the issue was. They have been telling me that everything is fine on their end and it looks like the problem is on blogger.com's end. And here we have yet a third incident involving Register.Com, in a single week . An HTTP access trace shows us: Sending request: GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: shortandsweetnyc.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0...

During the past week, we had an interesting experience where customers of Register.Com were reporting broken custom domains - domains that were using DNS service provided by Register. We traced the problem to a bogus address record , on a Register DNS server. ghs.google.com. 14400 IN CNAME ghs.google.com . Some time yesterday, the problem was, supposedly, fixed. Not. This morning, in reviewing the many threads in BHG: Something Is Broken, I see a reply in one thread I called Register.com again and walked through changing the DNS server settings one more time, and things are now working again. In the process of closing that problem, I did a final Dig on the domain, and found an interesting detail. ; > DiG 9.3.2 > @dns090.a.register.com www.theresmytwocents.com ANY ; (1 server found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER ;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.theresmytwocents.com. IN ANY ...

Most people, when setting up a new custom domain, simply use the " Buy A Domain " wizard, and end up with eNom or GoDaddy as a registrar. Neither eNom nor GoDaddy are foolproof, and some folks find new and exciting ways to make their domains not work. Neither the Custom Domain Reset Form, nor the Blogger Help Group, will be retired within this lifetime. For all their flaws, both eNom and GoDaddy are predictable, within limits. Some folks like to "roll their own", and use third party registrars, and " Advanced Settings ". Now, we have challenges. This evening, we have BHG: Something Is Broken: Custom domain suddenly not working We've had a custom domain set up perfectly for 2 years. Somehow this morning, with no changes to our DNS nor blogspot .. our blog is fubar. As usual, I start examining Dig logs (here, unabridged) for the domain. And, I find oddities. ; > DiG 9.3.2 > crackedsidewalks.com A ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer...