The Real Blogger Status

Now that custom domain publishing is once again available , though without the option to buy a domain through Blogger , too many anxious Blogger blog owners are asking the obvious question How do I buy a domain? Not a lot of blog owners want to be told Contact the registrar of your choice. The backup to "Buy a domain" would be to buy a domain directly from a registrar - however, this presents too many challenges to the casual blog owner. (Update 2012/10/09): "Buy a domain for your blog" is once again part of the Publishing wizard. Fortunately, there is a substitute to "Buy a domain", available through Google. Google Apps - which is the support organisation for "Buy a domain" itself - provides the option to buy a domain, along with the Google Apps Dashboard. Google Apps does not use easy to remember URLs, unfortunately.

This blog, "blogging.nitecruzr.net", is a domain under the generic Top Level Domain ".net". There are many Top Level Domains on the Internet, some generic , others country related . When we setup a new domain, we purchase the domain through a registrar. Registrars maintain the necessary relationships with the operators of the various TLDs. Not all registrars maintain a relationship with every TLD in the Internet. Some country code TLDs, such as ".me" and ".to", have a lingual value which makes them of interest to people outside the country which is associated with the TLD itself. The ".me" (Montenegro) and ".to" (Tonga) TLDs are ones which use two letter abbreviations which are meaningful in the English speaking world; similarily, there have been other TLDs popular in French and Spanish. Registering a domain in such ccTLDs may command a premium price because of their popularity, just as some generic TLD domain names have...

This blog is " blogging.nitecruzr.net ". It is published as a virtual host in the domain "nitecruzr.net". We say that the URL element "nitecruzr.net" is the domain name. The URL component "net" is significant, and in Internet terminology is called a Top Level Domain ("TLD").

Now that the Blogger Custom Domain product is maturing, and the bugs are slowly being worked out, the special needs of people not in the USA are becoming visible. Right now, if you have registered "mydomain.com", and setup a proper "CNAME" referral, you'll probably want to use either "www.mydomain.com" and "mydomain.com", interchangeably. All things being equal, you probably can, though some work may be involved . But what if you registered "mydomain.co.us", or "mydomain.co.uk"? Could you redirect "www.mydomain.co.us" or "www.mydomain.co.uk" as easily? Recently, Blogger Employee provided good news We do support 2 level TLDs. Maybe we should ask what specific TLDs are supported, and under what conditions are they supported. >> Top