Create sub-domain with custom domain

If you are just interested to know how to create sub-domain, skip directly to How to create sub-domain

A blogger's complaint that the static page he created has unwanted expandable post summary (if I understand him correctly is the push I needed to finally write this post on sub-domain. He suspect it may have something to do with the fact that he is using a template with built-in expandable post summary (again if I understand him correctly. He may be right but it looks that the static page one created via Blogger uses the same template.

Anyway I figure his solution might be to abandon blogspot and upgrade to custom domain and create a sub-domain instead as the sub-domain can use any template which may or may not be the same as the original. It is practically a separate independent website. Look at the one I created recently faq.bloggertipsandtricks.com/ (still under construction). If you go to BT&T FAQ which is the title of that sub-domain, you may see me using the same template, but the blog title, sidebars, etc are different from Blogger Tips and Tricks.

A bit more rambling. While for a long time, Blogger.com was negatively compared with Wordpress, since it abandoned the old classic template and forced everyone to upgrade to the new Blogger xml templates, Blogger has improved by leaps and bounds. Not only that, now coupled with Google Apps, you have a very easy "content management system" to create many things without getting too technical. In fact, I know that Google (here in Malaysia anyway) is working with a students from a University to help SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) using Blogger and Google Apps to create >websites for businesses.

How to create sub-domain

First you must upgrade to custom domain and I would suggest you not register directly your domain using other domain registra but do it via Blogger.com and Google Apps and you will find lots of what you need to do is automated for you by Blogger.com. No need to struggle with CNames, etc. etc.

Once you have a custom domain, make sure you create an administrator account (email). Instructions should be emailed to you. Once you have created that administrator account, either log into that email or log into https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com, making sure to replace yourdomain with the actual URL of your blog. If you ever forgot your admin password, refer to Google Apps "forgot password". (I somehow prefer to sign into my admin email, then click "Manage this domain" to get into the CPanel).

In Google Apps Control Panel, click the Domain Settings tab



and in the following window, click Domain Settings tab:



In the window after clicking the Domain Settings tab, the name of your domain registra will be shown. Below that, there will be an Advanced DNS Settings link. Click it



Click "Advanced DNS Settings" and the next screen will give you the password and username of your domain registra:



Click "Sign into DNS Console" and in the next window will be the login page of your domain registra's:

Copy-paste the username and password, click "Secure login" and presto, you are signed into the Advanced DNS Settings of your respective domain registra:



Click the particular domain to which you want to add a sub-domain, and in the next window:



Click "Total DNS Control" and in the next window, under "CNames Aliases", click "Add New CName record"



then type in the sub-domain (eg. faq.yourdomain.com), and for Points to Host Name: enter ghs.google.com, click OK and you are done. Congrats, you have created a sub-domain for your blog.

Top 22 Money-Saving Firefox Extensions

Bloggers don't live in an ivory tower insulated to all the vagaries of life on earth. That includes $$$$$ plus that thing we need to connect with the web - the browser. Firefox was the very first browser with tabbed browsing for me and is my favorite (that is, until Google Chrome burst onto the scene) browser.

So when I received an email telling about this Top 22 Money-Saving Firefox Extensions and asking if I would let my readers know about it, I thought, why not, especially we can save a bit of money or time (time is money), so there you are.

If you do use any of those tips, I would be extremely grateful if you can leave a comment here to let us know of your experience.

Spam blogs deletion & self-hosted blogs

This post has been transferred to Blogger for Dummies: Spam blogs deletion and self-hosted blogs

Web Host Rating comparison

There are now more and more businesses using blogging software as some kind of CMS (content management systems) to setup and manage their website, my son's security business for example which will be using Blogger.com. And for most cases where the requirements are not too demanding, it is sufficient. This is especially true now for Blogger.com since it has upgraded from using the old classic template to the new xml template plus teamed up with Google Apps.

Currently, that Blogger.com powered website is hosted free of charge by Blogger. Going down this route means no direct access to the web servers hosting his blog/website. But if ever he need direct access to the web servers such as for certain database operations, he will have to think of self-hosting his website which means the need to find a reliable web host at reasonable cost.

Fortunately there are websites offering web host rating making the task of selecting web host slightly easier. The more consistent the ratings, the more confidence we should have of their ratings. Below is a comparison between 2 web host rating websites:

Rank	WebHostRating	WebHostingGeek
1	InMotion Hosting	Inmotion
2	FatCow	iPage
3	Just Host	JustHost
4	Web Hosting Pad	WebHostingPad
5	HostClear	FatCow
6	IX Webhosting	GreenGeeks
7	BlueHost	Bluehost
8	HostMonster	Hostmonster
9	Acenet	GoDaddy
10	Globat	Yahoo

We can see that the ratings are fairly consistent. And similarly in the 2 sidebars, there are similarly links to different ratings according to different purposes or criteria such as Best Blog Hosting and Best Forum Hosting, something (forum) I am considering for this blog itself.

Why self hosted blogs and web host ratings

When you can register and use your own domain for you blog (custom domain) and Blogger can host your blog for you gratis (free), it makes me wonder why would anyone still wants to use the outdated classic Blogger template, host the blog themselves and use the more cumbersome FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to publish their posts. Hosting the blog ourselves means we have to pay monthly charges, amount of storage, worry about whether the bandwidth we purchased is sufficient, worry about the reputation of the web host, security, down time and a host of other issues.

In any case, old classic Blogger template will soon be history as Blogger is stopping support, so if you want to insist on hosting the blog yourself, you will have to migrate your blog to Wordpress.org or any of the other blogging software.

The question of why anyone would want self-hosted blogs still remains. I tried some research, but it mainly turned up posts that are way off track because they discussed pros and cons between free blogspot.com or wordpress.com blogs which are sub-domains of Blogger and Wordpress versus blogs like this (www.bloggertipsandtricks.com, no blogspot in URL) which even though uses my own domain, is hosted by Blogger.com free). One example of a post not hitting the mark is 10 Reasons to Self Host Your Own Blog.

That leaves to think up of old issues encountered in the past plus guesswork. I remembered us trying to Google sitemap for our blog. The method described is but a workaround using the RSS/Atom feed and is not a real Google sitemap. For that you need direct access to the server which we bloggers using custom domain don't have.

So the crucial item is direct access to the server which would be needed if whatever you want need you to directly control what goes on in the backroom behind the scene with your blog. Such as you need that when a visitor fills in a form and the database is altered, based on some preset conditions, some events are set into motion and displayed to the visitor.

At the moment, I am toying with the idea of creating a forum as a sub-domain of one of the blog I am helping manage and I suspect that may need to be self-hosted. If you know of any other reasons which forces self-hosting, please let us know by leaving a comment.

Very few bloggers would need that, but if you ever do, then it is time to self-host and its attending headaches. So I just wonder if this web host rating is at least a partial solution for your headaches. What caught my eyes are those Best this and Best that categories in that website, in particular, the Best Blog Host and since I am thinking of setting up a forum, the Best Forum Host. Unfortunately, I could not find any references as to why these 2 were chosen as the Best Blog Host or the Best Forum Host. I think I will shoot off an enquiary to them.

Create static Blogger Pages for Contact Form, About, privacy, etc

Definition of static page: A web page that is not modified by an application server before the page is sent to a browser. and do not employ dynamic technologies (like PHP, ASP, Perl...).

"I'm new to blogging, how do you create a contact me form on a separate page on your blog, without it showing up as a post or in the Archives."

The above question is the kick I needed to finally write this post about Static Pages which will be very useful for stuff like contact form or an About page, etc. especially if you don't want them to appear in the blog archive or irritate those who subscribe to your RSS feed with too much notifications as static pages will not be part of the normal post although the way to create these static pages is almost the same as ordinary posts.

To do this currently, you must switch to Blogger in Draft (UPDATE: According to Sean McCullough: Blogger Buzz, PAGES is no longer confined to Blogger in Draft to, and you can now create static PAGES in your standard Blogger Dashboard) and sign into your Blogger account and click on the New Post tab to open the post editor. However, this time, you will see an extra tab in the Blogger in Draft post editor, namely Edit Pages tab and below that, a NEW PAGE tab.



Clicking NEW PAGE will open the PAGE EDITOR which looks exactly like the normal post editor except instead of POST TITLE there is a field for entering the PAGE TITLE. Prepare the static page just like you would a normal post and click publish. You would then choose get the link to the static page either in BLOG SIDEBAR or as BLOG TAB below the header or NO GADGET (link pages manually)



Click SAVE AND PUBLISH and your static page will be publish but not as normal post which will appear in the blog archive and will not trigger your RSS feed to inform your subscribers that there is a new "post".

I have chosen for this blog, NO GADGET (link pages manually) and what you will see in this blog header is the horizontal navigation bar I manually added and which currently has 3 tabs, | HOME | CONTACT | PRIVACY POLICY | of which only one CONTACT is a static page. The other 2 were created earlier as ordinary post (I may change it later).

If you want to link pages manually, refer to Creating simple text horizontal navigation bar. One advantage of using this option is that you can link to any website you choose like what I have recently done and will not be constraint to only pages create in this blog which would be the case if you choose the following 2 options.

To show you what the other 2 choices would look like, refer to the screen shots below:

Static page tabs (HOME CONTACT PRIVACY) in sidebar

Now I experiment with dragging the Pages gadget from below the blog Header right into the blog Header itself, hoping to create a horizontal menu bar inside the blog Header itself, but unfortunately that is not to be, for the horizontal tabs arrangement change into a vertical one (see screen shot below). If you prefer the pages tabs created by Blogger to be within the Blog Header, you will have to use the manual method plus create a horizontal navigation bar.

Static Pages tabs (HOME CONTACT) changed into vertical bar of tabs

Tip: Editing old post and using the HTML comment tags to hide the original

A blogger asked: "if a do a post/message in blogger. And after I rewrite this post. But more later I want to replace (substirute) the rewrited post by the first original post. How can I do it?"

I assume the above implies frequent editing of old post and the possibility of reverting to the earlier/previous edition after editing. Now the problem is the previous edition would most probably have been overwritten by Blogger.com's automatic saving, so how to revert to the earlier/older edition?

Here is what I would suggest. Suppose I now want to edit an old post. What I would do will be to first copy-paste the whole original post within the same post under editing with one following the other so that there will be 2 duplicate copies of the post with duplicate below the original.

Now I would surround duplicate with a pair of the comment tag <!-- and --> like this (anything that is surrounded by the pair of comment tags will not be displayed by any browser):

Enviroman says: "We must take very good care of our 1 and only Spaceship Earth without lifeboat. Where can we go if something terrible happen to our spaceship and it become unlivable? What will we leave behind for our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? What kind of legacy are we leaving behind?
<--
Enviroman says: "We must take very good care of our 1 and only Spaceship Earth without lifeboat. Where can we go if something terrible happen to our spaceship and it become unlivable? What will we leave behind for our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? What kind of legacy are we leaving behind?
-->

Perhaps for extra measures, we may append an Version note and date, like for example, Version 1.0 14 February 2010, so it become

Enviroman says: "We must take very good care of our 1 and only Spaceship Earth without lifeboat. Where can we go if something terrible happen to our spaceship and it become unlivable? What will we leave behind for our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? What kind of legacy are we leaving behind?
<--
Version 1.0 14 February 2010:
Enviroman says: "We must take very good care of our 1 and only Spaceship Earth without lifeboat. Where can we go if something terrible happen to our spaceship and it become unlivable? What will we leave behind for our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? What kind of legacy are we leaving behind?
-->

And now we can confidently edit the first duplicate and if we don't like what we did, all we have to do is to discard it and remove the pair of comment tags to make the original display.

If you don't like the above method, perhaps you can copy-paste the original post to be edited into a new post, then save the original as draft. If you don't like the new edited post, then discard it, go back to the draft and republish it.