Finally, it all works!
Domain mapping is now active for my blogs (and photo albums):
- Main blog - NevOn: www.nevon.net
- This blog - NevOn Experimental: www.nevon.net/experimental/
The underlying TypePad addresses that you may have in your blogroll or favorites still work. Any links to specific posts in my blogs that use those addresses will also still work and reach those pages. The RSS feed will continue to work as it is, as well as those feeds via services like Feedburner and NewsGator.
So you don't really need to change anything if you prefer not to.
It was a painful two-week journey to get here. And, as I learned, the various difficulties I had were all of my own making and related to an incorrect setting I'd made in the DNS entries at my domain host, GoDaddy.
If it hadn't been for that error, this whole switchover would have been wholly painless and as simple and straightforward as following TypePad's domain mapping help. Special thanks to Melissa at TypePad Support for helping me finally get here.
So what did I do wrong? Well, it was a simple error but with terminal consequences.
In GoDaddy's DNS manager settings, I had set the alias in one of the CNAME entries like this:
What the alias should have been was this:
As Melissa explained it to me:
Alias: Weblog
Points to: nevon.typepad.com
That will point to:
weblog.nevon.net
Typically we recommend people point the Alias to www.
Seeing the explanation that simple way made it easier to understand what this CNAME setting means. So I deleted the incorrect alias and edited the setting to be 'www.'
Waited 24 hours for the DNS to take into account the change and then tried it today. Voila!
The other good news is that I don't need to change anything either in how ecto or BlogJet - the offline editing apps I use - connect to my blogs. The existing settings still work, so nothing to change or re-configure there.
It all could have been such a painless experience ;)
I had the same issue and posted a long how to as well. http://www.bloggingbusiness.com/2005/03/domain_mapping_.html
Posted by: John Jantsch | 10 March 2005 at 13:27
Thanks John. Your guide is great. If anyone reads both our posts, I'd say they would be able to do all this pretty simply!
Posted by: Neville Hobson | 11 March 2005 at 15:48
Talk about a fresh o' the ol' fresh air. I'd been wondering about similar problems for a while - stylesheet seeming not to load sometimes, errors in RSS feeds, etc. I just made the CName edits above - here's hoping the next 24 hours bring good news. Thanks for posting about your situation and helping the rest of us monkeys out there.
Posted by: Anthony St. Clair | 25 March 2005 at 18:18