I’ve been contemplating for a long time on whether to migrate this blog to WordPress. In fact, I’m still on a limbo here. It would be good to finally move on to another platform which I know will be better, but I’ve had this template for years now, and I can’t seem to let it go.

Decisions, decisions.

On a unrelated postscript, I have to stop reading mummy blogs. It’s making me broody, which I shouldn’t be at the moment. Gah.

Last week gave me quite a scare.

I was just tinkering about my blog last week and decided to move some files via FTP to my webhost. I no longer host my beauty blog on Blogger, and have moved to a separate webhost instead and migrated to WordPress. With my own webhost, I could essentially host my other blogs on it too, without having to purchase a new one.

Anyway, so there I was, transferring some files on my FTP client, FileZilla, and I have absolutely no idea what happened next, or how it even happened, but I accidentally deleted my public_html folder. This folder had my beauty blog files in it, and the next thing you know, I could access my blog no longer.

I had, somehow, manage to delete my blog.

I felt as though my entire stomach and heart were ripped out of me. I had a panic attack. I did not just delete over a year’s work, did I?!

I immediately shot an email to my blogging guru and saviour, Edrei, who then reassured me that as long as my mySQL database was intact, my posts and comments would still remain untouched. I heaved a huge sigh of relief, because I don’t know what I would do if I were to lose over a year’s worth of work. Hard work too, mind you.

Thank God, I had a backup of my blog files somewhere in my computer. I had the files stored away in my computer just before upgrading to WordPress 2.7. Essentially, I only lost a month’s worth of changes I made to the settings and plugins of the blog. As all my photographs were hosted on Photobucket, I didn’t lose any of the pictures used in my posts.

After an hour of transferring the files back to the server via FTP, and adding the changes, my blog was finally back to normal. My heart and stomach slowly crawled their way back into my body.

Let this be a lesson to all of us. Back up your work, and back up often. Also, do not put all your eggs into one basket. Keep your files in separate servers if possible. If I were to put all of my photographs in the public_html folder, I would have lost ALL of them if I hadn’t backed them up. Also, retrieving lost files from your webhost could be very expensive. I contacted Lunarpages (my webhost) if they could retrieve a backup of my files. They replied that files retrieval would cost me US$75. Oh boy.

So back up, back up, BACK UP. Whether it’s your work, your blog, etc. Anything you put a lot of hard work and effort in deserves at least that bit of security measure.

This post was requested by Zewt, on custom domain name setup for Blogger using domain names purchased at Godaddy.com.

If you’ve purchased your own domain name, congratulations! Nothing like your own lil’ dot com on that wide space called the Internet, eh? If, like me, you would like to continue to Blogger as your web host but using your own domain, well, that works too if you’re on relatively tight budget. I would still recommend you to move to your own web host and to WordPress though. I’m still searching for the best deals on web hosts, and when I do, I’ll be moving my blogs over to WordPress.

But for now, Blogger works just fine, and if you’d still like to hang on to Blogger for a bit, here’s how to set up your custom domain name on your blog using Blogger.

According to Blogger.com, to use a custom domain name on your blog would be to

Buy your own domain, and create a CNAME record for it to point to ghs.google.com (unless you buy the domain through Blogger).
Enter your domain in the ‘Custom Domain’ option on the Settings | Publishing tab.

You can read the full details here, which I highly recommend, but in the interest of saving time, I’ve included screenshots of how to set up your custom domain name on Blogger. Bear in mind that the instructions below are specified for domains purchased from Godaddy.com, but the general settings, like creating the CNAME record, etc, would be the same.

DNS stands for Domain Name System, and a DNS server determines what site a given address takes you to. So far, you have a domain name but none of the servers on the internet know what to do with it yet. To take care of this, you need to create a CNAME record for your domain with the DNS, associating your domain with ghs.google.com.

You can also read the full details of the setup here. I’ll be using the instructions as shown in Blogger.com, and include screenshots which would hopefully aid you in your domain name setup.

GODADDY DOMAIN NAME SETUP

1. Log in to your account at www.godaddy.com

2. Open the Domains tab and select My Domains. You’ll be directed to the Domain Manager page.

3. Click the domain that you’d like to use with your blog. (here you will see the three domain names which I already have. For explanation’s sake, I shall be using www.beautyholicsanonymous.com)

4. Click the Total DNS Control And MX Records link at the bottom of the section entitled Total DNS.

5. Click Add New CNAME Record in the box labelled CNAMES (aliases). If you’ve already created a CNAME record for your blog’s address, click the pencil icon next to the existing CNAME record. (The reason I blanked the words out is that I’ve already created a CNAME record for the domain. Before you add a new CNAME record for your domain, this is what you should see).

6. For the Name, enter only the subdomain of the address you want to use for your blog. For example, if you picked www.mydomain.com as your address, enter www here.
7. Enter ghs.google.com as the Host Name. Specify a TTL or use the default setting of 1 hour.

8. Click OK, and then click OK again.

You should now see the added CNAME record.

That’s pretty much it for your domain setup on Godaddy.

BLOGGER.COM SETUP

1. Go to Blogger.com, click on Settings on the blog in which you bought the domain name for, and then click on Publishing.

2. Click on Switch to Advanced Settings.
3. Type in your new domain name.

4. Click on Save Settings.

If nothing goes wrong, your domain should be up and running within 5 to 10 minutes. When you click on your blogspot address, you’d be directed to your new address instead.

There ya go, your very own domain name on Blogger. Just holler if you have any questions, or faced any problems.

Good luck!