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Mandevilla

Yesterday Blogger posted that the custom domain issue had been resolved. So I waited patiently (sort of) but continued to get the 404 error code when trying to access my blog. Meanwhile, back in the forums others were also griping about the fact that their blogs were still down. When I posted my issue in the forum I was asked by a moderator whether I had added a second CNAME. Come again? He then told me to go to my settings and add it. First of all, I have changed nothing in my settings. I explained to him that the reason I bought my domain name through Google is because they SAID I would not have to change anything, that they would do all the re-directing. Apparently after fixing whatever their big fiasco was, they decided we were all going to have to go in and change settings ourselves. Yay...

Now, I am asking myself...why in the world did they not come out with a set of simple instructions to walk us through this? Instead the poor guy in the forum is answering the same question over and over, and becoming increasing short (snotty) with people. Finally a woman in the forum (need I say more?) posted the steps she took to get her blog back up. Unfortunately Google must have sent her to Go Daddy for her domain name and not eNom where they sent me, because I am not seeing the two CNAMES for my blog located where she said they should be. What else would I expect?

So I have sent all the login information and copies of the forum posts out to my daughter in the hopes that she can figure it all out. I really did try to do this on my own, but I just don't get it. If she cannot fix it, then I am done with Blogger. I will see if the blog can be moved over to WordPress.

And the picture here? It doesn't really have anything to do with the post other than the fact that it kind of reminds me of giving Blogger the finger.

As I mentioned in my last post, I purchased a custom domain name for my Write Formation blog through Google on September 9th. That blog for all intents and purposes has disappeared. Being a non-techie I immediately assumed I had done something wrong, even though going this route was supposed to be dummy-proof. But once I went to the Google Forums for Blogger and checked in the "Something is Broken" discussion, it became abundantly clear that I am not alone in my frustration. There is a total lack of communication from Google regarding this huge problem. Apparently their DNS Server (which is what supports the Domain Name System) is down. Were they hacked like Go Daddy? Perhaps. What happened is not really important to me at the moment. My big issue is that even though a known problem existed, they continued to sell domain names to poor schmucks like me. That is just wrong. Even if Blogger had switched all of us back to our original blogger.com URLs, that would have been preferable to having the blogs disappear altogether. For a company the size of Google, this has all been extremely poor customer service. Come on Google - help out the little guy!

Kim Wolterman at Blogging for Authors

Over the weekend I presented information on blogging for authors to St. Louis Publishers Association members. I have written a post about it over at my Write Formation blog. Unfortunately you can't read it right now. I will get to the problem in a minute. As I was doing research in preparation for my presentation I learned about some things that need to be adjusted on my own blogs. For example, on myhousehistory.net my home page is static, meaning it does not change. It was designed that way on purpose as I wanted it to look like a website as opposed to just a blog. My blog posts are entered on the "How To" tab of the website which is several pages down in the site. While the website looks good, having the new posts so deep in the website means that the web crawlers which search for new material and thus have them appear in a Google search are probably not finding my posts. This answers some questions I have always had about why they don't appear in the Google Alerts I have set up, and perhaps why readers are not finding my site. I am currently looking into how to rectify that while still keeping the look that I want.

But what I also learned is that having a blog on blogger.com and not owning my own domain name is also hurting my search engine optimization results. For example, this blog is kimwolterman.blogspot.com which sends my Google "juice" to blogspot (AKA Blogger) instead of me. The way around that is to purchase the domain name kimwolterman.com (which I actually already own, by the way - just haven't used it on this blog), and have the blogspot.com site redirect to my domain name. I have not attempted any changes to this blog yet, but Saturday night I purchased writeformation.com directly through Google (which owns Blogger). The reason I did this is because they said they would take care of all the behind the scenes changes which need to be made for the re-directing.

Sounds easy, right? No such luck. The new domain name results in an error code when you type in the URL. That would be bad enough except that beginning yesterday even the old blogspot.com URL for my writing blog results in the error code. So no one can see my blog at all now. They had said it could take up to three days for the transfer to take place, but that in the meantime your old URL would work. Wrong! And this is why I never tried to change anything before now. I am certainly not going to mess around with changing the domain here until I get the other blog straightened out.

The St. Louis Genealogical Society had a meeting at the Viking Hotel yesterday on how to Google your family tree. The speaker Dan Lynch has, in fact, written a book coincidentally (not!) named "Google Your Family Tree". He is an excellent speaker and I learned a lot about how to more efficiently and effectively use Google. I typically use the Yahoo search engine because I like my Yahoo home page, but now that I know the power behind Google I will be surfing a whole new wave. I had no idea that there are numerous filters available to help you get a better search result.

Another interesting thing involves something called "cached", and I don't mean in a "Show me the money!" kind of way. Have you ever clicked on a web link only to get the dreaded error message that says this website is not available? Well, off to the side of the link listed in the search is the word "cached". If you click on it you will be taken to the static pages of what used to be shown on the website. Perhaps the information you are looking for is there, or at least a contact person so you see about getting the information. If a plus sign (+) shows up under a link in your search, that indicates that Google thinks that particular website has other pages relevant to your search.

When Dan got to the part of his presentation covering Google maps, it got pretty exciting. And not only because the fire alarms went off and we had to vacate the building for half an hour. (Fire trucks came but never did hear if it was the real deal.) Anyway, Dan went live online for this segment and it was amazing. Imagine going to the town in Ireland where your ancestors were from - from your own home. Or how about looking for landmarks when you are heading out to a store or business you haven't been to in the past. OR...what about if your are doing house research and want to see what the house looks like now??? I need to blog about that on my house history website for sure.

All in all, a very productive use of my Saturday. Let the searching begin!