This post deals primarily with pointing your blog to either a domain name you purchased or a domain (or sub-domain) on your self-hosted site. You would still be using your original blog and it would still be on wordpress.com, but you could get it using your own domain name, like clear.bluedei.com instead of allthingsweb20.wordpress.com.

But WordPress.com doesn’t make it easy to understand all the nuances of redirecting. Here is a description from their blog. Ok, now do you understand? I don’t and I had no trouble whatsoever redirecting my google blogger blog. Also, there is conflicting information on different support pages.

In addition, they charge you to be able to redirect your blog. You can see the charges for this (and other upgrades) in the screen print below.

Per wordpress.com:

“You can map a subdomain to your WordPress.com blog for 9.97 credits ($9.97) per year. This is ideal for web administrators who already have a functioning website at a primary domain, example.com, and wish to use blog.example.com as the official domain/URL for their WordPress.com-powered blog. Note that you cannot map the “www” subdomain because WordPress.com removes the “www” from all URLs.”

Here is their support page for domain mapping, either through them or using your own domain name.  It seems pretty straightforward to follow their instructions for buying a domain name through them. If you buy the domain name from them and have them map your wordpress.com blog to that domain name,you should be able to follow these instructions and as long as you pay them $14.97 a year ($5.00 for registering a domain name and $9.97 to point your blog to the new name) , you should be good to go. You don’t have to worry about doing anything else in this post. But read the next couple of paragraphs before you decide on this.

For managing your domain that you created through them they offer this support page.  It’s confusing but if you bought through them, you may want to read it. One caveat with going this route is the statement I found in their documentation (although for the life of me I cannot find it now, I did not save the site I pasted it from and finding anything in wordpress.com support/forums/etc. is practically impossible). This is what it said about registering through them:

“You will be able to use any domain that you already control; you don’t have to register with us. Many people will be happier with other registrars because they offer fine DNS control. If you register a new domain with us, your domain will be usable for your blog only. You will be able to transfer your domain to another registrar, though not in the initial release. ”

I don’t like the sound of “your domain will be usable for your blog only”.  Maybe I’m misunderstanding it but if I paid for and registered a domain through them, I’d want to use it for whatever I wanted (like point it to another website or use it for my blogger blog instead or whatever). You also get limited functionality and I would hate to have to go through wordpress.com’s support to get answersto anything or any kind of support for my new domain.

So unless you really want a plug and play way to purchase a domain name and point your blog to it, I would not recommend buying a domain through them. You will get much better support and functionality by using a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy and for the same price or cheaper. But if you do decide to buy your domain name and have your blog redirected by them, following the relatively simple directions they provide, you don’t have to worry about doing anything else in this post.

But assuming you prefer to buy your own domain name through a different domain name registrar, you have a bit more set up to do.

After you have purchased your domain name (godaddy.com is as good as anywhere to do this)  you need to point the new domain name nameservers to wordpress.com.

There are different ways to add the nameservers depending on what registrar you are using.  Regardless, they will all use the nameservers below (step 6). You can also contact your domain name registrar or hosting service and have them set them for you.  The domain hosting service we use, inmotionhosting.com, does not allow us to change nameservers, CNAME records, etc on our own so we have to contact them and ask them to do it. Not ideal, but at least they are very responsive about making changes that you ask of them.

Here is how you would set the nameservers correctly for your GoDaddy.com domain name to point your wordpress.com blog to the new name:

NOTE: You can set nameservers for your Domain on the Product Dashboard, or the Domain Manager. To set nameservers on the Dashboard log in to your Account Manager, and select the Domains tab. Click the Domain you want to set nameservers for, and then click Nameservers.

To Set the Nameservers for Your Domain

1. Log in to your Account Manager.
2. In the My Products section, select Domain Manager.
3. Use the checkbox(es) to select the domain name(s) you want to modify.
4. Click Nameservers.
5. Select the following:

   I want to park my domains

   Specifies you want to park your domain on our parked servers. We automatically park your new domain registrations. The parked page displays when someone opens your domain from a Web browser.

   I want to forward my domains

   Specifies you want to forward this domain to another URL. For more information about forwarding domains, see Forwarding or Masking Your Domain .

   I have a hosting account with these domains

   Specifies your domain is hosted with us and you want to use our nameservers.

   I host my domains with another provider

   Specifies your domain is hosted with another company, and allows you to enter the company’s nameservers.

6. If you selected I host my domains with another provider, enter your nameservers. You must enter at least two nameservers for your domain.

NOTE: remove any existing name servers and add these:

NS1.WORDPRESS.COM
NS2.WORDPRESS.COM
NS3.WORDPRESS.COM

Click OK.

If you are pointing your blog to a subdomain (like clear.bluedei.com) instead of the domain (bluedei.com), you’ll need to add a CNAME record through your domain management on your host (if available). We are not allowed to add / change CNAME records ourselves through our host provider, inmotionhosting.com, so I contacted their support and asked them to do it for me.

The first wordpress.com support page that I went to said “Add a CNAME record through the registrar where you purchased your domain or through your DNS provider. You should NOT change your Name Server information if you wish to only map a subdomain. The CNAME should look something like the following (please note the fullstop character at the end of each domain name): subdomain.yourdomain.com. IN CNAME yourblog.wordpress.com”

So my CNAME record according to this would be “clear.bluedei.com. IN CNAME allthingsweb20.wordpress.com”.  But when I tried that and then tried to add that domain name in wordpress.com, I got the following error:

It was telling me that the correct syntax for the CNAME record was “clear 14400 IN CNAME allthingsweb20.wordpress.com”

So I had InmotionHosting set up this CNAME record “clear 14400 IN CNAME allthingsweb20.wordpress.com”

Now you need to point your wordpress.com blog to your new domain name.

1. After the name server change takes effect, go to Settings -> Domains in your blog’s dashboard, enter the domain into the form at the top of the page, and click the Add domain to blog button. If the name servers are verified, you will be prompted to purchase the required credits via PayPal and complete the upgrade/mapping process.
   

NOTE: you will know if it is not set up right because you’ll get an error when trying to add the domain name to your blog.

1. After you have made your purchase, go back to the Settings -> Domains page, select the radio button next to the domain you just mapped to your blog, and click the Update Primary Domain button.
2. 

Now when you type in your new domain (or subdomain) URL, you will see your original wordpress.com blog.

12/17/2009 And if you want to read an interesting take on this blog post, called “How to Airt your Blog to a different URL Portion 2: WordPress.” and clearly translated by Bigfoot (Bigfoot say “I not dead!”), follow the link. Sometimes I wonder…

Round and round. Take care,

~Susan Mellott

Well, a way to organize your posts and help people see what else you might have written about the same topic is to use Categories (in WordPress) or Labels (in Google Blogger). These can also be referred to as tags (or folksonomies…). An example of this is, say you wanted to see any posts I’d written about Harry Potter. You can go to my categories and click on “Harry Potter” (notice that it gives the number of posts that are tagged Harry Potter after the tag – this is an optional setting in your categories widget). Then you would go to this page that only contains all my posts that are categorized as “Harry Potter”.

You will probably end up needing to go back and check your categories and clean them up periodically so they are useful to get all posts from a certain topic and to regroup those that only have 1 post in a category. And sometimes you might want to add a category and then add that category to the posts pertaining to it after you find you have written a few more posts about something.

If you look at this blog or my Blogger test blog Along the Path to 2.0, you can see that I have a huge list on the right of my blog of all my labels (for this blog, click the arrow on the right of my categories list to drop down the list). Especially in Blogger, it is important to file under broader categories so you don’t end up with a huge list that only contains 1 post like I did. That is not how categories/labels should be used. They should group a number of like posts, not just 1 post.

When I first stated my blog, I categorized everything by a whole bunch of specific keywords and so my earliest posts don’t have useful categories. As an example, I categorized some posts under “google” and “analytics” where I should have categorized them either as “google analytics” or “blog stats” or something that puts them in a category that would group them with other similar posts. Doing the keywords separately means that searching under ‘google’ would give all posts about anything I tagged ‘google” (could be google blogger, google analytics, the google search engine, the company, etc). Now that is fine for a category since it does allow someone to find everything I posted about anything related to google, but doesn’t help for finding those posts about getting or using blog statistics.

There really is an art to categorizing your posts and it is a process of refining and redoing them regularly. It helps if you start out on the right foot, knowing some of these things. I didn’t when I started and I now have sort of a mess and really need to go back an correct them. When you have a lot of posts, it is really a pain in the butt to do that though since it is very time-consuming and you have to do each post individually. So if you start with some good categories, you will save yourself a lot of time!

How to create categories/labels:

WordPress

When you write a post, you have the ability to add categories/labels to your post to help identify and categorize it. You can select and add categories to your WordPress blog in the categories box to the right of where you write your posts. This is the same whether using a wordpress.com hosted wordpress blog or a wordpress.org self-hosted blog.

Blogger:

In Google Blogger (Blogspot), there is a text box at the bottom of where you compose your post that says “Labels for this post:” and you enter the labels you want to use

WordPress:

Then just make sure you have included a Categories widget (for WordPress) on your sidebar so people can use it to search by category. The picture to the left is a picture of my sidebar 2 (right sidebar) for my blog. You can see that under the “Odiogo Subscribe Button” widget is my “Categories” widget. I have it configured so that it uses a drop-down box to display my categories. If I click on the little horizontal lines on the right of the widget, it brings up a box that lets me choose if I want a drop-down box or just a list (which can take up a lot of room on your sidebar if you have a lot of categories), and lets me give it a title and show the number of posts in each category. It also lets me choose to Show Hierarchy which to be honest, I don’t really know what that does. It doesn’t change anything when I check it.

If you are using the default sidebars for your template, it will most likely already have a categories widget. If not, and you want to add it, be aware that if you add anything to a default sidebar, it will remove all the other widgets so you will have add them as well.

Also, the template I am using displays the categories that each post is filed under right under the title of the post (see example). So someone could read this post about Picnik and if they were interested in more information about Picnik, they could click on the category “Picnik” at the top of my post and get a list of all the posts that are filed under “Picnik”. Different templates work differently, some have them at the bottom of the post and some don’t include them at all. It is something to look for when choosing a template if you want to have the categories for each post listed. Not everyone uses them, but when I am visiting a blog, if I read a post about an interesting subject and want to know more, I will click on the appropriate category in the post list. Of course, if that isn’t available, I will use the category list on the side to see what else they might have.

Blogger:

To add a category widget (which is called a Label Page Element) in Blogger, you go to template–>page elements and click on “Add a Page Element” and choose the Label page element. You can click on edit to edit it but there isn’t a lot you can do in Blogger, basically just list either alphabetically or by frequency.

And to show the labels for each post in Blogger, choose ‘edit’ in the Blog Posts box on that window and check the “labels” box.

Also, the template I am using (and near as I can tell, most of the templates in Google Blogger) displays the categories that each post is filed under right under the title of the post (see example). So someone could read this post about Las Vegas internet access and if they were interested in more information about Las Vegas, they could click on the category “las vegas” at the top of my post and get a list of all the posts that are filed under “las vegas”.

So as you write your posts, think about what category/label would be useful to search your blog for other similar posts and file your post under those categories. It will help other people find things on your blog. And don’t forget to try it out on other people’s blogs too!

~Susan Mellott

But before that, Christopher was kind enough to leave a comment on Part 1 explaining how to simulate multiple link list widgets in WordPress. I knew that there was only 1 link list widget (blogroll) in wordpress, but what I didn’t know was that if you give the links you add different categories, it will break the list down by that category so it functions as different groups of links. You can see this in action on this blog. I have a list of links called Blogroll and another list of links called Life. You cannot separate the lists, they appear one after the other, but you can get different groups of links. So if you were a company, you could have one group called “Our Locations” and another called “Our Distributors” (as examples). The heading of each group is based on the name you used for the category.

As Chris points out: Just go to the blogroll in the admin and select categories. Add a category for whatever topic you want like ‘books’ and add the new links to that category. They will show up as their own list. These instructions are actually for a wordpress.com hosted wordpress blog, but it is very similar if you have a self-hosted wordpress.org blog. Go to Admin—>Blogroll and add or edit a link. When you are on the page to set up the link, pick (or add) the category for the link from the list at the right and when you save it, it will show up with that category as the name of the list it is under. You can also do this if you have a wordpress.com blog, but only if you have already added the category previously. If not, you have to add the category through admin—>Blogroll—>Categories first. I don’t know why wordpress.com makes you do that extra step, but it does.

Anyway… On to sub-pages!

A sub-page is a page that has another page as its parent other than the main page. This is used to relate a set of pages to a particular page other than your main blog. As an example, you can see how I have set up an “Our Travel” page that appears in the list at the top of my blog. All pages that are sub-pages of other pages do not appear in the main heading of the blog. That lets my “Our Travel” be a completely different section of my blog and is similar to a website. In fact, this lets you almost use your blog as a website with more information than just your blog. You can keep lots more on your blog than just posts.

In Google Blogger, you cannot create pages, so obviously, you can’t create sub-pages either. But there are still things you can do to simulate sub-pages and/or use your blog for more than just a blog. One thing you can do is to create a back-dated post (see Part 1) as say, your “Locations” page that you put in your “Pages” link list in your sidebar. Then you can create several more posts with your different locations and then add links in the text of that post to each of your locations posts. You can get an idea of that by looking at my “Our Travel” page. I have added links on it to my sub-pages for 1996 and 1997. And on my 1996 sub-page, I added links to additional sub-pages for each of our travels in 1996. You can do the same thing in Blogger, by just substituting back-dated posts for sub-pages.

Another thing you could do is create a link list called “Locations” and then add links to each of the back-dated posts you have created for each location. Then you could add another link list for say, “Distributors” and add links to a post about each distributor (or a link to their site). Anyway, you get the idea. Pretty much the only thing you don’t get is the list of pages across the top of your blog like you do in WordPress.

On to WordPress: In WordPress, you can create actual sub-pages that are attached to a page and that won’t show up in the tabs across the top of your blog (only pages that have the main page as a parent show up on the top). What this means is that you have to have a “Pages” widget in your sidebar in order to access these sub-pages (unless you link to them from within the text of your page, which I have also done in my Our Travels pages).

In most WordPress themes (both wordpress.com and self-hosted wordpress), in the pages widget, it will show all your pages, with the sub-pages indented below each page they belong to. Unfortunately, this particular theme Prosumer 1.4 that I am using does not do that. All pages show at the same level in my Pages list. That really isn’t very nice and it is much nicer when they are appropriately indented. Hopefully they will fix it at some point. If you go to my All Things Web 2.0 wordpress.com blog, you can see how it looks indented. And here is a clip of the Pages sidebar widget from my wordpress.com blog.

Doesn’t that look a lot nicer than the one in this theme? I do like this theme though so I put up with some idiosyncrasies.

And for self-hosted WordPress blogs, there are several plugins that you can use in place of your standard “Pages” widget. It is a little tricky to install a plugin on your self-hosted blog because you have to get the widget files from their site and then upload it to your own site where your blog is. If you aren’t familiar or comfortable with doing that, you can just use the regular “Pages” widget.

My favorite is the Flexi Pages widget by Srini G. It has several option for displaying that the regular Pages widget doesn’t have.

You can name the list whatever you want. And have a lot of different sort options such as by Page Title, Menu Order, Date Created, etc. You can also pick certain pages that you don’t want to show up in the list. You can have an entry on your page list to the home page (main blog) and call it whatever you like. The rest is pretty self-explanatory (except that the theme I’m using doesn’t indent the pages regardless of whether or not it is chosen).

The custom depth level means how many sub-pages of sub-pages down you want to show. Blank means all of them. You can see that I have entered -3. That is a little trick that is not really explained or mentioned that I found buried in the widget information. You can see how it works by clicking on my Flexipage widget to go to other pages. Here is what it does (from the info):

“Have the child pages, parent pages, sibling pages and top level pages displayed on a page while still leaving out the siblings of parent pages. This is not possible with older versions. Version 1.2 doesn’t include this as an ‘option’ though. You have to specify the ‘Custom depth’ as -3 to achieve this.”

Another Pages widget is the MultiPages Widget by Jerome LeCoq. It is more difficult to use because you have to know the ID of each page (which you can find by going to Admin–>Manage–>Pages and the ID is the number on the left of the title. It doesn’t really give you any extras over the flexipage widget either, except that you can have up to 9 of the multipage widgets. So unless you need more than 1 page list, the FlexiPage widget is the best and easiest of these two. Here is what the setup looks like for the MultiPage plugin:

And if you look at the very bottom of the Admin–>Presentation–>Widgets page, that is where you choose how many instances of the widget you want. NOTE: This is also where you choose how many of various other widgets you want also. I always forget where it is when I need to increase the number of a widget, like if I need more text widgets.

You can see how these different widgets/plugins work by looking at my left sidebar of my blog.

So try out some pages and increase the power of your blog!

~Susan Mellott

If you add them to your blog, they get mixed in with everything else. If you try to add them to your sidebar, you don’t really have much room or many options. This way, you can have a list at the top of your blog and on your sidebar with “Events”, “Location”, “Schedule”, “About Us”, “Help”, etc. (NOTE: Blogger doesn’t support adding pages, but there are ways to simulate pages that I explain below).

WORDPRESS: The first page you might add to your blog and the most common, is the “About Me” page. I cannot remember now, but I think that wordpress might already have one added for you, although you need to go edit it to add your information. See instructions below for editing or adding a page.

To add a new page, such as “Books I am reading”, you would go to your wp-admin (dashboard) and choose “Manage” and then “Pages”. You will see a list of all the pages you have so far and here you can view, edit or delete them. You could choose to edit your “About Me” page to add content, or to change the title or whatever you would like to do. It is just like creating or editing a post.

Or you can choose “Create new Page” which will take you to a page that looks like the page you get when you want to write a new post. You can give the new page a title (such as “Books I am Reading”) and can write whatever you want to appear on that page. NOTE: You can also go to Write—->Pages to create a new page.

When you publish it, you will see at the top of your blog, a new tab that says “Books I am Reading”. If you click on that tab, you will see your new page. Each theme is a little different but pretty much all of them do this.

You can also add a widget to your sidebar that lists your pages. If you go to Presentation—->Widgets, you can drag and drop the Pages widget into your sidebar and it will give you a list of your pages in your sidebar.

NOTE: If you are using the default sidebar(s) with your blog, dropping a new widget on it will make your default sidebar go away so you will have to set it up yourself by dragging and dropping the widgets on it that you had before. This lets you customize your sidebars pretty easily, but if you don’t want to mess with it yet, don’t add the widget. Your pages will appear at the top of your theme anyway.

Check it out on this blog. You can see the pages listed across the top of my blog and the list of pages in the left sidebar of my blog. You can also see that there are more pages listed in the sidebar than at the top. That is because these are sub-pages that are under “Our Travels”. You can see how they are indented under their main page. In Part 2 of this article I will explain sub-pages and how to add them.

Another way to add pages that are not on your blog is to make a list of links under your Blogroll to those pages. This is one place where I don’t understand WordPress. They don’t have a links widget where you can just add a list of links and name it “ACPL Branches” or “Other Library Sites” or whatever. You have the blogroll and that is it. You can, however, make a new page and call it Information or ACPL Branches, etc. and add the links there.

GOOGLE BLOGGER: Google Blogger doesn’t allow multiple pages, which really surprises me. I really did not realize that until I started writing about this. If you really want to have multiple pages (and especially sub-pages, which I will cover in my Part 2 of this article), you may want to consider moving to WordPress.

Each blog engine has its advantages and disadvantages (see my 3-part review of blog engines) but if this is really important and this workaround doesn’t suit your needs, moving to WordPress.com is an option. The nice thing about going from Blogger to WordPress.com is that WordPress.com has a nice Import feature that lets you easily move all your Blogger posts into your new WordPress blog. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn’t have that for moving from WordPress, although there are tools to let you do it.

Anyway, here is something you can do in Blogger to create ‘Pages’.

Go to Settings—->Archiving—–>Enable post pages—–>Yes—>Save. Then just create a post to create a new page. You can call it whatever you want. Backdate it so that it does not appear on the Main page. It will still be in your blog, but as the first post if you backdate it far enough. See the picture for where you change the date. It is in the lower right hand corner. The picture is a picture of the page post being created. Click on the picture to see it full-sized.

Now you need to get the permanent link for this post. If you go to Posting—->Edit Posts and select “Oldest” on the top right of the list of posts, you will see your new post as the first (oldest) post in your list. Click on View for that post and it will take you to the post. Now copy the URL (link) to that post (in the text box at the top of your browser). You will use it to paste into the page element you create below as the link to your ‘page’.

Now go to Template—->Page Element and add a Link List element to your sidebar. You can call it something like “Pages” and for the link, add the URL to the post you just created and name it whatever you want, like “About Me”. As you add page posts and links, you will get a list that looks similar to a Pages sidebar widget in WordPress (although it will not list each page across the top like WordPress).

One thing you will note if you use the Archives page element in your sidebar, is that it will show up there. I added my Google Blogger “About Me” post by just changing the year to 2001 instead of 2007. You will see in my archives list that I have 2001/November listed with my About Me post. If you pick some date for all your new ‘pages’ (like 1/1/2000), they will just all fall under that which is best. If you pick random dates then you will have a whole bunch of different dates show up in your Archive list.

If you look at my Google Blogger blog Along the Path to 2.0, you can see this in action. The first ‘page’ on my list is actually a blog post. The second ‘page’ on my page list is a link to a page on this (my WordPress) blog. That is another way to add pages. As an example, if you have a blog and a website, you can link to information on a page on the website. If you already have an events or location or about page or home page you can link to it from your blog under your Pages list (or whatever you choose to call it, maybe Information or whatever makes sense).

In Part 2 of this article I will explain sub-pages and how to add and use them.

~Susan Mellott

Sara left me a comment and a link to Snope’s Hoaxes, Viruses and Urban Legends page about this picture and caption. It turns out that this is not from 1954 Popular Mechanics, nor is it what the RAND scientists envision the home computer to look like in the year 2004. Here is what Snope’s has to say about the photo:

“Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a “home computer” might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn’t, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype “home computer.” The picture is actually an entry submitted to a Fark.com image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo)”

The original color picture was taken in 2000 at the Smithsonian Institution exhibit “Fast Attacks and Boomers: Submarines in the Cold War” and depicts: full-scale display of a typical nuclear-powered submarine’s maneuvering room in which the ship’s engineers control the power plant and electrical and steam system.

I always, always check out every email about viruses and the like before sending them on. But I forgot to check this one before posting it. I generally get all my information from verified sources so I didn’t think to check this out. And I forgot that posting something is different than just forwarding on an email.

Well, live and learn! This is a very good lesson for me and I am glad I learned it (although I wish it was not in such a public manner).

Blogging is very much like writing a newspaper column and requires the same verification of sources and attention to detail. It isn’t like email where you can just forward something interesting.

This is definitely a lesson learned for me and not just that all sources need verified, but that blogging is reporting and a reporter needs to be sure they have their facts straight and need to be highly professional at all times in their approach, at least those bloggers who are trying to provide information for other people and not just using it as a diary or such.

So while this was learning the hard way, I hope it helps you avoid this problem for yourself and you can bet I will be more careful about this, and especially will verify email sources in the future.

~Susan Mellott