The backstory is here.
I decided to move Errbear.Com, my music publishing company’s web site, from FTP published Blogger to a Blogger Custom Domain. Here’s how I did it, and my initial thoughts. I’ll update this post as the process continues.
After getting encouragement from my friends Rick and Louis, I started out at the Blogger Custom Domain instruction page.
Step 1: Converting to a Blogspot.com address
From the Blogger Dashboard, select Publishing and click on “Switch to blogspot.com.” You will be sent to a form to pick blog name.
I picked errbear.blogspot.com, which thankfully was available. This step was very easy and took about 5 seconds.
Step 2: Configuring Your Custom Domain Settings
Again, from the Blogger Dashboard, select Publishing and click on “Switch to Custom Domain.” Then, since you already own your domain, click on Advanced Settings.
I want to direct the entire errbear.com address to my Custom Domain-managed blog, so I selected www before errbear.com. This step was also fast and easy.
Step 3: Make the CName and A Record Changes
This part is done via your domain registrar’s web site. And things get a little more complicated, but fear not, we’ll walk through it.
First, the CName change. I use Network Solutions, but the process is very similar everywhere.
From your domain management page, select the domain you want to use for your Custom Domain and then click the button or link to edit the domain’s DNS. Depending on your registrar, you may need to then click on Advanced Settings (or some similar phrase).
Create a CName Record for your Custom Domain that points to ghs.google.com. Again, because I want to direct the entire errbear.com address to my Custom Domain-managed blog, so I used www before errbear.com.
Next, the A Records.
I was confused by this passage in the Blogger instructions:
I didn’t know you could point a domain to “each” of four separate IP addresses. So I did what any good nerd should do and consulted Twitter:
And got a quick answer, that made me (a) like Twitter a little more, and (b) feel a little like a dumbass.
So I added the A Record three more times. Duh. At the end of the process, I have four A Records each for @ and * (nothing and everything other than www, respectively), one pointing to each of the IP addresses listed above and on the Blogger Custom Domain instruction page.
And immediately, the previous error message took a happier tone.
But all was not well, yet. When I republished my test post, that I did after moving to errbear.blogspot.com, the post was not there:
Don’t panic. This is normal. It takes a little while for the DNS changes to make their way across the internet. A little while later, all was well.
Almost.
Step 4: Getting Rid of the NavBar
There was this horrifying Blogger NavBar at the top of my blog:
This is not going to work. To fix this you have to add
#navbar-iframe { display: none; }
to your style sheet, if you use one, or above the </style> line in your blog template, if you don’t use a style sheet.
More good information about ridding yourself of the NavBar can be found here.
Step 5: Changing Your Template (Optional)
I have been using a custom template for years. But a lot of the new and promised features at Blogger don’t work well with custom templates, so I thought I’d experiment a little with some new templates.
Important: If you decide to do this, back-up your current template by copying it from your Template>Edit HTML page and pasting it into a text document. This is as important as not forgetting your parachute when sky-diving.
I put on my parachute and jumped. From my old template
to the current one.
Immediately, I got the opportunity to make some customizations that were not possible with a custom template.
Looks promising. Having said that, I hate reading a little narrow box of content on a big computer screen. It’s such a waste of screen space. Maybe I’ll work on some CSS to fix that.
But first there are a couple of pressing modifications that must be done. First, I need to add the Yahoo Music Player code, for the embedded music player. To do so, all you have to do is add this before the </head> tag:
<!– Begin Yahoo Player Header–>
// <!–[CDATA[
javascript” src=”http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js”>
// ]]>
<!– End Yahoo Player Header–>
And I need to, once again, get rid of the NavBar, this time by adding this before the line that begins with ]]>:
#navbar-iframe { display: none !important; }
After this, you can add features and customize your template as you see fit.
Update 1: I’ve now experimented with Blogger Custom Domains and the newer features enough to confidently report that publishing via Custom Domains is a reasonably powerful platform. The inclusion of static pages (via the Blogger in Draft beta page) adds the much needed ability to include ancillary pages. See the index pages I added to Errbear.Com for an example of how to implement static pages. I also found it reasonably easy to modify the new template, as you will see. It’s early, but so far I’m pretty impressed.
Conclusion
Overall, this was a pretty easy process. I don’t know if I the additional Blogger features that weren’t available with a custom template will outweigh the limitations of a canned template, but I can tell you that the process of moving to a Blogger Custom Domain was pretty easy.
I’ll try to address any questions or problems you face in the comments.
First, a recap. Recall that Blogger has 
At long last, we have arrived at the Promised Land. Newsome.Org is up and running on WordPress. Most (I have identified one casualty so far, and there may be a few more) of my 1600+ posts made the trip, and we have preserved the permalinks (more on that below). While I was able to get WordPress installed, hack-up a theme and generally get the system operational, the hardest and most important step is the importation of old blog posts and the preservation of your existing inbound links.
credit links, etc.), but this free theme is a good place to start my WordPress learning experience. Next, I wanted to modify the colors and content of the theme. WordPress has a built-in theme editor, but at least initially, I am not impressed with it. So I took the old-school approach and modified the files directly and uploaded them to my sever.
One, I believe I can hack together a WordPress theme that would serve my purposes.
