An Estonian girl who has found a home in Sweden.

Wednesday, February 10

I Broke the Blog

February 10, 2010 Posted by Vaire

Of course, by trying to make things work, I managed to break everything that could be broken. I'd messed with the DNS settings without really knowing how they work and the results were ugly: the main blog disappeared, I couldn't access anything whatsoever via my tools and it was a weekend.

So I messed with things some more via the hosting service's control panel. First, I put DNS settings back as they were before, moved the blog to the new address and added a redirect from the old blog page to the new. Then I let the DNS changes propagate and waited to see what I'd broken this time.

I'd tested the move before and it worked with the old BlogSpot blog. There was a risk that it would break because I'd moved things around, but I know now how to make it work again so I went ahead anyway. Besides, the main blog was inaccessible on the old address, so it didn't make any difference.

As I expected I got the main site visible again, but broke the connection between Blogger and the blog site. The redirect from the old blog to the new worked beautifully, except because the CNAME record had been replaced by A NAME record, there was nothing to see there and I could not fix it immediately, so I slapped up a quick notice and settled down for yet another 24 hour period to wait for the changes to propagate.

If I had known that an address can not have an A NAME and a CNAME record at the same time, I would have deleted the A NAME records when I set things back to defaults and saved myself some time. As it was I should have deleted anything even remotely to do with citikas.2cinquefoils.net, but I usually try not to delete too much.

The Blogger help page with instructions how to configure publishing to a custom domain was remarkably unhelpful at explaining the why's and whatfore's of what they wanted me to do. If they had been clearer, the move would have been as simple and easy as they claim it to be.

Even after waiting some more, the hosting control panel still wouldn't let me add a CNAME record. Gah! I did it once, and took it away, why, oh why, wouldn't it work again?! Then I slept on it, took another look at the control panel and fixed everything.

One thing that could not be fixed is the feed address, but that was to be expected and was explained by Blogger beforehand. If you are using Bloglines or any other reader, please use this new address: http://citikas.2cinquefoils.net/ to subscribe to the feed.

And, hopefully, this is the end.