Recently a reader sent me a question asking how a Blogger blog can be re-directed to a custom domain representing a country domain. This post is about how this blog, The Blogger Guide, was moved in to its current address in the .lk domain.
Basically, there are two steps.
Firstly, you should configure a CNAME (or Canonical Name) record with your country domain registry. (Additionally you can provide an A-record as well, but that is optional). Let's look at this in a bit more detail.
When a visitor want to reach www.bloggerguide.lk from a browser, the program will first contact a .lk domain registry through the DNS (Domain Name Service) system. Technically, this is called a DNS look-up. A DNS look-up simply maps a domain name (or URL) to a physical web hosting server which actually hosts the web site (or blog, or any Internet service for that matter) corresponding to that domain name. In this instance, the domain name www.bloggerguide.lk is hosted by Blogger and, the .lk domain registry should return the Blogger's hosting service as the reply to the DNS look-up. A CNAME entry is, in fact, an alias to another server which actually hosts the given URL
For example, the CNAME entry given to the .lk domain registry for this blog is given below.
Secondly, you have to tell Blogger that you will be hosting the blog on a custom domain. This step will link your blog with the custom domain name. When that is done, Blogger will know that a request asking, for example www.bloggerguide.lk, is actually looking for this blog which is running inside its servers.
The way to configure the custom domain in Blogger is very simple.
- Go to Settings : Basic : Publishing
- Click "Switch to advanced settings"
- Enter the custom domain name and click Save
Once the above two steps are completed, you are done with moving your Blogger blog to a custom domain. Of course, the DNS system might take about 24 hours to properly start resolving this new name.
See the Blogger's help article on custom domains for more details.
