How to Blog?

In the Blogger community forum, I happened to help a user who was not able to publish their blogspot address to their custom domain. After doing all the debugging, there was no option left out but to contact Google and finally we have known what the problem is. The problem was that the URL was not available for use in blogger.  Here on, before spending money on buying a domain, please ensure blogger allows it. Why isn't the custom domain available to buy but not available to use on Blogger? That'd be the first question every user would ask or think to ask. Unfortunately reason is un-disclosed by Blogger themselves.  So how do we know if a domain is available at Blogger or not? Earlier, there used to be no way we could do this as Blogger would throw a more generic error like below, Now, we get a more customised error for this particular case alone like below, So, here on, before spending money on buying a domain, please try publishing your blog in the domain name you are planni...

In BHF, there was a recent issue related to cloudflare where the browser screams the site is a phishing site. So I thought of writing up how does a service like cloudflare affect your blogger blog. What is Cloudflare? Well we have that written all over Wikipedia: Cloudflare . Let's go on with why Blogger users look for Cloudflare. Anciently Blogger users used Cloudflare for one simple reason. HTTPS for custom domains. So what happens when you introduce Cloudflare into your domain? DNS Redirect. Your custom domain will be configured with the proxy info provided by Cloudflare and when the request is hit, DNS redirect happens. DNS redirect is bad for the site's health. A number of reasons, but the most important is that some browsers, when it detects a DNS redirection, it thinks that it is a phishing site. What is a DNS redirect? I am trying to explain this in easy terms. I'll try not to be too technical. When a custom domain URL is hit, usually the domain reques...

We already saw the common issues when custom domain is involved where we saw a tool called DWI - Dig Web Interface which will help us get DNS records of a particular domain. Today while coming across a forum thread , got to notice a strange thing ever. It's not the first time however. If you refer the article about corrupted DNS , the blog URL used had similar issue. It is normally recommended to use "Authoritative" under Name servers when digging a domain. However this doesn't always workout. Let us consider the following URL in issue. newsblok.com www.newsblok.com The actual authoritative Dig Log gives us the following results, newsblok.com@dns1.name-services.com.: /usr/bin/dig: couldn't get address for 'dns1.name-services.com.': failure newsblok.com@dns2.name-services.com.: /usr/bin/dig: couldn't get address for 'dns2.name-services.com.': failure newsblok.com@dns3.name-services.com.: /usr/bin/dig: couldn't get address...

In BHF, one of the common issues we face is setting up custom domain. We already have a lot of information on how to setup a custom domain. So I am going to go ahead and write on the troubleshooting tips for custom domain. This article is dedicated to Chuck Croll who has been/is a great mentor to me since the beginning. So let's start with the first and foremost golden rule of Custom domain troubleshooting. Any issue where you have custom domains involved, first check if the custom domain is setup properly. Some common issues where custom domain  are involved and you'll not know DNS was causing the trouble are, You'll be able to see the custom domain while some of your friends/users will not be able to. In this case, you shall use DWI to see if the DNS addresses are righteous. Cannot get thumbnail on Facebook. What can I do? So what? Use Facebook OG Object Debugger is what most people think. There comes the case, Inspite of using Facebook OG Object Debugger,...

As far as custom domain troubleshooting is concerned, it's not always there'll be issues with, DNS Records Who Is Issues like  Domain expiration clientHold There is a case where the DNS could be corrupted. In that matter we need to know two important things. How do I know my DNS is corrupt? Where do I report about my corrupt  DNS? How do I know my DNS is corrupt? The diagnosis on a custom domain issue with DWI will tell you there could be an issue in DNS while WhoIs Lookup will confirm. I had to face one such thread whose diagnosis steps are shown below, The above is the dig log of the custom URL which gave me very weird results. I went ahead and checked for expiration/non registered URL/clientHold at Who Is Lookup , Registry Domain ID: 1619884945_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.enom.com Registrar URL: www.enom.com Updated Date: 2016-10-12T03:07:49.00Z Creation Date: 2010-10-11...

Again as a part of Custom Domain Troubleshooting , we do Who Is lookup which gives us a handful of information. What is Who Is Lookup? Who Is lookup gives exactly what the name means. "Who Is". In addition to Who Is, this will give few useful information like, Registrar Information Registered date and expiry information and so on. How to do Who Is Lookup?

In  BHF, when it comes to custom domain, I or Chuck or any other expert mentioning a dig log URL mentioned most of the times as DWI. What on earth is DWI? DWI is expanded as DigWebInterface which is an online DNS Lookup tool.  How to use DWI?  1. Go to https://digwebinterface.com/ In the H ostnames or IP addresses text box, enter your full custom domain URL and naked domain URL as shown below and choose "Authoritative" under Nameservers list. (However not in all the cases, "Authoritative" works ) After doing this, click on Dig. When the dig is complete, you should expect the following, (i.e) 4 A records and 1 CName record. @        1799    IN    A    216.239.36.21 @        1799    IN    A    216.239.32.21 @        1799    IN    A ...