I’ve been dogged by some of the other bloggers who shall remain nameless (Jim 🙂 ) about the fact that my blog didn’t have its own domain. Well, it’s been two months in the making but if you take a look at the address bar in your browser, you’ll see that this blog has a new address.
When I chose WordPress.com as my blogging platform, domain mapping wasn’t offered. For the non-techies among you, that means that all of the blogs hosted here had the address blogname.wordpress.com. In late October, the fine folks here at WordPress rolled out domain mapping. It took me a while to figure out what domain I wanted, whether I wanted to have it hosted here or elsewhere, and all that jazz. Once I figured out what I wanted, it was a breeze.
For those hosted here at WordPress, give them $15 a year and they will do the domain registration and the mapping. Alternatively, for $10 a year you can just have them do the domain mapping. As I have other plans for my vivianpaige.com domain, I ended up paying $9.20 for the domain thru GoDaddy and set up a host which gave me email accounts and subdomain ability. (The blog address is a subdomain.)
Why go thru all of that instead of downloading and installing WordPress using a host? Because I like the simplicity of WordPress.com. I have no desire to be responsible for installing updates or any of that stuff. Blogging should be fun, not work, and I know how tedious software installations can be (especially since I’ve spent the better part of this week doing that at work).
Anyway, that’s the first change for this blog for 2007. More changes are coming as time permits.
Oh – and the cool thing about domain mapping? The old bookmarks and RSS feeds still work 🙂
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Yes they do!
I chose a different route. Since computers, software and networking is what I do, I was ok with the time and effort to do it myself. But at the prices you just put up there… Given that opportunity I would have mapped mine over too!!!
Good to see the domain name. I find it hard to believe you had to work any length of time to figure it out. Sort of like mine. 🙂
S…
It wasn’t that it was hard to do, it was hard to decide what to do. I have another site that I want to move to the main domain but until I can get it transferred, it will be mapped to the new one. So I had decide on whether to stay with that host or get a new one. Unfortunately, my emails to support for that host didn’t get answered timely so I was in limbo for a while.
As it turned out, by the time I got all of my questions answered, I knew exactly how to make it all work. I added the domain to my existing hosting package, stuck in the DNS server info, added the subdomain and the CNAME record info and viola!
I’m not moving my old website to the new one, though. I’ll leave that for my webmaster to handle. I wouldn’t know where to start 😦
Welcome to the big leagues 😉 !
Smart move using a subdomain that you will be using for other things — that means you only have to pay once for the domain and then map subdomains in the DNS server. You’re looking geekier all the time!
Soon you’re going to have servers running in your basement. I just know it.
Oh, you didn’t know that I was a bit of a geek? Around here, I’m the one everybody asks for tech advice 🙂 Besides, I am a part owner of a tech site 🙂
No servers in my basement, though. I don’t have a basement 😆
One more thing that I did was to set up the subdirectory for my podcasts. Using FTP, I can put them on the server there instead of having them hosted elsewhere.
Yep, things are a-changin’ ’round here 🙂
Why “blog.vivianpaige…” Why not just vivianpaige.com?
Like I said, I have plans for the main domain.
I like the knew header, Vivian.
It’s a photo I took at sunset in Aruba.
I like the changes, but miss your photo everytime the opening screen comes up! Makes the site more personal to actually see a person’s picture associated with the site… Computers can sometimes be so impersonal that folks forget that they’re actually responding to a live person.