Monday, November 8, 2010

Masking Blogger URL

I currently use JustHost.com to host my personal domain as well as another domain for a web site I maintain for my son's school.  Of course my personal domain (StephenByers.net) just redirects to my Blogger account.  I'd really like to hide the fact that it forwards to Blogger and Google tells me how to do that, but it requires more DNS control than what JustHost offers (at least as far as I can tell).  I can understand why I shouldn't be allowed to merely modify my .htaccess file and mask a redirect because that seems to be a major security problem.  I'm just not sure I will always host my content on Blogger and it would be nice to just mask the URL so people always see my original domain name.

Since this is one of those techie things I'm trying to figure out, I'm sure others may have the same problem.  A lot of it probably just depends on your DNS servers and how much control you have.  I've submitted a support ticket to JustHost to see if I can have more control or if there is another solution.  Any ideas welcome.

UPDATE:  It appears that my hosting company does not let me control DNS but they will do it for me via support ticket.  I think I can have them setup a CNAME for "www" that goes to ghs.google.com.  I'm afraid to have them mess with the 'A' NAME because I have subdomains that are for other sites and I have a feeling that will send everything to Blogger.  However, I think I could update my .htaccess file with a redirect for anything going to the "naked" domain (stephenbyers.net) and redirect it to "www.stephenbyers.net" which will then be the CNAME that they configured.  It's easy to see I am NOT a networking person (software only for me), but this stuff is pretty interesting.  I'm sure my analysis if flawed, but now I have to decide if having support create the CNAME will get rid of my search friendly URLs that Google and other search engines love.

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