How to re-direct an old custom domain - and all its posts - to a new one

This article describes options for making link to a blog's old URL automatically point to the blog's new URL after a custom domain change.

If you have a blog made with Blogger which has a custom domain, then it's easy enough to switch this blog to use a different domain. Doing this moves both the content (posts and pages) and template (layout, structure, colour-scheme).

Often when people make this type of change, they want to set up re-directs so that if anyone clicks an external link to the old custom domain, they are re-directed to the same content on the new domain.
For example, www.old-domain.com/current-Page.html should redirect to www.new-domain.com/current-page.html.)

With many other website building tools, the .htaccess file for the site lets you set up re-directs like this. But things are little different when you use Blogger.

Your Blogspot address VS your custom domain

Your blog always has a blogspot addresss - let's call it: www.yourBlog.blogspot.com

When you publish to a custom domain, Blogger automatically handles the re-direction from www.yourBlog.blogspot.com to www.yourCustomdomain.com for you. This works at all levels, so the home page and every individual post/page are all redirected correctly.

To move your blog from from www.yourCustomDomain.com to www.newCustomDomain.com, you simply tell Blogger to

1. Stop publishing your blog to www.oldCustomDomain.com and then to
2. Start publishing it to www.newCustomDomain.com

(See Switching your blog to a different custom domain for more information about this.)

Once you have done this (and afer a little bit of transition time), Blogger handles the re-direction from www.yourBlog.blogspot.com to www.newCustomdomain.com for you - as before, this works at all levels, so the home page and every individual post/page are redirected correctly.

One point that many people mis-understand, is that after you have done this, there is no connection between Blogger and your old custom domain. You have various options (listed below) for what to do with www.oldCustomDomain.com - and you aren't limited to the features that Blogger offers. The only limits are based on what your domain registrar allows, and what tools you can (learn to) use.

Options for re-directing your old custom domain

Option 1: Registrar re-direction

Once you have stopped publishing your blog to www.yourCustomDomain.com, Blogger has no connection with it at all.

How you manage re-directions from it is totally up to the tools provided by the domain registrar. The simplest approach is to set up a "301 redirect" on the domain, which simply sends all traffic to it to another domain of your choice.

The method for setting this up depends on the tools used by your domain registrar - search their help files for terms like "301 redirect" to find out what is possible with tools.

See Using a custom domain for something other than your blog for advice about accessing your domain registrar account for the domain.

Advantages

• This is the easiest approach, and doesn't require you to make a website of any type.
• Visitors are automatically re-directed.

Disadvantages

• Depending on how the registrar's tools work, visitors may be automatically redirected to your new home page, not the the post that they specifically followed a link to.

Option 2: Another website tool

If you know how to use another website development tool that does provide access to the .htaccess file for the site, then you could make a "site" that just contains page-and-post level redirections for all your existing posts and pages.

Advantages

• This approach sends people to the exact content that they followed a link to.

Disadvantages

• It could be tedious setting this up for every post and page, if you have a lot of them at the time when you change domains.
• You need to choose and learn a very different type of website building tool to do this.

Option 3: use Blogger to make a site-level re-direction message

Make a totally new blog (eg    www.myBlogHasMoved.blogspot.com),

Publish it to your old custom domain

Give it one post that says

"www.oldCustomDomain.com has moved to www.newCustomDomain.com please update your links"

Use the Settings > Search preferences > Errors and redirections > Custom Redirect Custom Page Not Found  option to explain that your blog has moved, and send any traffic to that one post.

Advantages

• This is a simple approach, using tools that you already know.
• It will work forever (because blogspot domains don't expire).

Disadvantages

• Visitors will not be automatically redirected: the best you can do is show a link which goes to a selected post or page in your blog, which the visitor needs to click to go to the blog.
• The re-direction link is only to one specific page, not to the exact content that was linked to iniitially.  This is quite different from what many people want to achieve - blogger simply does not have that functionality.

A non-option: Blogger's custom redirect tool

Blogger has a function under Settings > Search preferences > Errors and redirections > Custom Redirects  that lets you set up custom redirects for individual pages.

However this isn't suitable when you change your custom-domain totally, because it only supports re-direction within the same blog, not to an external URL.

(And anyway, if you have a significant number of posts, it would not be practical.)

Other options

Have you found any other ways around this? Or any good tool for setting up .htaccess redirects on a domain that you used to use for a blog?  Share your experience in the comments area below.

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Related Articles:

Using a custom domain for something other than your blog

Linking your blog and your website.

How to make a real website using Blogger

Switching your blog to a different custom domain

SEO Basics for Bloggers

Introducing Maps Engine Lite - a better tool for customizing maps

This article is an introduction to Google's Maps Engine Lite, which is a tool for creating custom maps.

What is Google Maps Engine Lite

In late March 2013, Google announced a beta (ie late-stage test) of Maps Engine Lite - and now it is available from the main Google Maps interface, without the word "beta" in sight.

This is a web application to let you "Create powerful custom maps", and it has more features than the current  "My Maps" custom-map editor in Google Maps, which I've used until now to put certain maps into one of my blogs.

You can access it at: https://mapsengine.google.com/

Once you have signed in to a Google account, you can either view/edit an existing map that you have make with Maps Engine Lite or which has been shared with you in MEL, or create a new one.

How to create a custom map using Maps Engine Lite

Click on the New Map button from the front screen, or the New map link from the manage-files folder (top left side of the screen).

Use the arrow beside Base Map to choose the style that you want applied: this covers both what is shown, and the colour scheme. At the moment the options are:

• Map (ie ordinary - like regular Google maps)
• Satellite
• Terrain
• Light Political
• Mono City
• Simple Atlas
• Light Landmass
• Dark Landmass
• Whitewater

Add places to the map by:

Drawing them - You add things to the map with the Placemark and line or shape-drawing tools.  These are similar to those for Google Custom Maps, though they're now separate into two items.

or

Importing them - from either CSV/Excel files or you existing Google Custom Maps - see http://support.google.com/mapsengine/?p=lite_addplaces for details about what is possible.

You can separate the map into multiple layers, and you have access to Google Maps regular search feature: search-results are placed on non-permanent "search" layer, and you can select a result, right click on it and Save it to the map you are currently editing.


While editing the map, you have these options

• Style - lets you choose whether to show individual markers, or a sequence of letters/colours
• Table - Edit the list of placemarkers and lines - giving each a name or description
• Labels - lets you choose whether to show marker labels on the map or not - and whether to use the name or description field.

Sharing maps you have made

The map can be shared using the green Share button in the top right corner, via gmail, G+, Facebook, Twitter or anything else which lets you use a link like this:

Putting Custom Maps on your website or blog

In Maps Engine Lite, the "embed on my website" option is available under the Save icon (currently at the top left, with options New map, Open and  Embed).  

However it only works if you have first clicked the green Share button, and set the map-visibility to Public (ie not just "anyone with the link").

This gives you a simple iframe statement like this:

<iframe height="480" src="http://mapsengine.google.com/map/view?mid=zV9FBQ3J7L1o.kzRGlAso0tmU" width="640"></iframe>

You can easily change the size via the height and width options, but there is no zoom level option - and I assume that the centre of the displayed map is represented in the coding  (this doesn't always work so well for Custom Maps - I usually recommend that people use the customization option).

And once you have the code, you can put it into your blog in the same way you would add any other 3rd party HTML.   The code above gives a map like this:

Notice that the map itself tells you that it was made with Maps Engine, and that it says it is for non-commercial use:   commercial users can buy access to a far more powerful version of the Maps Engine.

Advantages and disadvantages of Maps Engine Lite

So far I've only done a quick test, but initial impressions are:

Advantages:

Richer interface than custom maps - you can do more things.

Layers are a particularly good addition - it would be great if individual layers could be turned on/off from embedded version of the map.

Alternative colour scheme - will make it easier to create maps that are more suitable for certain circumstances, eg with a faded background.

Sequential markers - I don't have to use my own set of custom markers any more.

Uses the same base data as regular Google Maps - so the Follow Your World service can be used to get you updates about changes to the image-data.

Disadvantages:

No access to Google Streetview while you are editing the map.

Currently if you choose sequential markers, the labels and colours in the key on the left are not always the same as the ones used inside the map.

No Snap-to-roads option for lines

No custom map markers:  if you import a map from My Maps (aka Google Custom Maps), then any custom markers that you have are retained, and you can choose to use them again, but there is no way to add new custom markers.


What else have you found?

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Related Articles:

Creating a Google Custom Map

Adding a Google Custom Map to your blog

Adding 3rd party HTML to your blog

Newer AdSense ad-unit sizes are now available inside Blogger

This QuickTip shares a feature that I just noticed inside Blogger's Add-a-gadget > Adsense option.

Previously I've mentioned that rather than using the AdSense gadget offered by Blogger's Add-a-Gadget wizard, I usually get ad-code from AdSense and put this code into my blog as an HTML widget.

This gives:

• Access to a wider range of ad-unit sizes, 
• Better control over the gadget alignment, 
• Ability to re-use  AdSense's colour palettes that I've saved before
• Access to an "image ads only" option that Blogger doesn't have.

The downside that if I have enabled a mobile template for the blog, then visitors who look at it using a mobile device don't see any ads.   I did find work-around for this, but it had a nasty side effect if I wanted to add another gadget to the template - and that's a story for a different post.

Tonight I happened to look at the options in the Add-a-gadget > AdSense  option again, and was delighted to notice that the newer ad-sizes (eg 300x600 wide skyscraper) are now available there.    I have no idea how long they've been there - but I haven't seen it mentioned on any of the other blogs I read, so thought it was worth a mention here.

This doesn't solve all my issues, but did mean that I could use a standard AdSense gadget on a blog where I was particularly keen to have one that filled the whole width of the sidebar.

Like they say in Tesco - every little helps!


Update:   shortly after I wrote this post, AdSense announced a new ad-size (970 x 90 pixels) - and unfortunately it's not included in Blogger's AdSense widget.  

What happens to your blog if your Google account becomes inactive?

This article describes Google's Inactive Account Manager, a new tool that gives you control over what happens to your Google account if you don't log on to it for a period of time.

Ages ago, I read a thought-provoking article on ProBlogger about making a "blogging will". His main aim was to ensure that his family could access his business assets (ie his blogs etc) if something untoward happened to him.

Now, Google's Data Liberation Front have annnounced a new tool called the Inactive Account Manager, which lets Google account owners say what should happen if they ever stop using their account.

This tool lets you decide

1. If and when your account should be treated as inactive
2. What happens with your data if it becomes inactive, and
3. Who else is notified, and what is said to them.

At the moment, it covers these Google tools - which are attached to your Google account:

• +1s
• Blogger
• Contacts and Circles
• Drive (which I guess means Docs too)
• Gmail
• Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams
• Picasa Web Albums
• Google Voice
• YouTube.

AdSense is a notable exception: I don't know what happens to your outstanding balance and income if your AdSense account becomes inactive.   But I suspect that it might be managed in the same way as a bank account or book royalties - and because each country will have different laws about managing estates and the like, it's not possible to let you "opt-out" in the same way as it is for regular data.

What situations is this for

There are a few scenarios that the IAM ("Inactive Account Manager" is such a mouthful) might be useful for.

Death / Serious illness or injury

The most obvious thing that you could use the IAM to provide for is if you unexpectedly die, or become so sick/injured that you cannot log in any more.

In this case, if your blog and other Google content (eg YouTube videos) is personal, you may or may not want family or friends to access it - and you may or may not want it to be deleted.

But if your blog belongs to an organisation or a business, it's quite a different scenario:   you will almost certainly want someone else to have access.

And if it contains material about a hobby or public interest topic, you may well want to have it transferred to some kind of "data steward" - or you may want your estate to manage it as an asset, if it is profitable.

Losing access to your account

Some people lose access to their Google account because they:

1. Set them up with an external email address
2. Lose access to that email address
3. Forget the Google account password
4. Cannot remember enough details to regain access via the forgotten-password wizard.

The IAM will only help these people if they have set it up, and if they (or a friend) still has access to the alternative email address they entered.   So it's not a universal cure for this problem, but may help a little.

Losing interest in your account

People's lives and priorities change over time.   The blog that was all-important ten years ago may now be a distant memory.   In this case, if IAM is set up, people will at least get a chance to think about whether they want to maintain what was there, or not

The best approach?

There is no "one right way" to use the IAM to look after your blog when you stop updating it.   It's a very private decision, and depends on what risks you think you want to cover off, and how you are using your Google account.

Personally, I don't think that losing interest or losing access are likely to happen.    So I've set up my IAM information to cover the first case, ie death or incapacity, and used it to send messages to carefully selected friends and relatives.  I could do more, eg include details about selling a couple of blogs that would be "assets" in the right hands, and send messages to the firm who would be looking after my affairs.   But it's a start - and as with so many "death and taxes" type of issues making a start is half the battle.

How to set up your inactive account information

Once you have thought about what sort of situations you want to deal with, then setting up your inactive-account information is pretty easy.

To start with, go to the Account Management option your Google account settings page.   Once you're there, there is an easy set-up wizard, which covers the following points.

Warning that you're in danger of becoming inactive

Google doesn't want your account to suddenly become inactive.   So they collect details are used to warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to an alternative address, saying that your account is close to becoming inactive. The current definition of "close" is one-month. Basically, this is your chance to stop the account becoming inactive by logging in.  

They ask for:

• A mobile phone number (which needs to be verified - so it must be one that you can access now)
• An alternative email address (which isn't verified - yet!)

Setting the timeout period

You need to choose how much time needs to go by without you logging in before your account is considered to be inactive. The default is three months, and other options are six, nine and 12 months.

Who else to tell

You can nominate one or more trusted contacts - ie email addresses that receive notification, and (if you choose, access to your data), once your account actually becomes inactive.

For each trusted contact, you need to give some message-text and also say which specific Google products they should get access too.

You can also set up an auto-reply to messages to your Gmail account, which is sent in response to all incoming messages after your account becomes inactive - or at most once every 4 days if one account sends you lots of messages.

What happens to your account:

Finally, you choose whether to delete your data once your account is inactive - the default value is "no", but you should change it to "yes" if you want to be sure that your blog etc are removed.

Confirmation

After you have saved your settings, you will get an email confirming that you entered.    (In my case, this message took several days to arrive - possibly because I get up my IAM settings fairly shortly after it had been introduced.   Hopefully it's got quicker now.

Limitations of the IAM

At the moment, IAM lets you set thresholds, notifications and actions for a whole Google account - there is no way to say that some blogs should be kept, and some deleted.

And there are still lots of things that we don't know about how IAM will work in practise.

• Do you get only one reminder - or one every time you reach the inactive-account threshold again  (ie every 3, 6, 9 or 12 months)?

• What happens if you're one administrator of a team blog, and your account becomes inactive with instructions to delete it - but there are other member or administrators who are still actively contributing?   (I would hope that the presence of these people means that your "delete" instruction is ignores, at least for the blog.   But I suspect that this won't be an easy scenario to provide for - and it's possible that Google haven't worked through all the options here.
  
  Ditto other shared resources (YouTube Channels, Shared folder/documents in Drive, etc)?  The dimensions will be different in each product, but the underlying problem is the same.

So while I think that IAM is a great idea, I'm also a little nervous about what problems it could cause if people choose to delete things without thinking through all the consequences.

And if you are going to set it up for your own personal blogs, then maybe now is a good time to transfer ownership of blogs that you made for clubs / societies / organisations / businesses to generic accounts being managed for them.

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Related Posts

Understanding Google accounts

Team blogs:  letting other people write to your blog

Transferring blog ownership

Understanding how Blogger and Picasa-web-albums work together

Setting up AdSense for your blog

How to tick the "expand widgets" checkbox in Blogger's new template editor

This QuickTip is about finding the "expand widgets" option in Blogger's template editor.

Today, Blogger Buzz announced a new version of the template editor.

This is exciting in all sorts of ways, including that it implies that Blogger will continue to support template editing:   some people suspected that Dynamic Templates, which don't allow template editing, might be the way of the future.

But there's one immediate issue: many of the existing "How to do XXXX in Blogger" tutorials include statements like

Open your template for editing, and tick the "Expand widgets" checkbox

or

Open your template for editing, and make sure that "Expand widgets" isn't ticked

However today's changes have deleted the Expand Widgets checkbox.

So - what do you do if you need to expand the widgets?   Luckily, this is one of the things that has been made easier, once you find out where the option has moved to.

How to see expanded code for a gadget / widget

The equivalent of ticking the "expand" check-box is to:


1)    Find the gadgetID in the usual way.


2)   Open the template for editing, and find the reference to the widget / gadgetID in the code
(Either using the browser's find feature - or  the "Jump to Widget" feature that is now in the post editor.)


3)    Click on the fold marker for that gadget.
This is the horizontal arrow ( ? ) which is in the very left side of the editing window on the same line as the gadget name.

Clicking it turns the sideways arrow into a down-arrow, and shows you the code that's included in that gadget - or at least as much of it as Blogger is going to let you see.

To un-tick the expand check-widgets checkbox, just make sure that all the fold-arrows are horizontal. (they work as toggles - clicking them changes them from one expanded to contracted, or vice versa).

What else has changed?

I'll be updating Blogger-HAT's main "How to edit your Blogger template" article soon - this is just a quick heads-up to start with.

If you've found any more features of the new template editor that you like (or don't) or which need more explanation then drop a comment below and I'll see what I can do.

Introducing Google's tools for measuring how fast your blog loads

This quick-tip describes some tools that I've recently discovered that measure page-load speed and make suggestions about how to improve it.

Google have said a number of times that page-load-speed (ie how quickly a visitor to your blog sees it load onto the screen) is one of the factors in SEO.

And even if SEO isn't important to your blog in terms of getting visitors, page-load speed is important for making your visitors happy: even your mother isn't going to be happy if your blog takes five minutes to show her the pictures of your new baby.

So Google's tools for measuring and improving page-load speed are valuable tools for most bloggers.

Where to find them:

The tools are available at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

The most important one for Bloggers is in the Analyze section, called Insights, found under the "Analyze your site online" link.

There are other tools there, too (eg an API, the Page-speed service, extensions for certain browsers), but they are well outside what Bloggers need to know.

How to use the Pagespeed tool

To find out what Google thinks of your blog's page-load speed, simply type your web-address into the box in the middle of the Pagespeed  Insights screen, and click the Analyse button.

In a few moments, the screen refreshes with the results.

At the top of the results, there is your site's score out of 100.

Then there is a list of suggestions, broken down by priority (high, medlium, low) based on their "potential performance wins" (how much difference they make) and amount of "development effort" ie how hard they are to do).

Not all of these suggestions are relevant for Blogger users, because we don't have total control over how our posts are converted into website pages. However ones that are relevant include:

• Optimize images
• Serve scaled images,
• Putting CSS into the document head  (in our case, putting it into the template rather than into individual posts)

If you go into the details of the particular suggestions (using the entries in the left hand sidebar), you can see how much impact they will have, and get information about what  you need to change to implement the suggestion.

Why bother

Given that so many of the suggestions aren't relevant for Blogger why use the tool at all?

One reason is that it gives you a way of looking at the effect of gadgets that you add to your blog:  looking at the page load score before and after adding the gadget shows if it makes much difference to your load time.   Based on this, you may decide to only show certain gadgets on a particular page.

Stop Twitter's "follow-me" spam in its tracks

This article is about how to stop the annoying email messages that Twitter sends when an acquaintance joins Twitter and decides that they think you should follow them there too.

What happens if a "friend" invites to you follow them on Twitter

A few weeks ago, I got an email message saying that Helen Someone had just signed up to Twitter, and had provided my email address as someone who followed her elsewhere, and who she thought should follow her here too.

But I'm already on Twitter, and my account there is linked to a different email address than the one which Ms Someone "generously" chose to share with Twitter. And frankly, I get enough email from her already, the last thing I want her doing is bugging me on Twitter too.

So what did I do? Like any sensible person, I deleted the email.

But now, every few days, I get an email message like this :

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Helen Someone is still waiting for you to join Twitter...
From: "Twitter"
Date: Fri, March 29, 2013 4:26 am
To: me@email.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Helen Someone is still waiting for you to join Twitter...

Twitter helps you stay connected with what's happening right now and with the people and organizations you care about.

Accept invitation     https://twitter.com/i/535c9c20b....5487e4f01449c029

------------------------

This message was sent by Twitter on behalf of Twitter users who entered your email address to invite you to Twitter.
Unsubscribe: https://twitter.com/i/o?t=1&iid=05f4a3...d=68+26+20130328

Need help?
https://support.twitter.com

Or like this, if I look at it an email client that shows the graphics - notice that the "how to un-subscribe" message is in very small print, down the bottom of the page.

How to stop these messages

At first I just ignored these messages: I figured that Twitter would give up and leave me alone after one or two reminders. But that hasn't happened: they keep reminding me, and I'm getting sick of deleting the same message over and over again.

So today I went looking for how to stop the reminders from happening.   Basically there are two options:

Option 1:  Sign up to Twitter

Accept the invitation, sign up for a new twitter account, turn off all email notifications for this account - and never uses the account again.

Advantage: this stops the annoying messages - and makes sure you won't get them from any other "friends" who give Twitter the same address.

Disadvantage: other friends (who maybe you do want to follow in Twitter) may enter the same email address, and Twitter may connect them to this same Twitter-account that you never use.   You won't get a notification.

Option 2:  Use the un-subscribe link that's provided

If you look at the email contents, there is actually an unsubscribe link near the bottom of the message - f your email client shows the graphic version of the message it's right down in the ultra-small print at the bottom.

Click the link provided - or copy-and-paste it to a web-browser.

This will turn off the annoying messages from this person - and it will also stop your email address from getting messages if other people join Twitter and suggest you should follow them there.

Is this Ok

Which option would you recommend?

More importantly - do you think it's ok to share other people's addresses with social networking sites that you sign up to, in the way that Ms Someone gave my address to Twitter?

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Related Articles:

Put a "follow me on Twitter" link into your blog

Showing an email address in Blogger

Tools for linking your blog to social sharing websites