Nitecruzr, who runs the website, “The Real Blogger Status”,
has a recent (May 6) perspective on Custom Domains for blogs, a discussion the
general principles of which would apply to both Wordpress and Blogger.
This refers to the practice of purchasing domain names and
connecting them to blogs (through “Zone files” on sites) for DNS resolution, or
sometimes to subdomains (that is, several blogs attached to the same domain
with a prefix).
His link is
here (and his own blog has a separate DNS
URL).
It appears (to me, at least) that there are two possible scenarios. One is that one some purchases a domain name
(which could be from Google, or from any registrar such as GoDaddy or Network
Solutions) and connects it to a blog which is still hosted “for free” on the
Blogger or Wordpress space. Or, the second scenario, at least
with Wordpress (I can’t tell if this happens for Blogger from the literature) is this: you purchase shared or dedicated hosting service from a major provider (like
Verio), get your own licensed copy of the blogging software on your domain
space and put all of the content (in blogs or anything else) on the hosted
space that you pay for.
In the latter case, you’re freer from disruption (by the
spam blog false positive problem) because you’re not using “somebody else’s
free service”, an idea that was floated a lot around the summer of 2008 (as Nitecruzr documents there). But you have a more complicated software environment,
must maintain the blogging software upgrades (or the hosting provider must),
and could well have interface problems.
And you may well not have as much space or be able to host multiple
blogs.
Right now, my blogs are simply subdomains of Blogspot (with
one addition Wordpress blog hosted as I described in the paragraph above),
which means they get indexed and found by visitors immediately when
posted. I point to them with a simple
index from my home page of “doaskdotell.com”. From the viewpoint of user ease,
there is almost no point in assigning new URL’s (to eliminate the “blogspot”
node). The user needs to navigate only
from a simple hyperlink on a very fast-loading home page. I also have a cross-reference file to help
users find the more unusually placed blog entries (mostly movie and book
reviews).
Why could there be a trademark question? New URL’s are allowed on a FCFS (“first come,
first served”) or FIFO basis. I’m not
sure that it’s prudent to take on new domain names, which indeed are very
inexpensive, and invite unnecessary trademark complaints, which could arise
(when they would not with a “blogspot” or “wordpress” in the middle, I
suspect).
But it’s still an open question. I could look at this differently in the
future. “The best practices” keep
changing. I welcome comments on this question, because it seems like the perspective is changing.
