I was so curious to see how this mapping worked that I gave it a try already a few days ago, but I was impatient about waiting for the DNS to populate, so I had actually deleted the subdomain I had created and removed the 3rd party set-up from the blog. I was just too busy during the week to keep an eye on this to make sure the DNS did populate eventually. Since I did not wait for the DNS to populate, I was not 100% sure whether it worked or not, but I figured I would wait for the three-day weekend so that I could afford to be patient. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the multi-step verification process I went through did not have to be repeated and apparently the DNS procedure went through just fine, so that I did not have to do hardly anything when I went to map today. Supremely cool!
Adam, I don't think the tutorial says that people only have to do all that tedious stuff ONCE, and then they can apparently map all the Blogger blogs they want in no time at all. It might be good to indicate that! I would have been happy knowing that by doing the mapping once, I was getting ready to be able to instantly map all the Blogger blogs that I want.
So, here's what I did today - I thought I would be here for an hour, but it took just a few minutes!
I started by making a new blog that is going to be my pet project for this semester, where I will be writing up "The Anatomy of an Online Course," trying to document (finally!) the different components of my online course design. Here is the Blogger blog I made:
http://onlinecourseanatomy.blogspot.com
I published a single test post so that I could make sure the mapping worked for an existing post:
http://onlinecourseanatomy.blogspot.com/2014/08/test-post.html
Then, I logged on at create.ou.edu and made a subdomain. Since I don't have the same naming constraints as at blogspot.com, I was able to choose something shorter:
http://anatomy.lauragibbs.net
Then, I followed the steps in this tutorial for the actual mapping.
I put in the CNAME ghs.google.com (Step 5), and then when I went to enter the 3rd part address at Blogger, I did not get the error message about verification! I was surprised, but sure enough — there was no error because I was already verified.
This address works and shows my Blogger blog contents:
http://anatomy.lauragibbs.net/
Next I tested the existing post address at blogspot:
http://onlinecourseanatomy.blogspot.com/2014/08/test-post.html
It now displays at:
http://anatomy.lauragibbs.net/2014/08/test-post.html
HOW COOL! Just to make sure I was not hallucinating, I mapped another blog to see what happened. Before I started, I copied a URL for a post so that I can check to make sure existing links will still work:
http://englishaesop.blogspot.com/2011/11/davies-apollo-and-jupiter.html
Here's my new subdomain:
http://englishaesop.lauragibbs.net/
After I map... presto! It works!!! And the old link redirects:
http://englishaesop.blogspot.com/2011/11/davies-apollo-and-jupiter.html
GLORY HALLELUJAH. I had no idea I would get to skip all those steps: what a nice surprise! I don't really feel a need one way or the other to map all my Blogger blogs, but this is a very cool opportunity for my future students. If they are already using Domains because of a previous class they were in, I feel confident that I can help them to map their Blogger domain, while also giving them good support on the use of Blogger itself. Of course, if they are WordPress users and want to carry on using WordPress, that's great: my only requirement is that their blogging platform support full RSS and also labels (tags, categories, whatever) for navigation.
I feel proud of myself, and it was good to go through a process like this and learn something new - that sense of nervousness but also the excitement when something succeeds! I ask my students to do new things with technology, so it's good to remind myself of just what that feels like. To me, it feels good!!!
THANK YOU, Adam, for the chance to do this! Much appreciated.
