Google Custom Domain Headaches

Ack, it's been while since I've posted, I know, but what luck, i have something relevant to actually report.

After initially setting up my wife's blog, tucsonquerido.blogspot.com to use a custom GoDaddy domain back in June, I found what everyone had seemed to find out; it's not perfect. The details are at The Real Blogger Status - Beta: Google Custom Domain - Case Study # I tried Google's way initially, but that left tucsonquerido.com users out in the cold, and after all, www is deprecated. So after a bit of tweaking, I got just plain tucsonquerido.com to work with Blogger by using the IP address associated with ghs.google.com. But I was back at square one. Old school web users could not use www.tucsonquerido.com. Still, google usually gave them a search page instead. I left it like this for a long time and google indexed it accordingly.

I decided recently to see if Google had fixed this, and they did! Well, sort of. They added a checkbox that flip-flops between "forward www traffic to tucsonquerido.com" and vice versa if your publishing url already started with www.

"Great," I thought, "I'll just change everything back and flip this bit!" So I did.

48 hours later, it still didn't seem to work. I followed the directions above and tried deleting the A record, but that still didn't seem to work. I called GoDaddy and they didn't quite know what to do either, but they did suggest at least using their A record IP.

However, I seem to have stumbled upon a possible fix. Before this recent mess, I simply changed the existing A record to point to the ip address for ghs.google.com. Like I mentioned above, this worked for a long time, I just left out the www people. So in order to get my wife's search links back, I changed it back, but this time, added a CNAME record www that points to @, or the root, as well as leaving the the checkbox checked in the publishing settings.

So far, it seems to have worked. But give it 48 hours...