Adding Recent Comments

Recent comments or any comments from your readers actually gives more appeal to your blog. It's another one of those things that you want to display so your other readers can see and read that there is actually an interaction going on in your blog.

There are a several widgets that you can actually use to display comments or act as your message board. Some of them are: Chat widget from Shoutmix, Chatter Box, Cbox and while I was browsing around I came across this widget to display the recent comments made for blogspot blog. Usually I only see recent comments for Wordpress Themes. So I went ahead and added it here. The widget was made exclusively for blogspot, however if you have a custom domain, you can still use it. All you have to do is add the blogspot URL that you use to have.

For example, I used my personal blog to add the Recent Comments.

I type in http://canofthoughts.blogspot.com instead of http://canofthoughts.com.

See the result below:

RECENT COMMENTS



So if you are looking for some interaction in your blog, consider adding a tag board, message board or recent comments.


Designs By Vhiel - Blog Makeover
Anything and Everything in Between

Custom Domain and Error 404

You finally purchased your domain and start setting up your DNS settings and you are ready to publish your blog and have it redirected to your own domain. So you go through the process of setting it up by going to your SETTINGS on your Dashboard, Publishing and then choosing CUSTOM DOMAIN. So click on Switch to Advanced Settings and you type in your custom domain www.myowndomain.com then hit SAVE SETTINGS. You click on VIEW BLOG and there it was your ERROR 404 or 404 NOT FOUND.















After enduring all of the tedious steps that you have to follow, changing your DNS Settings and refreshing your domain by going through Google Apps and now finally was able to add your custom domain without getting the message "Another Blog is already hosted..." it is giving you the error message 404 when you view your blog.

When this thing happen, there's just one way to recover.

• Publish your blog back to "myblog.blogspot.com." To do this, just go to SETTINGS, PUBLISHING and the Switch to Blogspot.com and SAVE SETTINGS. Very easy compare to publishing to your custom domain.
• Wait for atleast 15 minuts or so, then publish your blog back to your www.customdomain.com using the Advanced Settings wizard. Don't forget to save.
• Clear your cookies and cache, wait for around 5 minutes and then check your custom domain.

It should not take a whole lot of time for it to refresh because you are not setting your DNS information anymore.

If the steps that I have given above did not fix your problem, you can use the Magical Custom Domain Form provided by Blogger so they can refresh your custom domain. You can also leave me a comment and I'll try my best to answer all questions.

Designs By Vhiel - Blog Makeover
Can of Thoughts - Blog of A Mom

"Another Blog Is Already Hosted on this Address"

You just purchased your own domain name from GoDaddy through Blogger and you are getting ready to make your DOT BLOGSPOT blog forwarded to your domain name. How do you do it?

First you login to your account-click on SETTINGS, hit PUBLISHING and then choose Switch to: Custom Domain. Since you already purchased your own domain name, click to Switch to Advanced Settings. Under the Advanced settings, you have a box that says YOUR DOMAIN, you type in www.youdomainname.com and you hit SAVE SETTINGS and poop you get the message "Another blog is already hosted in this address." So you asked yourself, "what? But that's my domain name. I just purchased it."

This is one of the issue that many blogger's like me is encountering in setting up to have blogs forward from the .blogspot to .com

So when one of my friend ask me to have her custom domain set up so she will be able to use her domain name, I just have to make sure that I remember what I did for my other 2 domain.

I am sharing this because I know how difficult it is to figure out the process and hopefully this steps will help out fellow bloggers in setting up their own domain name.

Here are the steps on how to setup your .blogspot redirect to your .com site.

1. First, make sure that your DNS configuration is set up properly. Log in to your GoDaddy account and create a CNAME. This is were you specify that you want it to be forwarded to www.yourdomainname.com. Once this has been set up, then you are set to start the steps on your blogger account.
2. Log in to your blogger account, click Settings, then Publishing and then choose custom domain and click Advanced Settings. Type your new domain name starting with www.yourdomainname.com and then click SAVE Settings.

If you encounter the message "Another blog is already hosted on this address" here are some quick fix.

1. Make sure that your DNS settings and CNAME are set to www. To make sure that this setting was correct, you need to use a little bit of PING command. You can do this by going to your Command Prompt. Makes sure you are familiar with the DOS command. You can access this by going to your Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt. When you have the window, type:

C:\> ping www.yourdomainname.com

If your DNS settings are correct, meaning the CNAME was set up properly then the WWW will redirect itself to ghs.l.google.com then you should see the same result as I have on the image. If your DNS settings where not correct, then it will usually say, cannot ping and to check if your set up with www.. something to that effect.

3. After pinging your domain and you get the same result above, then that means that you DNS settings were setup properly. So you do the process again.

• Log in to your blogger account, click Settings, then Publishing and then choose custom domain and click Advanced Settings. Type your new domain name starting with www.yourdomainname.com and then click SAVE Settings.
• If you still encounter the message about "another blog is already hosted on this address after you did the ping command, then you can reset your site by using Google Apps.
• This is where the e-mail that was sent to you by google becomes handy. Make sure you are register with them in order to reset your settings.
• Once your registered, sign in and then click on WEB PAGES link on your DASHBOARD. Click on Disable Web Pages, clear your cache and cookies, then go back to your dashboard and click Add More Services. On the WEB PAGES section click on the button ADD IT NOW. You just enable the web pages again.
• Then create a page and Publish a Google Apps page, using Google Page Creator. Save and Publish it. Clear your cache and cookies and you can delete the page that you have created.
  
• If everything else fails then Blogger has provided a new problem reporting tool, that lets them fix the problems similar to those resolved by Google Apps, using the Magical Custom Domain Form.
• If that doesn't work either, use Blogger Contact, and let them know of the problem or you can have somebody look are your settings and have them follow these steps to make sure that you are just not all stressed out in trying to fix the problem.

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Designs By Vhiel - Blog Makeover
Anything and Everything in Between

Favorite Icon For Your Website and Blog

If you want to add a little bit of appeal to your website or blog, adding a favorite icon where your URL appear is a nice trick.

First, you need to create the icon that your want to display. After creating the icon, you need to associate it with your web page or blog.

To do this, you can follow two methods: (don't' forget to back up your code before doing the steps below)

First is to save the icon using the default name favicon.ico to the root directory of your domain. Example http://www.jvivance.com/favicon.ico. When a user visits your site, Internet Explorer automatically looks for this file and if found, put the icon on the address bar. Like the image above.

Note: If you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, the file must be save as .ICO (file type such as jpg, gif, png and other images type will not work in IE) otherwise it will not display on your address bar. If you are using a lower version of Internet Explorer (6.0 & 5.0) the icon will only appear after you save the website to your favorites. But if you are using other browser like FireFox and Safari, you should have no problem displaying the icon.

The second option (this is the one that I used for all of my blogs) is to add a line of HTML coding. You can do this by going to your HTML codes and look for HEAD element and then place the code after the HEAD element

Like this:
The mydomain.com will be the URL where you have uploaded the icon.

NOTE: The same thing will apply to this one. If you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, you must save the icon as .ICO in order for IE to display it but if you are using FireFox and Safari then you should be able to save the file using jpg, png, gif and other image format and it will display it just fine.

After you have edited your code, make sure to preview it first and see if you like the result before saving it.

Related Topics:
Add a Favicon to your blog
How to Add a Shortcut Icon to a Web Page

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Spread the WORD - ADDTHIS.COM

If your looking for more ways to increase your blog popularity and at the same time give your visitors the ease of sharing and bookmarking your site, then ADDTHIS button is the one that you need.

AddThis is a bookmarking and sharing button on the internet. It is being done when your visitor bookmark and share your site. It helps in the promotion, increase popularity and at the same time create a buzz for your site.

What's nice about this one is that you don't have to create an account in order to use it. Right now, this can be used with Typepad, Wordpress and Blogger.

If you want to add this little button on your site, you can generate the code here