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Here in the UK, Mothering Sunday is the second Sunday of Lent. But I would like to wish all you mums in the United States and elsewhere in the world a very happy Mothers' Day! You all deserve it!

Above is a video sent to me by Marie of Mommy Community.com. Thank you Marie! I hope you all enjoy her lovely video.

Technorati Tags: mothers+day| mother| mum| celebration

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I used GoDaddy to register my domain name, as this company seemed the cheapest dot.com domain provider, and also because they supply a free email address and basic hosting account with each domain, which has come in rather handy.

However, I'd read quite a few complaints about using GoDaddy for custom domains with Blogger hosting, so I was rather careful to make sure I did everything correctly!

Please do note that you can only link your site as http://yoursite.com or http://www.yoursite.com. Not both. It just doesn't work that way. My advice is to use the www prefix, and if you can make a simple redirect page in your host root, as I'll explain later

I followed Blogger's advice to the letter, and everything works fine. Here are the basics of their tutorial, or you can read the whole thing yourself on this page.

  1. Buy your chosen domain name and create your account.
  2. Once your domain has been registered, log in to your control panel, and choose to "manage domains".
  3. Click on the area marked Total DNS Control, and then on Total DNS Control And MX Records.
  4. Look for a record prefixed "WWW". If there isn't one, add a new CNAME record; if there is one, you'll need to edit this record instead.
  5. Insert these settings exactly as they are described! For the "Name" type "www" (as in www.yoursite.com). For the Host Name, you need to enter "ghs.google.com". Don't change or enter anything else except for these two functions. If this is a new CNAME, click "add". If you are editing an existing CNAME, click "update" and "continue".

Before you link this domain to your Blogspot blog, you may well want to check that all the settings are correct. To do this, you'll need to "ping" your new domain and ensure the host points to ghs.google.com.

If you're a Windows user, this is quite simple to do using the "command" feature. Windows 98 and ME have a "command prompt" program in the start menu; Windows XP has the "run..." feature, which brings up a box; simply type in CMD, hit enter and you'll get your command prompt.

Then all you need to do is enter the following:

ping www.yourdomainname.com

substituting yourdomain.com for your domain name and suffix. Hit enter, and see what happens. It should look something like this:

Pinging ghs.1.google.com [72.14.207.121] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 72.14.207.121:
bytes=32 time=85ms TTL=247
Reply from
72.14.207.121: bytes=32 time=89ms
TTL=247
Reply from 72.14.207.121:
bytes=32 time=86ms TTL=247
Reply from
72.14.207.121: bytes=32 time=86ms
TTL=247
Ping statistics for 72.14.207.121:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received =
4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip
times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 85ms, Maximum = 89ms, Average = 86ms




Notice that the ping recognises that my site is hosted with ghs.1.google.com. This means that I can (and indeed, have) followed the next step in telling Blogspot my new domain name. If you don't notice the host is registered as Google, wait a little longer before following the next step.

Log in to your Blogger control panel. In the settings section, click on the publishing tab. Near the top of this page, you'll notice "publish to a custom domain". This is what you want to do.

When prompted, enter the domain name you have directed to the ghs.google.com host, including the www prefix! Continue, and you should see that your new settings have been saved.

View your blog to ensure everything works and looks okay. Don't worry if at first you get a "404 file not found" page: it can take a few days for DNS settings to propogate across the whole internet. You can always switch back to Blogspot hosting and try again in a day or two. When this does work okay, you'll see your blog exactly how it is normally seen, with the exception that your new domain name is in the address bar. Blogger takes care of all the inter-blog links, page titles and such for you, and even redirects traffic from your old name.blogspot.com address to your new www.yoursite.com address! This is great as it means it's unlikely you'll lose traffic or page ranking stats.

Now here's the awkward part: as I mentioned earlier, you can only have http://www.yourblog.com or http://yourblog.com. Not both. Blogger/Google simply haven't recognised that this may be important, and only offer the function of linking one address to your blog. But in a strange way, this is good: you don't have to worry about having two seperate blogs listed in Technorati, for example.

I advised that you use the www prefix for a good reason. Many domain providers offer a single page (often called a "holding page") with each domain name. This will show when you type http://yourblog.com, even though www.yourblog.com will link to your Blogger blog.

So make use of it!

If you are able to edit the HTML, you could create a redirect page to automatically redirect visitors to your www address. That way, you won't lose any visitors at all. To make the page redirect to your www address, you need to insert this code between the head tags, substituting "mysite.com" for your domain name. You can do this using an HTML editor (I prefer Notepad).

<head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.mysite.com" /></head>

The part content="0; means that there is no pause before the browser is redirected. You can change this to "5" for example, to give a 5 second pause if you also want to include an explanation for the redirect in the body of the page. It is also a good idea to include a hyperlink to your www address in the body of the page, just in case the visitor's browser doesn't recognise the redirect command.

If you look at my redirect page at http://glamumous.com, you'll notice that there is an 8 second pause and an explanation for the redirect. Play around and see what works for you!

Similar posts:

  • My new blog header
  • Using Haloscan to enable trackbacks
  • Creating a 3 column Blogger template"
  • Creating a label cloud in the sidebar
  • How to add social bookmark buttons to a Blogger template

Technorati Tags: blogger custom+domain domain+name dot+com+address customizing+blogger+templates blogging

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I must be awkward. As much as I love jeans, I have the greatest trouble in finding a pair that fits well. They're either too big on the waist, or are way too tight on the hips, making me walk like a cardboard cowboy... On the odd occasion that I have found a great pair of jeans, they're too expensive!

What's a girl to do?

Thankfully, help is at hand! Thanks to TheMommyBlog, I encountered the great Zafu Jeans Finder. It's perfect! All you have to do is answer a few questions about your body shape, style preferences and the like, and they find results for the best pair of jeans to suit you and your shape. Really, it works! Best of all, they search hundreds of brands in order to find prices and styles to suit any budget. I found a pair of designer jeans in exactly the style and colour I love for only £15! I couldn't believe my luck!

What's more, you can always find the jeans you like, then go to your nearest outlet to try them for yourself before commiting to a sale online (I did this earlier today to check the accuracy of the jeans finder). And guess what? Zafu was right: the Levis I tried fit like a dream! But I'll buy therm online instead as the price was much better...

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Technorati Tags: perfect+jeans jeans| clothes| style| zafu| jeans+finder online+shopping
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Abuse of parent and child parking spaces is one of my pet hates. In fact, it often infuriates me that people with no children deliberately park in these spaces, ensuring that struggling parents with crying babies, buggies and arms full of shopping have to struggle across the car park.

A few weeks ago, I spotted an empty parent and child space in the local shopping centre's car park. Just as I was manouvering to drive in, a white transit van nipped in instead. I was slightly miffed to say the least, but when I saw a single guy step out in worker's overalls, no child in sight, I was infuriated:

"Hey, I was just about to park there!"
"So what? I got there first!"
"It's a parent and child space. I don't see any kids with you. So move your van."
"No! There's no law against me parking here, is there?"
As luck had it, a parking attendent overheard our "conversation" and told the guy he'd better move if he didn't want to get a ticket for "obstructive parking". That's right: "obstructive parking" not "abuse of parent and child facilities"! Still, I felt better that his behavious had been corrected.

Here in the UK, those who abuse disabled parking facilities are fined when caught. However, those who abuse parent and child allocations are not. I personally feel it is about time this changed.

Technorati Tags: parent+child parking car+parks parking+facilities parenting
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Last night, I finally got around to customising my blog header, which turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be!

I made the header using a combination of Publisher and Photoshop, then uploaded it to my hosting account on another server. I'm rather proud of how well the design turned out!





Then, rather then change the background image through the header widget, I read Peter Chen's excellent tutorial and added an extra widget to the header section; this enabled me to add an extra widget (HTML/Javascript), in which I created an image link to my header enclosed in link tags to the Glamumous home page.

After much tweaking of the header-wrapper/background images and the like, I finally have the (almost) finished design you see now. Please leave your comments to let me know what you think so far!

Similar posts:

  • How I set up my Blogger custom domain
  • Using Haloscan to enable trackbacks
  • Creating a 3 column Blogger template
  • Creating a label cloud in the sidebar
  • How to add social bookmark buttons to a Blogger template

Technorati Tags: custom+header customizing+blogger blogger templates

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5minutesformom.com have a great project on their site called "Tackle it Tuesday". They invite mums to contribute their hints and advice about tackling problem housekeeping chores (which is great for mums like me who really don't like housework!).

Read all about it here!

Tackle It Tuesday Meme


Technorati Tags: 5minutesformom| housework| hints| household| sahm
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Trackbacks are a way of linking blogs to each other when referencing another blogger's post. They're quite useful and interesting to use, but unfortunately Blogger has not yet made this an inherent feature of the new Blogger software.

As an alternative, I decided to install Haloscan on my blog, to enable trackback links. So far, I've found Haloscan to be very useful! It has a feature where you can automatically install Haloscan comments and trackback features into your Blogger template, which is great for those who have a classic template and don't wish to use Blogger's comments system.

Unfortunately, I don't fall into either category: my template is now heavily modified, and I do want to use Blogger's comments! So I tried to install only the trackback links. Big problems there...

To cut a (very) long story short, I believe I have found the way to do this. Here's my step by step guide to what has worked for me:
  1. Get yourself a free account with Haloscan

  2. Once you have your account (and most importantly, your username), open your Blogger dashboard, then click on Template>Edit HTML. Ensure "expand widgets" is ticked.
    Just before the closing head tag, insert this code, being sure to replace "yourhaloscanusername" with your appropriate UN:

    <script src="http://www.haloscan.com/load/yourhaloscanusername"
    type="text/javascript">
  3. Then add this code where you want your Trackback link to appear, again replacing the username:

    <a class='comment-link'
    expr:href='"http://www.haloscan.com/tb/yourhaloscanusername/" + data:post.id +
    "/"' expr:onclick='"HaloScanTB(" + "\""+ data:post.id + "\"" + ");return
    false;"'><script
    type='text/javascript'>postCountTB('<data:post.id/>');</script></a>
  4. I included this just after the comment link as in the following example:
    <b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'> <a
    class='comment-link' expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl'
    expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'><b:if
    cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>1
    <data:top.commentLabel/><b:else/><data:post.numComments/>
    data:top.commentLabelPlural/></b:if></a>
    </b:if> </b:if><a class='comment-link'
    expr:href='"http://www.haloscan.com/tb/yourhaloscanusername/"
    +
    data:post.id + "/"' expr:onclick='"HaloScanTB(" + "\""+ data:post.id + "\""
    +
    ");return false;"'<script
    type='text/javascript'>postCountTB('<data:post.id/>');</script></a>
  5. Preview your template first to make sure everything works okay. If it does, then save your template and begin to receive your trackbacks!

Please let me know if this modification works for you by leaving me a comment below. Happy trackbacking!

Related posts:

  • How I set up my Blogger custom domain
  • My new blog header
  • Creating a 3 column Blogger template
  • Creating a label cloud in the sidebar
  • How to add social bookmark buttons to a Blogger template

Technorati Tags: haloscan trackbacks blogger

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