By way of an update, I sorted CG sorted out (www.powernoparole.ca).
For some reason, although an account was setup, the blog that she created didn’t exist on that account.
All we had to do was create the new blog using her account and then set it up to post to her domain.

CG chose to have her blog hosted at her site, (which I must say is a very powerful insight to something I couldn’t imagine how I would cope with. Well worth a read).

For those who are considering hosting their blog data on their own servers, here is a rough explaination of what we did.

  1. Logged into the web server via FTP and created a sub folder under the public_html folder called blog (original I know, but you could have it stored in the public_html folder if you want)
  2. Created a archive sub folder under /public_html/blog/archive (just to keep things neater later on).
  3. On the blogger control panel, entered in the FTP address of the web server (this is usually ftp.yourdomain.com, but you could use the IP address if you know it)
  4. On the blogger control panel, enter the name of the blog page (in this case index.html), the path to the blog (in this case /public_html/blog) and the web address where the blog can be found.
  5. Enter in the username and password for the FTP account on the webserver. I usually like to create an FTP account just for the use of blogger so that I can track access a little better. Whilst creating the FTP account, you can also specify a home directory for that account and limit access to the /public_html/blog/ folder just as an extra level of security.
  6. Made a test post…

So there you go. Five simple steps to having your blog data on your own website, six if you include the test post. (assuming you have one).
There are further settings you can change, but this just changes the way it works, but the information above is all you really need to make it work.

  1. Change the archive path to the one you defined on your webserver (if you did, if not, it will post it to the /public_html/blog folder in our example).
  2. Add an email address to where new posts are sent.
  3. Set up the comments section

Why would you want to do this?

  • Well I like to be in control of the data that I post, (i.e. if Blogger ever went belly up and trashed its machines and the countless backups I hope it has, I still have a copy of the data on my own webserver. Not that I think Blogger would ever suffer such a catestrophic failure I might add).
  • All my posts are still held in the blogger database, but the actual HTML pages that are created are stored on my own webserver.
  • It means that I can have my own domain name as part of the blog URL. (It means I can incorporate my blog into an existing website, just like CG did).

The only downside to the above, is a large blog will use space on your webserver that would otherwise be space used on Blogger’s server. But if you are on a web server with a host that offers anything less than 2GB of storage, you are with the wrong host, so these days, it would have to be a rather large blog to be a problem when it comes to space.

If you ever fancy moving your blog from the blogger web address to your own domain and need a hand, just give us a shout.

Regards

Chris