Herself’s Webtools

I was asked to help set up a website for a local non-profit. Last time I set up a custom domain name for Blogspot with GoDaddy it was totally painless. It sure wasn’t this time. 404 errors, name servers that wouldn’t update and Google’s directions on Blogger just don’t work.

Here is what does work.

1) Log onto Google
- go to your blog
- go to settings then publishing
Your domain = http://www.yourdomain.com
Be sure to put in the www
Do not check the box for the redirect.
Save settings.

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2) Log onto your GoDaddy Account
- go to Domains then My Domains
- check that the name servers are ‘Default Parked Nameservers

3) Go to Total DNS Control and MX Records
- under cnames set host www to points to ghs.google.com

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4) Go to Forwarding
- Forward Enabled
- Forward To: http://www.yourdomain.com
- Redirect type 301 Moved Permanently

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That’s it. If everything is correct all should be well in a couple of hours. Possibly as long as two days but I’ve never had it take more than a couple of hours. Just replace herselfsgreenthings.com with your domain name in each of the three pictures.

[ I just set that up temporarily to solve this problem. That domain will probably be reverted to its proper home by the time you read this. ]

One of the main reasons I parted paths with Blogger was there was no easy way to backup and restore my blogs there.  I did write a Perl script for backing up, but moved to WP before I wrote the restore tool.

BlogBackupOnline is a free tool for most users. It will backup, export to other formats and restore your blog if you should need to do so. You sign up and it will back up your blogs daily. You can restore or export your blog as needed. It does not back up your blog images ( photos, images, video ) yet. They hope to add that in the future.

Storage limits are 50 Mb per account, but since you are only backing up text that should be more than sufficient.

Once upon a time when TimesToCome was very young I had a section filled with background images. The expectation was that people would download the images and use them on their own sites. What happened was many people hotlinked to them. Hot linking is when you put a link to someone’s image on their server rather than host it on your server.

My first solution was to remove the images and replace them all with pastel colored smiley faces. While this worked it also meant I couldn’t put up background images for users to download.

There is a better way to do this. You can use .htaccess to prevent hotlinking of images, yet still make them available for your users to view and download. You can prevent all hotlinking of images on your site or just block specific images from being hotlinked.

Block ALL image hotlinking by adding this to your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain\.com(/?.*$)
[NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC,L]

This sends a 403 forbidden error to the person doing the hotlinking and stops processing the .htaccess file.

To allow a domain ( Yours and any others you have ) to hotlink your files add this to the above code: RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}
!^http://(www\.)?okdomain\.com(/)?.*$[NC]

Just add one line for each domain you wish to allow to hotlink.

To block hotlinking in specific directories create an .htaccess file and put it in that directory Then add these lines:
Rewrite Engine on
RewriteRule ^.*$ -

You can also replace the image so the hotlinker sees a different image than the one on your site: RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain\.com(/?.*$)
[NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png|bmp)$ /images/warningimage.gif [L,NC]

Now .htaccess is just that, nothing should be added to the file name. If you make a mistake you’ll likely take down your site. So try on your home computer first. If you do take down your site, just delete .htaccess or move it to old.htaccess until you can fix the problem.

You can also block specific sites like MySpace from hotlinking but allow all others ( like Google image search etc )

Block by server name:
RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} evilwebsite\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} anotherevilwebsite\.com
RewriteRule .*-[F]

To block an ip just add it to your blocked list: ( this blocks both 1.2.3.4 and 0.0.0.0 )

order allow,deny
deny from 1.2.3.4
deny from 0.0.0.0
allow from all