The Lady Programmer

I am glad to extend help in fixing Joop’s Sailor’s Adventures and Opinions blog. For a week I could not the view blog through my feed reader. I can view the blog using the old blogspot domain, but not with their newly purchased “www.sailorsmusings.com” domain.

Joops is one regular visitor of this blog. His wife, Chubkulit, is the one actively seeking help in fixing this problem. She had managed to change the domain of her Rose’s Obstacles and Journey, but something had gone wrong with her hubby’s blog.

I have been visiting Iceah, Pastilan, and Berry’s blogs and I noticed Chubkulit’s distress call. Chubkulit followed Iceah’s post mentioning that Pinay Chicken Heart’s new domain by reaching out to me in this previous post on how to set up custom domains in blogger.

Since Chubkulit seemed to be up all week fixing the domain herself. I just contacted her and went into their domain manager account in Google Apps. I also checked their blogger account to see if the settings are right. Fixing that domain thing took me less than 10 minutes.

You can now view Joop’s blog and see their latest family adventure in Korea: Sailor’s Adventures and Opinions

To Joop’s and Chubskulit, thanks for featuring me in your blogs:
Lady Programmer
Goodies… Good Luck… Great Friends… Great People

Got a similar problem? Please contact me through this address gem [at] theladyprogrammer [dot] com

If you are writing for site like SocialSpark, PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews.com, bloggers often run into problems when these bloggers performed an upgrade to using a custom domain.

I could still use the old URL and statistics with PayPerPost and Sponsored Reviews.com. SocialSpark is an entirely different story: I could not submit my posts even if I used the old URL that I had registered with them.

photo credit: stevekrh19 (SXC)

The Problem with SocialSpark

I had taken a SocialSpark opportunity recently but I could not submit my recent post because of the URL change. To most bloggers, this situation can be frustrating and some bloggers may blog about their frustrations that accompany new domain changes. SocialSpark is still on BETA, so their automated review system is not perfected yet and it relies on community feedback to build their system.

Immediately, I had gone to IZEA Help section to find any write ups and FAQs about domain URL changes with SocialSpark. I have not found any so I decided to write a short love note to Customer Love, requesting for two things:

• change the URL registered with them from http://theladyprogrammer.blogspot.com to http://www.theladyprogrammer.com
• approve a recently opportunity that was rejected outright at auto approval

I did not get an immediate response with them because I submitted a help ticket during the weekend. The recently opportunity that I had with them had even expired. What I did was to reopen the resolved tickets to Customer Love just to have those requests approved. I was so happy when they had fulfilled all my requests above. Customer Love seemed to love me!

photo credit: weirdvis (SXC)

There is only one more problem that I had encountered with SocialSpark, so I had to reopen the resolved ticket again. My blog has lost its statistics so I ended up not qualified for the opportunities that I was once qualified for. It seemed to me that the right statistics for the daily visitors and Alexa rankings are not properly reflected in my new account, so I needed those clarifications.

Change URL Requests with PayPerPost

Since PayPerPost still remains as the huge paid review site, I had encountered so many bloggers blog about their domain changes and their successful arrangement with PayPerPost. I had tried my hands too, when I had to request for a URL change on one of my older blogs. The system with PPP is simple: simply write to Customer Love to request for a change in URL. Their technical support will make all the corresponding URL changes in their database. All the blog statistics with the new domain will be reflected in one’s PPP account.

Change URL Request with Sponsored Reviews

URL change policy is different in SponsoredReviews.com because it has a different policy on URL change requests. One has to delete the old blog that uses the old URL first, then resubmit the blog that uses the new URL. This will still require manual review by the SponsoredReviews.com. I don’t like this arrangement, because I had gotten some good feedback ratings from some advertisers.

I have noticed that the old URL still works with SponsoredReviews.com, so I still get opportunities using the old URL instead.

Have you encountered headaches with other paid review services?

Questions that I’ve asked myself before switching domains:
Is it possible to retain all the rankings after switching from blogspot to custom domain? Can I still own my page rank after switching domains? What would happen to other rankings (Alexa, Technorati, Yahoo backlinks)?

Did you notice my new domain?

photo credit: bigevil600 (SXC)

As some of you had noticed, I’ve changed the URL of this blog to a new domain. For this little blog that has some PR and good Alexa stats, it is not an easy decision. I did not even think that this blog would really make it that far in statistics and put me to a good exposure to various opportunities. For anyone doing paid reviews, PR still remains the most important thing: higher PR means more paid reviews. A PR of N/A or zero means lesser paid review opportunities.

I’ve searched over the World Wide Web for information before I switched to a new address. Purchasing a new domain is not a new thing to me, as I’ve done it already before. This is the third domain purchase: the first two ones were spent on my personal blogs. I’ve lost a PR4 blog due to a new domain.

Throwing Out the Old URL
Over the weekend I decided to throw away my rankings and see what the new domain will lead me; being a lady programmer I had been curious about what will happen to this one. If you are planning to own a new domain (believe me, it feels great to have a custom domain even if you lose all the rankings), then you might want to dig in to more information that I had consulted myself.

photo credit: lusi (SXC)

Blogger help has some resources to setup custom domains.
How do I Use a Custom Domain on my Blog?
How do I create a CNAME record for my custom domain?

You might find Amanda’s information, but she still points out to other bloggers like Blogbloke below on setting up custom domains. She’s great on explaining how to tweak blogger templates, but on the discussion on domain topics, her advice on using meta-refresh pages is not recommended. Still, I’m giving out the link references below.
How to Setup Your Blogger Custom Domain
A Better Way to Setup Your Custom Domain?
How to Setup your Blogger Custom Domain with GoDaddy

Blogbloke does not have a great looking website (in my opinion; well, I messed up my blog and I had missing parts that I haven’t got to fix in my site), but his write up on setting custom domains using 301 redirect is the best one I’ve seen around. This is the one that I’ve followed during the entire setup.
Blogger Custom Domain: Best Setup for Optimizing your Blog Pagerank!
6 Blog Tips Why You Should be using a Custom Domain Name for your Blog
Blogger Custom Domain: Best Setup for Optimizing your Blog Pagerank!

Do you want to understand what 301 redirect is all about? That’s the one that I have used for the new domain. It is the proper way to redirect a site. Don’t ever use 302 redirect and meta-refresh tags.
Transferring a Website to a New Domain
Best Practices When Moving Your Site

I am not an expert so I hope that the resources that I had bookmarked for you will guide you when you decided to have a domain that you can call your own.

Unfortunately I could not provide the answer to the questions above right now. This domain is still less than a week old as I am writing this post.

Before I forget, if you got links using my old URL, I would appreciate changing it to the one that uses this new domain. Thanks again to those who made quick changes to their blogrolls and links before I made this formal announcement. I prefer having the URL using http://www.ladyprogrammer.com (with the WWW). Thanks!

Do you have any joys and pains when you switched to a new domain?

Oh! “The Lady Programmer” has a new URL!

Some of you noticed that new URL that my blog had. Some even made the URL changes in their blogrolls even without my request. Thanks so much and I am happy to see that.

I made a very careful research before I decided to make the move to my own custom domain. I wanted to make sure I do things right. The experts had always said that I would do the right thing if I do a 301 redirect so I don’t have to lose the search engine rankings. To do a 301 redirect I had to manipulate the domain manager in my GoDaddy account.

The Cost of a New Domain

It does not cost much to own a domain. Get your credit card or Paypal account funded with only about $10 and you can have a .COM domain with a free email account with the domain suffix (oh… you can now email me at gem [at] theladyprogrammer [dot] com). .INFO domains are the best buys on GoDaddy on sale: the domains only cost $1.49. If you want to save even more, use a coupon code from coupon sites and apply that before checking out (I was able to save a dollar!). UPDATE: A $10 .COM domain is good for one-year ownership.

In Blogger, it is also possible to own a custom domain but I have decided to go for the GoDaddy one because I wanted to have my own email account with the domain and do a little bit more tinkering with the email.

Why Did I Made the Move?

I think that it is now proper for me to have this blog sitting out on a new URL, after all this blog of mine is getting to be big little blog or a little big blog. It is finally getting noticed and I am very glad that I have a community of readers in this blog.

I made a careful research and the 301 redirect is the right thing to do for any website or blog with nice ratings on Google pagerank, Alexa rankings, Technorati rankings and other rating systems that bloggers are very much conscious of.

A new domain is a clean slate. At the beginning it would have no rankings and my blog would seem like a new blog that was just created. Check on any pagerank checker site and you’ll see that this new URL does not have any pagerank. My older domain http://theladyprogrammer.blogspot.com has a PR3 ranking as I am writing this. The 301 redirect would simply tell all search engine bots that I have moved to a new address, and a permanent one.

Image credit to Viajar24h.com

Losing the Precious Rankings

I would temporarily lose the rankings for the meantime. These experts say it would take me several weeks to a few months for the new domain to acquire the ranking of my old domain. Since the old domain still sits on a PR3 rank, any visitors who came to my site from Google would still see my site and information would still be ranked the same.

The Proper Way: The 301 Redirect

301 redirect also saves me time from running around to everyone then begging on my knees to change the old URLs in their blogrolls or blog post links. But to anyone who can spare the time, I would really appreciate if you take some time to take off the old URL and use this new one.

Of course, I would not have made this ultimate move without the support of my frequent readers – active commenters or not. You’re the ones whom I could thank for the growing success of this blog. Thanks to all!

Do you own a custom domain? Or are you considering one for your blog?