Using Blogger.com to post to your own domain is a piece of cake. This website was built using this following method, but has since moved to WordPress:
Here is what you do:
1. In Blogger, “create a blog”
http://beta.blogger.com/create-blog.g
and choose Advanced blog set up at the bottom of the page.
2. Pop in your FTP details, either IP address or ftp.domainname.com
3. Enter the FTP path, eg. if it is for your default domain, then this will be /var/www/html/ (this will vary for every webhost)
4. Choose a file name (usualy index.html)
5. Then the Blog url, eg. http://domainname.com
6. Enter your user name and FTP password that your web hosting provider has given you
7. Continue to the next page……
8. Chose a template – the Blogger ones are nice and simple, but I wanted extra columns. There are many free and open source templates available these days. I really like Andreas Viklund’s templates. They are very stylish, easy to modify, and have only a few files.
9. Your Blog has been created !
10. You can add a description next, and change the main title if you desire.
11. The settings need to be modified for the archiving and site feed publishing:
12. Under Archive, add the achive path, e.g. /var/www/html/, and the URL, same as under publishing. Make sure Enable Post pages is set to yes as this allows all posts to have a unigue page that can then be cached in the search engines.
13. Site Feed – add the path and URL here too, most likely the same as for archiving.
That’s it. Create a post, publish, and check it all looks OK. Make sure the Blog, the archive and the sitefeed are all being published to the correct folders. Blogger creates both atom and rss site feeds. The templates can be easily modified once you become familiar with them. Good luck and happy blogging!
