WordPress.com Domain Upgrade

Finally after a lot of thinking I made to upgrade this blog to my own domain name, thanks to //engtech who also just took this hard step, passing me the inspiration.

One of the factor that influenced this move was the recent modifications on wordpress.com that facilitated verification on Google Webmasters tools. Since this popped up as an undocumented feature, it is not guaranteed to work in future. And if you didn’t make the move now and tomorrow this feature disappears, at least for me, that would be a reason to stick to the wordpress.com subdomain forever.

Meanwhile WordPress.com came up with Domain mapping and Email. While it’s all the Google App that it is talking about and that’s available to anyone, wordpress.com here is enabling you to pass the Google verification process that requires you to upload an html page, and create relevant MX entries on the fly. Once you have posted the filename suggested by Google, wordpress.com ensures that it doesn’t return a 404 error when this page is called (May be the undocumented feature mentioned above crept from modifications made for domain mapping).

While the FAQ Page regarding above mentions that Gmail is the only App currently available, I have successfully added Start Page, Calendar, Web Pages, Docs & Spreadsheets apart from Gmail. I am putting here the process that I went through if it could be of any help.

After getting ownership of the domain, which I purchased from a registrar other than wordpress.com, when I tried to point the domain in wordpress.com dashboard it required the name server settings to be changed to point to name servers of wordpress.com. I hated that as I would no longer be able to make DNS modifications, after all I had paid extra for getting the domain name with these facilities. As any deviation would have required me to contact Support and get them to complete the task, I just followed as was told and changed the Name servers and got the domain activated on my wordpress.com blog.

Now the first thing that I did after this was to add the domain to Google Webmasters and get it verified. When done I just changed the Name servers back and added a “A” DNS entry to point all subdomains (*) on Jalaj.net to the IP address of the wordpress.com server that hosted my blog (I hope they don’t change server/IPs). Worked fine…

Now went ahead to register for Google Apps. Did everything as was told in the wordpress post/FAQ as above except that instead of opting for HTML upload, chose the other option regarding adding a specific “CNAME” entry in the DNS settings to point to google.com. And as I performed the step the verification succeeded. I however did require performing an additional step of manually creating the six “MX” records as told by Google, which would have required a single click if I had pointed Name Servers to wordpress.com. While I successfully got all available Google Apps activated without an hassles, getting them to work on custom url addresses required additional “CNAME” entries to be made for each app.

Now that everything’s working fine, only thing left with me is to replace the hard-coded links on posts to point to the new ones, unsure of whether that would be of any help?