Don’t be down when your domain is down

Recently, the blog.mu domain has been down pulling several blogs down to the graveyard with it. Here’s the story by Eddy Young. Thanks to Stéphane Lee, appropriate measures have been taken and the blogs are now accessible with a moris.org address instead of a blog.mu one. Thus http://blogosquare.blog.mu comes to http://blogosquare.moris.org

I would like here to share some tips with all those using such domain or that are being hosted at blog.mu by Stéphane.

1. Use a domain redirection service like freedomain.co.nr and never worry again of domain name changes. What to do with all your visitors who don’t know of your new moris.org address? Never get stuck like this again. By setting a free account with co.nr, you’ve got a free domain like http://www.you.co.nr that you can target to your blog’s address. Make sure that the cloaking option is on. So if in the future such domain name issues surge again, you just have to change the target URL to the new domain. Your visitors will always have access to your blog.

I’ve got mine which is www.blogosquare.co.nr. If tomorrow the address changes back to blog.mu, I’ll just change the target URL from http://blogosquare.moris.org to http://blogosquare.blog.mu without having access to my blog affected.

2. Use relative address for your pages in Wordpress. If you have modified the links in your header.php to point to your pages, chances are that those links are now broken. Kyushiro from kyusphere.co.nr suggest you write the links for your pages in your header.php as such:

<a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/page slug">page name</a>

instead of <a href="http://yourblog.blog.mu/page slug>page name</a>

To get the page slug, see the right panel in your wordpress admin when you edit a particular page. There are several boxes there like Discussion, Page Status,Page Template,Page Parent and among them you will also find the Page Slug. That’s what you have to insert in that link as above.

3. I would also suggest you update your permalinks from Options > Permalinks within your Wordpress admin. Permalink is just the URL pointing to your post. Just in case some links might be pointing to the old url. Make sure to have your .htaccess modifiable(by changing the file permission using an Ftp soft like FileZilla) so that this can be done automatically within your Wordpress admin section.

4. Burn your feed using a service like Feedburner.com. You would then have a feed URL that you can make available to your visitors which is like http://feeds.feedburner.com/your feed name. Since your blog’s URL has changed, your feed would also have a new address giving an error message to subscribers of your feed.

Using Feedburner, you can edit the feed details and point it to your new feed URL and the feed would be available to those subscribed to it. No fuss with those following you via RSS.

5. For all those that follow the track of Mauritian bloggers’ posts, the tracker is now available at mauritiusblogtracker.com. Subscribe to the RSS to have all the fresh content from Mauritian blogs delivered to your desk.

So now enjoy access to your blog at blog.mu without worrying again of those domain name problems. If you’ve got more tips like these to share to others, please do so using the comments. I would like to thank Stéphane Lee for all the great work that he does for the Mauritian Blogging Community. Thumbs up to you man.