Custom made

I was going to reply to this question in the comments for my last post, but then I realized it was a bit long and involved for that, so Lori, here's the info:

Q: Is it easy to set up a custom domain name with Blogger?
A: Yes and no.

I've registered two different Blogger sites with custom domain names. The first was super easy because I bought the name through Blogger (instructions here), so they take care of updating all the settings for you. Very, very easy to do, and only costs $10USD.

The second name I registered was this one, which I couldn't get through Blogger because it was already taken - since it was about to expire, I grabbed it on the drop with snapnames*. This meant it was slightly more expensive ($60USD), and that I also had to take care of my own DNS settings and deal with the infamous "Blogs may not be hosted at naked domains" error. Neither of these things are extremely difficult, but it is frustrating, time consuming and frankly just a pain in the ass.

Now that I have it working? Yup, totally worth it! However, if I'd had the choice to buy it through Blogger, I would have, just to make life easier.

*Blogger will not backorder domains, so this is something you have to do with an alternate company; I highly recommend snapnames or pool, and do NOT recommend godaddy - not only do they have a far lower success rate, but they also put the name up for auction regardless of whether it's backordered or not (the other companies also use auctions when there are multiple backorders on the same name, but godaddy is the only registrar that puts up your desired domain for auction even if yours is the only order).

P.S. Wanna see something gross? This is about a quarter of the cat hair and dust that came out of my laptop when it was cleaned. A quarter. No wonder it was running badly...