Unapologetically Mundane

Tracey tells me that the WordPress plugin that e-mails my replies to your comments has stopped functioning. This is good news for you if you’re annoyed that you have to read my replies but are too polite to not include your e-mail address in your comments. But it makes me feel like one of those normal bloggers who can’t even have plugins.

I might as well not reply to comments at all!

I might as well stop blogging!

I MIGHT AS WELL DIE!!

I’ve sort of been thinking about changing the layout of my site, because I basically had no idea what I was doing when I chose my WordPress theme and only later discovered that mine was built for WordPress version 1.1 or something and was so messed up that it took the smarts of every programmer at my software company to make it look reasonable. And even now, its a complete wreck internally.

So, I’ve chosen a new layout and done a little work on it to make it suit me more, but basically all of my friends think it’s too emo for my subject matter. I like it, though!

Click to enlarge.

What do you think? You know I can’t make decisions on my own.

So, this Twitter thing is sort of over, huh? After talking about it for weeks, my best friend, Tracey, convinced me to join last week so we won’t become those old ladies who wear Winnie the Pooh t-shirts, still listen to Poison, and are afraid of the Internet.

I added the 36 suggested people from my Gmail contacts, and 17 of them have added me back. SEVENTEEN! The other 20 of them haven’t logged into Twitter since August.

The problem is that I think I really like Twitter now. I didn’t see the point of it before, what with my writing dissertation-length diatribes here and all, but now I see that Twitter challenges me to be a better writer by forcing me to cram all of my brilliant thoughts into 140 characters. Or to be willing to separate them into twenty different tweets of 140 characters each. Doesn’t that sound great?!

Plus, I like the interface, and I like that I have so many fewer friends on there than on Facebook that I have some interest in keeping up. At this point, I actually care what my Twitter friends are saying, notice when they say something about me, and care to reply to them. Some of them are actually clever enough that I want to retweet their tweets! I was so busy being annoyed that CNN and Ashton Kutcher thought anyone cared what they said that I totally missed the boat. Sort of like the way I might someday actually watch any of the Star Wars movies and find out they’re not lame.

So follow me on Twitter! And also follow Tracey, because she doesn’t just spout feminist propaganda on there, unlike on her blog!

There’s also Bachelor Girl! And Noel! And Tessa! And Aaron! And Serial Monogamist! And Nat! And those are the only people I’ll imagine you’ll know, but you should add them all, because I want all of my friends to be friends with all of my other friends.

An Examiner article that’s about Michael Jackson simply to get Google hits.

A donuts4dinner post that you know I wouldn’t have to link to you if you’d just subscribe to my feed over there. Just sayin’.

I host my main blogs on Bluehost, use the WordPress blogging platform, and love both of them. However, it takes a little work to set up a self-hosted blog, so when I wanted to start a side project recently, I chose Blogger for its supposed ease of use.

I purchased my new domain from Bluehost and found Google’s directions for using a custom domain with Blogger. They seemed fairly simple at first, but when I actually tried to follow them, I found that they didn’t make a bit of sense to me.

And so I present my own directions for using a Bluehost custom domain with a Blogger blog:

1. Log in to your Bluehost account and scroll down until you see Register Domain.

2. Choose your new domain and purchase it as an add-on. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, but if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them.

3. Click on the Help tab in the upper-righthand corner of your screen.

4. Choose Open a Ticket from the Main Menu on the lefthand navigation.

5. Click the radio button for the first option, A Record/MX/Cname Changes.

6. The ticket form will automatically load. Fill in your e-mail address, your full name, and the domain you’ve just purchased. (Example: newdomain.com)

7. In the Message box, write something like the following:

Hello Support,

My main domain is [olddomain.com], and the last 4 digits of the credit card I used to purchase my domain are [- - - -].

Please make the following changes for me:

A record: [newdomain.com] –> 216.239.32.21, 216.239.34.21, 216.239.36.21, 216.239.38.21
CName: [www.newdomain.com] –> ghs.google.com

Thanks,
Your Name

In my case, olddomain.com would be unapologeticallymundane.com, because that’s the original domain I purchased with Bluehost in 2008. www.newdomain.com would be the one I recently purchased for my side project.

You can change the www.yourdomain.com to blog.yourdomain.com or whatever subdomain you may have set up with Bluehost. Google’s instructions tell you that you must use a subdomain, and I had no idea that www is considered a subdomain at first.

8. Submit the form, and in a couple of hours, you should hear back from Bluehost at whatever e-mail address you entered at the top of the form to open a ticket.

9. Bluehost says the domain will be ready in 1-4 hours. If you’re impatient like me, you’ll begin checking after about 5 minutes, but it’s best to wait the full 4 hours if your Blogger is already up and running and has visitors.

10. Log in to Blogger and go to Settings –> Publishing –> Switch to Custom Domain –> Switch to Advanced Settings.

11. Type in your domain name, complete with www or blog or whatever subdomain you chose. Type in the word verification at the bottom of the page, hit Save Settings, and you’re finished!

It seems easy now, but I had no idea if I was doing anything right the first time around. Please leave a comment if you have any questions; I won’t judge.

If you’re like me, you obsess over the fact that Google Reader doesn’t update itself often enough to include your newest blog entries the moment you write them. I scoured the Innanet to find a solution but couldn’t see anything official. Here’s a great workaround, though:

1) If you’re using FeedBurner FeedFlares for things like displaying a link to comment on your feed (which you should be, OMG), you’ll want to make sure it’s aware of your latest post by pinging FeedBurner.

If you’re not using Feedburner (fool!), skip to step 3.

2) Give it anywhere between 10 seconds and 30 minutes, because pinging Feedburner only works about half of the time.

3) Bring your feed up on Google Reader and click the Refresh button right above your text.

Voila! Your feed will be updated for all to see, and you can go back to being obsessive-compulsive about something else.

Hey, whoa, I actually just posted on donuts4dinner.com.

It’s the tale of my trip to the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party this weekend and includes some super-sexy mid-eat photos. Mmmmmm.

Busy actually working at work, busy enjoying Kamran’s two-week break from law school before summer semester starts, busy savoring fancy dinners, busy not reading your blog . . .

So tell me what’s going on! Or just force me to cozy up with my Google Reader this weekend.

I just made my first update to donuts4dinner.com!

Which is my new food blog, in case you missed it.

I promise not to tell you every time I update the thing, but you know, a girl has to give herself a little traffic to start.