howto: have two or more blogs in the same domain

For my inaugural how-to post, I'll explain with how I configured this "howto" subdomain. It was much simpler than I expected.

I already have a blog at http://edvoidswarranties.com/. I also have the www subdomain automatically redirecting (this is a setting in Blogger: Settings -> Publishing -> "Redirect http://www.edvoidswarranties.com/ to http://www.blogger.com/ is checked).

First, I had to configure the subdomain. My registrar is GoDaddy. In the "Total DNS Control and MX Records" section, I created a CNAME for "howto" (without the quotes) and pointed it to ghs.google.com, just like the www CNAME was already configured. My new howto alias was live in less than 5 minutes, (your mileage may vary, DNS can take a while to propagate from server to server).

Second, in Blogger, I created a new blog. I copied over most of the template HTML from my http://edvoidswarranties/ template (I copied the raw HTML), but some of it generated errors when I tried to save it, so I had to manually check each one of the gadgets. In some cases, I copied HTML text from the http://edvoidswarranties.com/ gadgets directly into the http://howto.edvoidswarranties.com/ gadgets. But basically, I created it to be the same blog "shell" as my primary blog because I wanted a consistent look and feel. I gave it a different title however, because I wanted to differentiate between my blog and this how-to collection. In Blogger's Settings -> Publishing section, I configured it to point to http://howto.edvoidswarranties.com/. I chose not to tick the "Redirect www.howto.edvoidswarranties.com to howto.edvoidswarranties.com" checkbox because I felt it was unlikely anyone would ever attempt to try that address.

That's it! In about an hour, I made a second blog feeding into my http://edvoidswarranties.com/ domain. Now I can post howto and instructional guides. I'm eager to publish this initial post so I'll skip diagrams and pictures.

filed under: blog