Blogger 1AND1 and Domain Authorisation

It started by deciding I was done with Wordpress for blogging. I would move my personal blog to sit alongside my CreativeCrow blog on Google's Blogger platform. Once I'd done that I had a few decisions to make.

The link to my fairly popular CreativeCrow blog was blog.johnpotter.info but it made sense to move that attribution to the new personal blog and give CreativeCrow a more appropriate name like creative.johnpotter.info. Traffic to CreativeCrow would die while Google re-digested the site with its new creative.johnpotter.info branding, but I'd rather do it now than face the move when the blog is proper popular. So this is what I needed to do:

• Move the attribution of blog.johnpotter.info  from my CreativeCrow blog to my personal blog
• Create a new host attribution of creative.johnpotter.info and assign that to my CreativeCrow writing blog

I knew from past experience this can be problematic but I wasn't expecting this:

1. I created the creative.johnpotter.info sub-domain on 1AND1 with a redirect to ghs.google.com, which is one half of what's required to link to Blogger
2. I deleted the blog.johnpotter.info attribution from the Blogger CreativeCrow blog
3. I tried adding the blog.johnpotter.info attribution to the personal blog on Blogger which failed, with a message from Blogger stating it could not confirm I owned the domain and host name. Blogger listed the steps I needed to follow to complete authorisation but I didn't, not immediately, because I had already authorised blog.johnpotter.info a year earlier.
4. Some extensive Googling later I discovered Blogger recently upped its security, so any changes needed re-authorising. Yey!
5. The instructions stated that I needed to create a Blogger specific sub-domain within johnpotter.info with a provided security enabled redirection code that is very long. In fact longer than 1AND1 permit despite the configuration instructions being aimed specifically at 1AND1 
6. I really couldn't believe this and huffed and puffed a bit. I then fired off a crisply worded support request to 1AND1 and did some more Googling. It seemed Blogger's most recent security requirements had frustrated a LOT of 1AND1 Bloggers
7. I learned that while Blogger's new security authorisation code was on the lengthy side, 1AND1 were the only hosting company not supporting it, with some vague statement promising they would at some point in the future.
8. I eventually came across this brilliant post: How to setup your Blogger blog with a custom domain from 1and1.com where Marc Ridey explains that the only solution for 1AND1 customers is to move the DNS management of johnpotter.info from 1AND1 to another DNS hosting company. I followed his instructions step by step and moved johnpotter.info to ClouDNS.
9. A got a reply to my earlier support request from 1AND1 which simply pointed me to Marc's post.
10. Sixteen hours later all the changes filtered through and blog.johnpotter.info was correctly assigned to my personal blog and creative.johnpotter.info was assigned to my CreativeCrow blog.

I am now looking at moving my Chasing Innocence promotional sites away from 1AND1 and transferring management of the domains to ClouDNS.