Yesterday, we moved this CelebritySemiotic.com domain from Microsoft Live Spaces to Blogger and we already have a critical error with Blogger that we cannot solve on our own.  Right now, www.celebritysemiotic.com works while the “naked domain” version celebritysemiotic.com does not:


Here is the trouble report we filed this morning in the Blogger help group.

Your Blogs URL: celebritysemiotic.com
Browser(s) used: Firefox 3.5.5, Safari 4.0.4
Location: East Coast

Here’s a story of two domains moved to Blogger yesterday. Neither are Google Apps domains, but Google Apps does appear to be playing a part in the problem. Doing WHOIS tests on both domains returns exactly the same results. Both domains are managed by me via Network Solutions.

1. The first domain http://bolesblues.com — appears to be working fine on the naked URL and with the WWW.

2. The second domain http://celebritysemiotic.com — is not working right as a naked URL. I get the error message in Blogger that “Another Blog is already Hosted at this Address” when I try to set up the redirect, but I can’t figure out how to fix it. T

However, there is a re-direct happening with the naked URL… but it isn’t my doing… even though it may appear otherwise!

celebritysemiotic.com, for a few hours last night, was redirecting to another domain of mine: http://boles.com and now this morning it is redirecting to yet another domain of mine, http://bolesuniversity.com — and I have no idea why or how that is happening.

BolesUniversity.com is a Google Apps Premier domain — that I purchased and manage through Network Solutions and my local hosting company — but it has never been associated with celebritysemiotic.com in any way.

celebritysemiotic.com used to point to another blog hosted on MSFT Live Spaces — so there’s no way that domain was ever even tangentially associated with Boles.com or BolesUniversity.com from a CNAME or A Record point of view.

I have tried hooking and unhooking the celebritysemiotic.com domain to and from its original blogger address to a dedicated domain in the Blogger admin panel — but trying to check the box to redirect the domain still ends in the unfortunate error mentioned in the title of his report.

I have read and searched for a proper answer. I used the Magical Custom Domain form last night. If that works, will I be notified? Or will I need to do something extra on my side to then complete the problem?

There is an obvious problem with the host file for celebritysemiotic.com — but I have no idea how to reset it or fix it or to even understand the why of what happened because it does not make any sense.

I appreciate any aide and comfort and solutions you might supply.

Thank you.

We have no idea when or if this will be resolved and we confess to being frustrated at not being able to directly control the zone file for this domain with Google. 

We also wish we had a more direct line to Google to get this fixed instead of hoping for help in the Blogger support forum and continuously wishing on the “Magical Custom Domain Form” — so we’re stuck here with you holding thumbs and through the cloud for help.

If you have any idea how to fix this, please leave us a comment with the details.

5 Comments

  1. Looks like the best solution was just to avoid blogger altogether — seems like a lot of people have this very same problem with Blogger!

  2. You’re right, Gordon. I was lulled into a false sense of Blogger safety by rarely using the service. Then, when we ramped up, Blogger died us down. Unfortunate, but good to know early it would be a disappointment in the end.

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