Join the BlogIdol Movimiento!

Paying annually for a domain name is a drag. Getting a free one chains you to your service provider. If you want a domain solution that will not cost you yearly and dearly but you can take with you, we have it right here: introducing The BlogIdol Movimiento (right now in Beta) Blushing

We are introducing a new model for domain name registration. Rather than you paying $10-50 / year for a domain name of your choosing, you can pay $1 for our subdomain setup (i.e., Minimum3Letters.BlogIdol.ro) and $5 for each update you request we make. We undertake to provide this offer for as long as .ro domains do not incur yearly charges, as it is the case right now. We can also provide an email address (e.g., yoursubdomain@BlogIdol.ro) for a one-time charge TBD. Payment can be done by PayPal – we are open to alternatives as well.

In all fairness, a quick search turns out existing free such subdomains (afraid.org, .co.nr, subdomain.net). We do not know what exactly they offer, if they offer CNAME as we do and how reliable they are – we only got tired of paying for a domain name to host a blog that does not bring any income, a blog that we do not plan on monetizing and yet we do not want to be tied down to any particular blog service provider. One of the providers above might be more suitable for you. We are providing this service as Beta for now and there is no guarantee express or implied. Other than a marketing firm collecting your data we do not see why would anyone go to the trouble of providing a free service, unless they plan on (over)charging you later on. With our service, we have a fully disclosed charge of $5 for modifications, so we have a clear and obvious incentive to keep this up and running. We only need your email address to authenticate you, the subdomain you choose and where to forward it to (or the CNAME) and we will not sell your email to anyone else. Please use our form to enter your data (open to the right or in a new window).

The following is a (VERY) quick list of what a blogger has to do to move their Blogger blog from a domain that’s no longer under control to a BlogIdol subdomain:

Create new canonical subdomain pointing to ghs.google.com (that’s what WE do, if this is a new subdomain)
Create new blog under your account. Choose a template similar to what you have on the old blog. (this and everything else is what YOU do)
Backup old blog using Blogger tool in “Settings –> Other”
Open XML backup in a text editor and search for old www.olddoma.in replacing with www.newdoma.in; also olddoma.in replace with newdoma.in so that your existing links point to your new address.
If you can find it, search for <a name='more'></a> and replace it with <!—more--> If you don’t, your new blog will be missing the  “Read more” breaks.
Save the xml backup with a new file name and make note of it.
Backup the template – this may be done in the whole blog backup, but in our testing it did not propagate right away.
In the new blog, import the file you saved at 6.
Your articles will still be unpublished and showing as “Imported”. You will have to Publish them manually.
After making that your new blog works with the expected URLs, add <link rel="canonical" href=http://newaddress/> to old blog in the <head> section
Use <meta content='5;url=http://www.newdoma.in/' http-equiv='refresh'/> to redirect automatically within 5 seconds to www.newdoma.in
Consider using the if..else trick to write such code on every page automatically.
You will also have to reimport the Favicon, the template and copy all the other modifications – for instance, custom 404 page etc.
Move the old widget contents in the Layout, modifying the URL where necessary.
If you didn’t have much traffic with your old blog, get a new analytics code and install it, if you have an old template, or just paste it in Settings if you have a new one. If you want to keep your Analytics history, use the same code and change the URL in the Analytics Account settings.
Use webmaster tools from analytics – change of address (under Configuration) to let Google know you’ve moved.
Update your Feedburner feed by clicking Edit Feed Details in the top menu and entering your new blog address. No need to create new Feed!
Use Disqus “Migrate domain” tool or, if you are using another commenting system, follow those instructions. If you are using the default Blogger commenting system, no change is necessary for a straight Blogger to Blogger change.
Change your blog link in your social media profiles. At a minimum, this should be Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus Pages, Pinterest.
Post a boilerplate message to the let users know the address has changed. You might want to do so with a permanent text box at the very top of the page – add it from the Layout.
If you find that your new blog is leaking traffic to your old blog, watch out for included documents (or forms) that contain links to your old blog. Because these are external, they were not modified at step 4.
Browse your new blog and play with the Bubble Wrap :)

If you have access to your old domain control panel and can do so, consider adding 301 redirects. They are a better way to move your blog, but unfortunately Blogger does not support it.

The following is a quote from Blogger2Wordpress, who also offer a plugin for that platform:

Blogger.com doesn’t provide you with the facility to 301 redirect people and robots to any other site. So, we use a link parameter called rel=”canonical”. Initially, this was used to prioritize in-domain URLs but now, all major search engines have agreed to use it cross domain. See the last question here.
Here, we make a template on blogger with rel=”canonical” and meta refresh to http://yourdomain.com?blogger=http://your.BlogSpot.com/blah-blah.html. rel=”canonical” tells the search engine robots to “crawl this yourdomain.com URL next time you come across theBlogSpott URL”.
“Meta refresh” refreshes the webpage and redirect to yourdomain.com URL as soon as a real person opens your website.
On the other side (wordpress) we 301 redirect http://yourdomain.com?blogger=http://yourBlogSpott.com/blah-blah.html to the original wordpress URL.
Now, for this to work, you have to import your posts using the “Blogger Importer” given in the WordPress tools as it adds a meta data value with the blogger URL. Copy Pasted stuff will NOT work.

In terms of automatic redirection, you might want to find inspiration in the code used by mobile sites. Here is what Duda Mobile uses:

<script src="http://static.dudamobile.com/DM_redirect.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
   DM_redirect("http://m.example.com");
</script>

Here’s the .js file:

function DM_redirect(MobileURL, Home){
	try {
		// avoid loops within mobile site
		if(document.getElementById("dmRoot") != null)
		{
			return;
		}
		var CurrentUrl = location.href
		var noredirect = document.location.search;
		if (noredirect.indexOf("no_redirect=true") < 0){
			if ((navigator.userAgent.match(/(iPhone|.etc.|Nintendo DSi)/i)) ) {
				
				if(Home){
					location.replace(MobileURL);
				}
				else
				{
					location.replace(MobileURL + "?url=" + encodeURIComponent(CurrentUrl));
				}
			}
		}	
	}
	catch(err){}
}