Load Time

Not sure what the deal is, but it takes a long long time to load both my homepage and my blog page. My only guess is that Google is limiting the bandwidth, seems like really slow servers. Anybody else notice this either on my site or on your own. As I've described before, I'm hosting on Google servers with the domain registration going through enom, Google's default setup for the Google Apps standard edition.

Last update for today ...

Ok I was browsing around the DNS provider (enom) again and this time I think I figured out how to add the URL forwarding for http://brianjkopp.com to go to http://www.brianjkopp.com. Add a URL redirect record under the Host Records section. It take up to 3 hours to take affect so I'll have to wait and see how it goes.

As for my other to do...add Google Analytics, I got my home page tagged and the blog sight tagged as well. This was very simple. I was debating using the same tracking code for both the website and the blog site. I decided to do two different tracking codes for now. Not sure if that's what I should do or not. Seems like for reporting I could then easily see my visitors for both sights. If I used one tracking code, then I'd have to create a filter if I only wanted to see one of the sites.

I think I'll ask my good buddy and co-worker Ward Tongen tomorrow during lunch, he's our SEO SEM specialist in our Medtronic eMarketing group.

Update...yes already

So following my last post I dug into the blogger settings and found in the settings tab a promising looking setting in the publishing section, publish to a Custom Domain. After looking at the setup instructions provided, I re-logged into Google Apps and navigated to the domain settings tab and found the advanced DNS settings link under the domain names section. From there I was able to log into enom, the DNS company Google is using to register your domains with when you sign up for Google Apps.

Found under the Host records section where to add my new CNAME entry. I added blog and assigned it to the Google address: ghs.google.com.

After that was saved in enom, I navigated back to blogger and added my domain. Wham, all done and it works great. Took me longer to write this and go back and look at how I did it then it did to actually do it.

Next on the to do list:

1. Add Google Analytics
2. Figure out how to get http://brianjkopp.com to forward to http://www.brianjkopp.com. (right now the first link just goes to the iGoogle (Personalized) start page with my domain in a big ugly gray bar on the top)