Moving from blogspot to Blogger custom domain is supposed to be an easy transition. I've tested it several times on my test blog and everything was fine... until I applied it to my actual blog. It showed 0 comments on all posts! grr...
As I mentioned last week I was just a few clicks away from
moving to my own domain. I've set www as CNAME record pointed to ghs.google.com. and ran DIG service to look up information in the DNS. The result showed my domain already pointed to Google server:
www.alittleboysblog.net. 14400 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
ghs.google.com. 184963 IN CNAME ghs.l.google.com.
ghs.l.google.com. IN A 74.125.43.121
HTTP trace on my blogspot blog also showed it was permanently redirected to new domain:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: evan-keona.blogspot.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Referer: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Connection: close
• Finding host IP address...
• Host IP address = 74.125.19.191
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Waiting for response...
Receiving Header:
HTTP/1.1·301·Moved·Permanently(CR)(LF)
Content-Type:·text/html;·charset=UTF-8(CR)(LF)
X-Frame-Options:·ALLOWALL(CR)(LF)
Location:·http://www.alittleboysblog.net/(CR)(LF)
Date:·Thu,·18·Mar·2010·04:49:46·GMT(CR)(LF)
Expires:·Thu,·18·Mar·2010·04:49:46·GMT(CR)(LF)
Cache-Control:·private,·max-age=0(CR)(LF)
X-Content-Type-Options:·nosniff(CR)(LF)
Server:·GSE(CR)(LF)
X-XSS-Protection:·0(CR)(LF)
Connection:·close(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)
So what was wrong? I googled it and apparently this problem already became "a known issue" on
Blogger:
Some users are experiencing comment count discrepancies on their blog, specifically for older comments during the December-January timeframe. We have isolated the underlying problem though, and are working to release a fix shortly.
Also, if you have recently switched hosting from BlogSpot to a custom domain, it may take up to a few hours before the counts are synced completely (and this is expected). — latest update on Sunday, March 07, 2010
After more than 24 hours since the switching without progress (my old comments haven't showed up), this morning I switched back to blogspot, exported this blog to XML file and switched back to new domain. So to all of you who commented here,
do not worry, your comments are save in my disk. I can restore them later should this problem continue.
I will wait for a few days (at least until weekend) to give time for Blogger to sync properly before deciding what to do. Meanwhile, I'm also preparing a WordPress blog for this blog so in case I can't get my comments back on Blogger I will transfer it to WordPress. Ironic, isn't it?
***
Update @7:40 PM:
Everything is fine now, I can see all comments are back. Maybe the process took longer than I thought. So if you experience similar thing when switching to custom domain, try to be more patient and don't hit the panic button too quickly like I did :)
Or you can try to switch back to blogspot then republish on custom domain again. I'm not sure if it can speed up the process but that's what I did this morning so who knows...
