DNS stuff sorted out and other ambitions

Acting upon Pascal's tip, I'm now publishing straight to www.ibert.be and still hosting (for free) with Google. However, not without a fair amount of trouble. My favorite sysadmin Paul was there to help, but it still took some digging in help files and forums (long live consumer generated help) to get everything working perfectly.

So if you fancy using your own domain for a blogger-blog without forwarding in a frame, give it a try, it works. But keep in mind this little quote from the blogger help forum:
"In general, Blogger custom domains is a "power user" feature that requires some understanding of DNS that not all bloggers have. We are planning to add more wizards and automation to make the process of setting up custom domains easier and less painful and more accessible for the less technical user."

My next challenge is to migrate my gmail account to Google apps. There my question is: When migrating from gmail to google apps mail (which is basically the same), will I keep the labels I've been using?

Porting to a new blogging platform?

My right column starts to look really messy. So I'm considering moving to another platform. That would also allow me to work with Ecto more comfortably, and boost my pagerank if everything goes onto www.ibert.be.

Does anybody know whether I can port the 'old' content from blogger to a new platform?

Blogger upgrade

The blogger software was updated recently, and today I upgraded to the new 'template'. I had to re-integrate most of the stuff on in the right column, but at least you can do that in an organised way now (rather then fiddling around in the HTML). You can now simply add 'blocks' with HTML or javascript, and also choose from a number of predefined blocks (e.g. archive, profile, etc.).

It was a bit disappointing however that there a no blocks for:
- RSS feeds
- Technorati integration (is that competition for Google?)
- Google adwords (imagine that!)
- Any other cool tools
In fact, they just offer the basics. I hope new features will be added soon.