Setting Up Subdomains With Blogger

When initially contemplating the Ham Grown site, there was an immediate awareness of a primary problem. Blogs are typically dedicated to a focused subject area or topic. However, there were many video clip ideas that just did not fit with a single genre.

Instead of breaking out subject specific blogs for these clips, it started to make more sense to use a single domain (i.e. hamgrownvideos.com) to host the different subject areas. The problem to solve was how to use existing free blogging services like Blogger and break up content into multiple pages while giving the impression to the outside world that the various blog topics are hosted as a single service.

It took some internet searching and quite a bit of trial and error, but a solution was found that seems to fit. Here's the steps taken:

1. Identify your base domain name (in our case - hamgrownvideos.com) and verify it is not already used (try entering the domain in your browser, or go to a domain service like register.com or godaddy.com and check). If available, go ahead and purchase the domain. This will ensure you can re-host the service later if needed.
2. Create the initial blog through Blogger at https://www.blogger.com/start. Use your base domain name for the initial blog (in our case, it started as hamgrownvideos.blogspot.com).
3. Create additional blogs with names formatted as basename-subtopic.blogspot.com (notice, that is a dash ('-') between the basename and the subtopic).
4. Under your Blogger account 'Settings' screens, change the base domain to publish as a 'Custom Domain'.
5. For each subtopic, create appropriate 'A' records under your domain service (i.e register.com, godaddy.com, or what ever provider you are using).
6. Under each subtopic blog, go to the 'Settings' screens and change the domain to publish to the appropriate custom subdomain (e.g. this page uses 'instructional' as the subdomain - http://instructional.hamgrownvideos.com/).

Since seeing is often better than reading, check out the video clip below for a demonstration.

Let me know if this works for you.