BNV
I recently bought my own domain name for my blog. Now I use blogger and wondered does anyone understand CNAME and registering your domain properly

I read this and I can not get my head around it. I know I need to get to grips with some techie stuff but it is all new to me

any good advice welcomed

How do I create a CNAME record for my custom domain?

Not sure if you've already solved this as it has been around for a while, but I didn't get a chance to look at your question before.


When you bought or leased your domain name, the details would have been registered (by your service provider) in DNS with an A record and as the registrant, you should have been given the DNS details.

Sub-Domain example:
Now that you want to understand the purpose of CNAME and create a sub-domain. The best way might be to illustrate it with an simple example. Let's say for example that your domain name is ladyday.com and you create a sub domain for your blog.layday.com you would create a CNAME entry for this sub domain.
The way you create it will depend on the interface provided by your ISP.
When people want to interact with your blog at address "blog.ladyday.com", their browser sends out a request to the local DNS server to find your ladyday.com domain. DNS will resolve the IP address from the domain name and the connection request will be delivered to the server on which your domain is hosted. The request gets to your host server via some very complex routing services across the internet. It is not necessary to go into that detail for
the purpose of this basic explanation.

In summary, CNAME records enable you to create additional sub-domains and services which point to the same IP address.

I hope this helps...

I remember the early days when I talked you through setting up a router and now you are all over technology. LOL

mmm still not worked it out. basically my blog is with blogger and I need to train my domain name to do what you said. mmmm gonna spend a whole day on that very soon

@safteyblitz yes progression is good
I think once I get a desktop pc I might even buy one of those £199 netbooks that run on linux to use as a travelling laptop.

OK, no problem, I didn't know how much you already knew about the subject, so I was unsure of where to pitch the explanation.

If you need it broken down some more, then that's alright. Just raise the questions about what you don't understand and I will know where to start or where you need to start. Your original question was about CNAME and domains, which is a subset of DNS. So I suppose I should check this... how familiar are you with DNS?

@cheikh
dns mmmm ok start me off from the beginning and lets take it from there
i assume dns is to do with servers??????

DNS - From the beginning...! oh well, how do I explain DNS and keep it simple? The are a lot of concepts and vocabulary to pick up as you go along, but for now I'll try to avoid it and keep it for later.

Here's a scenario. Imagine that "every time you speak to someone" it has to be via your phone regardless of where the other person is located (whether they are in the same room as you, or they are on the other side of the Earth). You don't know the various phone numbers, but you can get hold of a unique name for each person you wish to speak to. Each person has their unique telephone number and you don't need to know all the different phone numbers for the people you may wish to speak to daily - could be hundreds of them, you would not want to remember the numbers and area codes yourself.

So, you employ an assistant; and every time you want to speak to someone, you tell your assistant the name of the person you want to speak to and the assistant looks up the telephone number in a directory or the assistant asks other assistants located around the country for help, they might use other assistants located around the world to look up the number for the given name and return it so the connection can be made for you, then you can speak to the particular person(s) you asked to be connected to.

Your local assistant remembers the people you've had recent conversations
with, so that they don't have to waste time doing a lookup of recent numbers you used in your communication.

Everybody must talk to each other in a particular way, called a protocol- (TCP/IP), via a particular handset - (port), with a particular number - IP address. - end of scenario.

well the way we use computers talk to each other across the internet is similar to the above scenario, same basic principle, although more complex. We use names which are easy for us humans to read and remember. For example easily typing African Caribbean Social Network into your browser,DNS resolves that name to an IP address which happens to be 66.240.234.179 and with the help of routers it discovers the end point address for the request and returns the web page to your browser.

DNS - Domain Name System is a suite of programs running on multiple inter-connected servers across the world, their purpose is to keep the Name <-> IP Address mapping up-to-date and respond to requests for resolving canonical names to ip-addresses. This enables us to use email servers, FTP, web servers and blogs - (like the one you are going to set up), etc..

Hopefully that has provided a brief overview of what DNS is trying to do. If you want to know "how" DNS works, then there is plenty more to talk about and it can be very heavy going. But rather than writing several pages of explanation here, I thought it might be an idea to get to you to look at HowStuffWorks "How Domain Name Servers Work"
this gives a good introduction, without the really techie stuff. Have a read and come back with questions.