Your Domain With Google Apps (PART 4 - Setting Up A Blog)

The easiest way to do this is going with blogger. Now that you have your own Domain, you can go through and setup a blog. You should have an email address now with your Domain. The email that I setup through my examples was david@segudavr.com. This is the administrative email that I used for my new Domain.

So going into Blogger, you need to create a new account. Use your Domain's primary email contact as the email you use to signin to Blogger. Create your new account, then go to Settings > Publishing and choose "Your Domain". Don't forget to add the "www" in the front. So for my Domain, I added (http://)www.segudavr.com. The "http://" was already there, so don't worry about that. Put a check in the "Redirect" check box and you are good to go.

Once that is setup, you will need to edit some DNS settings again. Go back to GoDaddy and get to your Domain Management. You will need to create some "A (Host) Records". Add the following "Points To" to get this working (Host needs to be @ and TTL should be 1/2 Hour initially. Change this to 1 Hour after everything is working):

• 216.239.32.21
• 216.239.34.21
• 216.239.36.21
• 216.239.38.21

If you have any other "A (Host) Records", go ahead and delete them.

Once the Blog Domain redirect is complete, your Blog from Blogger.com is live. Go ahead and start Blogging!

Your Domain With Google Apps (PART 3 - Subdomain Aliases)

Now it is time to setup some Domain Aliases to get to the apps. Domain Aliases are kinda like shortcuts to get to the other links.
Email - http://mail.google.com/a/segudavr.com
So checking email at this address may not be the easiest link for me to remember, so I want to make it shorter. From my Google Apps Dashboard, I select "Email" under the Service Settings. From there I see a "Web Address". I can then "Change URL" and it provides me an option to select http://mail.segudavr.com/. So I will select this option and then Continue. It tells me that I need to change some more Go Daddy DNS Settings and create a CNAME record of mail with ghs.google.com as the destination address. I will just select "I've completed these steps" and go on.
Now I will do the same to Calendar and set it to http://calendar.segudavr.com/. The same process is done for Docs (http://docs.segudavr.com/) and Sites (http://sites.segudavr.com/).

So now let's go back to Go Daddy's Total DNS Control and make our changes. It is better to delete an entry and to create a new one. So let's first delete the CNAME mail entry that points mail to pop.secureserver.net. In fact, we can delete all CNAME entries except www and ftp.
Here are my default entries, the ones in RED I am going to delete:

www @
ftp @
googleffffffffbf4cc94c google.com
mobilemail mobilemail-v01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net
pda mobilemail-v01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net
email email.secureserver.net
imap imap.secureserver.net
mail pop.secureserver.net
pop pop.secureserver.net
smtp smtp.secureserver.net
webmail webmail.secureserver.net
e email.secureserver.net

Now that these are deleted, I will add the following. I have to do these individually by going to "Add New CNAME Record" and adding each Alias pointed to ghs.google.com with a TTL of 1/2 Hour. The Aliases are mail calendar docs sites
Now all of these aliases should be online within 30 minutes. Mine only took 5. Stay tuned to PART 4

Your Domain With Google Apps (PART 2 - Email Setup)

Now here is where we start getting everything to come together. You should now be in your Google Apps Dashboard. Let’s start with Email. Press the “Activate email” link. You will now have the instructions listed below. Complete these steps . . . I changed the TTL from 1 week to ½ hour for initial setup. After you confirm your email is working you can change it back to 1 week. The default MX values for Go Daddy are “0 / @ / smtp.secureserver.net / 1 Hour” and “10 / @ / mailstore1.secureserver.net / 1 Hour”. Delete these entries in step 7.

1. Log in to your account at http://www.godaddy.com
2. Open the Domains tab and select My Domain Names. You'll be directed to the Manage Domains page
3. Click the domain that you'd like to use with Google Apps
4. From the Domain Details panel along the right, select the + icon under the Total DNS Control list item. A sub-list will appear.
5. Click the entry titled Total DNS Control And MX Records. The Manage MX Records, and DNS Zone File panel will appear.
6. Click Launch Total DNS Control Manager. The DNS Manager window will appear
7. Clear all existing MX Records by clicking Delete
8. Click OK in the confirmation dialogue box.
9. Once you've deleted all existing records, click Add New MX Record. The MX (Mail Exchangers) Record Wizard will appear
10. For each MX Record, enter information according to the data in the table below:
    For the Select the Priority Value drop-down menu, enter the priority value.
    For Enter a Host Name, leave the default setting to @.
    For Enter Goes To Address enter the Google server name in the table below. Be sure to include the trailing dot at the end of each record
    For the Select TTL Value drop-down menu, enter 1 Week. This will appear as 604800 seconds within the DNS system.
    10 @ ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 1 week
    20 @ ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 1 week
    30 @ ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 1 week
    40 @ ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 1 week
    50 @ ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 1 week
11. Click Continue
12. Click Add to confirm each entry. The DNS Manager main page will reappear when you've finished
    
    When you are done, press “I have completed these steps”. This should take a few hours to work properly. You should be now back at your Google Apps Dashboard. We will continue the setup in STEP 3

Your Domain With Google Apps (PART 1 - Domain Setup)

I thought I would take the time to write about setting up your own Domain with Google Apps. I use this for segura.org and have a blog, full email, and everything . . .

So the first step is to get a Domain. I use Go Daddy for my domains. Go there first and register a Domain (or you can use Google to register). The registration process is pretty simple, grab a Domain and you are all set.

Now we need to sign up for Google Apps. Select the “Administrator: I own or control this domain” radio button, and enter the domain name in the box. For these instructions, we are going to use segudavr.com as the domain. Press “Get Started”.

Now you will need to enter your information as best as you can. Use an email address you have access to . . . Press the “Continue” button when finished. Enter a user name and a password. For this domain, I entered david as the user. Press “I accept. Continue with set up”. So as a verification, Google requires you to either upload an HTML file or change a CNAME record. The easiest thing to do is to select “Change segudavr.com CNAME record” and press the “Continue” button. You will now be given a CNAME record to add. Mine was googleffffffffbf4cc94c.

Now open a new browser window and go to godaddy.com and complete the following steps (change the CNAME that Google gave you to match yours)

• Login to GoDaddy
• Select Domain Manager (on the left navigation bar)
• Select your domain from the Domain Name column
• Select the “Total DNS Control” link
• To the right of “CNAMES (Aliases)” select “Add New CNAME Record”
• Enter an Alias Name: googleffffffffbf4cc94c
• Points To Host Name: google.com
• TTL: ½ Hour
• Press OK

Now this will be in “Pending Setup” for a little while. Just take a 5 minute break and grab a cup of coffee. When this is done, go back to the Google Apps webpage you left open and click on “I’ve completed the steps above”. You can now view the “Google Apps Setup Guide”. This will pop-up in a new window, so just minimize this, and now we are set up. We will continue the setup in PART 2 in my next blog post.