Help setting up DNS for micro.blog

Hosting on Micro.blog
#1

I currently use SquareSpace (with Hover as my domain registrar) for a small site for my indie iOS/Mac apps. I have a hosted micro (dot) blog account and have made “pages” for my apps. Instead of using SquareSpace, I would like my dave256apps (dot) com domain resolve to one of my pages at micro (dot) blog (David Reed · Apps) and then have blog.dave256apps.com map to my micro (dot) blog posts.

Can someone who understand DNS setup better than me tell me if this is possible and if so, help me set it up? I’ve contacted micro.blog twice about this but it appears Manton and Jean have been too busy to help.

Thanks,
Dave

#2

Hi Dave, thanks for posting again here. I have a lot of older email help requests that need a reply, so I’m sorry I missed yours. I’ll follow up in email too, but this is a good place to discuss because other people may be more familiar with Hover than I am.

My first thought is to use Hover to redirect your root domain to a Micro.blog page. There’s a Hover help page here about “forwards” that may help: How To: Create Domain Shortcuts (Custom URLs) – Hover Help Center

This would probably mean redirecting everyone to your blog subdomain, though. Another way to go would be to actually have 2 blogs on Micro.blog, one for your apps and one for your actual blog. That would give you the most control.

And finally, you could also have everything in one blog on Micro.blog, but have a custom blog home page that showed your apps and also linked to recent blog posts. This could be done with a custom theme that override the home page, as described in this help topic: Custom home page

1 Like
#3

Thanks for the reply. I couldn’t get the Custom home page to work. I made a custom theme, but I couldn’t follow the instructions. There’s no Posts → Design. But if I just go to Design, I did try to make a custom theme and tried to make a basic home page to try it out:

{{ define "main" }}

Here are my apps (I would fill this in later with details)

<a href="blog.dave256apps.com">Blog</a>

{{ end }}

but that doesn’t seem to get used even though I selected that as my default theme.

I’ll also look into the domain forwarding at Hover. If my apps start making some money, I’ll consider a second blog for them, but right now they’re not so that’s one reason I’m trying to get rid of squarespace and consolidate on one site.

#4

I never did get the custom home page to work (which I think would work nicer with the URLs) but I was able to make changes in the DNS at Hover so the URLs now resolve:

My A records point to Hover’s DNS and I have cname so that blog (dot) dave256apps (dot) com maps to davereed (dot) micro (dot) blog and then I use forwarding so that dave256apps.com maps to davereed (dot) micro (dot) blog/apps

So the only downsides are that when someone enters dave256apps (dot) com, it changes the URL davereed (dot) micro (dot) blog/apps rather than showing dave256apps (dot) com (which makes sense given it is forwarding) and if someone enters https://dave256apps (dot) com then it doesn’t work since there’s no SSL for it.

So this is at least workable and given right now this is a hobby business for me and I can’t justify spending more money at the problem until I write some more apps and actually make some money.

Thanks @manton for pointing me in the right direction.

Dave