As a result we have created this document to help anyone that gets stuck. Hope
it’s helpful!

We have now successfully redirected BlogWell and are maintaining it ourselves
on GoDaddy. Check it out – go to either of the above addresses and you will end
up at the same place: http://blog-well.com.

Why redirect a WordPress.com blog to your own domain?

The main reason anyone would want to redirect their WordPress.com blog to
their new domain is to ensure links coming in to their original blog are not lost.

Existing links to your original WordPress.com blog will be automatically
redirected to the new blog, for instance, our post on WordPress for Dummies,
http://blogwell.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/wordpress-for-dummies/ will now
be automatically redirected to http://blog-well.com/2007/11/20/wordpress-for-
dummies/

Also, the RSS 2.0 feed at http://blogwell.wordpress.com/feed will be
automatically redirected to http://blog-well.com/feed.
So you can move the blog’s physical location on the Web and allow existing links
to the old location to be automatically redirected to the new location.
Old & New Permalinks Style Must Match

Before proceeding, it is important that the style of the permalinks, the
permanent links to your posts, of your new blog is set to match the style
used by WordPress.com.

If the permalink styles to do match, then your existing WordPress.com blog posts
will not be automatically redirected to your new blog.

WordPress.com uses the day and name permalink style, where the year, month,
day and name of the post are present in the permanent link.

Within your new blog’s Dashboard, select Settings, then Permalinks and ensure
that the “Day and name” style of permalinks is selected, and then press “Save
Changes”.

How is the redirection done?

Quite simply really, as Matt Mullenweg explains.

Before we start, we need to define a few terms, just to help clarify things:

Term

What it means

Domain name

A domain name is a name which identifies a computer on the Internet. For example, wordpress.com, google.com and microsoft.com are all examples of well known domain names. blog-well.com is also a domain name, although not so well known (yet). See Wikipedia for more information on domain names.

Domain host

A company that hosts domains on its own computers, and provides 24/7 availability, backup and support services. We use GoDaddy to host our blog.

Nameserver
(or “name server”)

A nameserver is a machine (server) that stores the locations of domain names, and is usually held by your host provider

Also called DNS (Domain Name Server).

See Wikipedia for more information on nameservers.

Steps involved:

WordPress.com allows its blogs to be redirected to your own self-managed domain, for a small fee of $10/year. This is managed within the WordPress administration dashboard, select “Upgrades” and then “Domains”.

After you enter your domain name (e.g. http://blog-well.com) and select “Add
domain to blog”, you get the following information:

The “possible problem” WordPress.com points out to you is not a really a problem at all, so it’s a little tricky to understand. It actually describes what needs to happen: You must let WordPress.com manage the location of your domain, which is only temporary, while you setup the redirection. Going through the directions that WordPress.com offer, it seems a little confusing; don’t worry though, there is a method to their madness.

Only the true owner of the domain has the ability to change who manages the location of their domain on the Internet, and as such, WordPress.com is using as a way to verify that you are in fact the owner of the new domain.

If this check was not done, then anyone could create a WordPress.com blog and then redirect to any domain they like, for instance, you could create http://governator.wordpress.com, and then redirect it to official Californian Web site http://www.ca.gov.

Once you have setup your new WordPress blog you will now have two blogs, e.g. http://blogwell.wordpress.com (residing at WordPress.com) and http://blog-well.com (residing at GoDaddy).

Both blogs function independently of each other, and are in fact two different blogs, even if they do contain the same information.

You need to let your chosen host provider know that you want WordPress.com to manage the location of your new domain. This is done by your host provider. (The steps required to do this, if you are using GoDaddy, are at the end of this article.)

Once you have done this, you have allowed WordPress.com to manage the location of your domain name.

We are now in a position to setup the redirection within WordPres.com. Return to the Domains section of your administration dashboard of your WordPress.com blog and add your new domain (e.g. blog-well.com):

Enter your new domain and select “Add domain to blog” and WordPress.com will
ask for 10 credits:

Select “Buy” and you will be able to setup the redirection:

Your new domain will now be redirected to your WordPress.com blog (e.g. http://blog-well.com is redirected to http://blogwell.wordpress.com).

You are now half way there; to complete the redirection you just need to flip it around.

Within the “Domains” section of the WordPress.com dashboard, you need to tell WordPress.com that your blog is located at your new domain (e.g. http://blog-well.com).

This is done by selecting “Put blog here” next to your new domain name (e.g. http://blog-well.com).

Once you have done this, it will show that your blog is now located at your new domain (e.g. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.) and your WordPress.com blog (e.g. http://blogwell.wordpress.com) is being redirected to it.

The last thing you need to do is to undo the first thing we did , as we no longer need WordPress.com managing the location of the new domain. This is done by your host provider. (We have put the necessary steps to do this for GoDaddy at the end of this article.)

Congratulations! You have now completed the redirection of your WordPress.com blog to your new domain.

Changing the Nameservers for blog-well.com using GoDaddy

The following are the steps required to change the nameservers for a GoDaddy hosted domain.

Once you have logged into GoDaddy and selected “My Account”, select “Manage Domains” from the “Domain Names” menu:

Select the domain name you want, and then select the “Nameservers” button:
This will display the current nameservers for your domain name.

You want to, temporarily, host the domain name somewhere else, being WordPress.com. Select the “Custom Nameservers” option which will allow you to change the nameservers to those used by WordPress.com.

Before you change anything, write down the nameservers used by your domain name host. You may need these later.

You need to change the current nameservers to ns1.wordpress.com, ns2.wordpress.com and ns3.wordpress.com.

Select OK.
After a few minutes the nameservers for blog-well.com will have been updated:

WordPress.com is now managing the location of http://blog-well.com.

Restoring the Nameservers for blog-well.com using GoDaddy

The following are the steps required to restore the nameservers for a GoDaddy
hosted domain.

Using the previous directions, go to where you manage the nameservers for your
new domain.

We need to restore the default nameservers so that http://blog-well.com
references the blog which has been created on GoDaddy.

This is done by selecting the “Default Hosting Nameservers” option within the
“Set Nameservers” options.

NOTE: You may need to explicitly enter the original nameservers used by your
domain host.

Select OK and after a few minutes the nameservers for blog-well.com will be set
to GoDaddy’s nameservers.

January 27, 2008 – Created.
June 27, 2008 – Updated. Section on Permalinks added.

Please feel free to copy, enhance, and pass this document on. Do what you like with it – just make sure you help others .

A MadLid creation
http://blog-well.com

Click here to read on…

If you can’t open the Task Manager, it might be for various reasons: it might be restricted by another user with administrator permissions, you might have a virus, etc. When disabled, if you right click on the taskbar, you will see the Task Manager grayed out like in the screenshot below.

To enable the Task Manager, download the file attached at the bottom of this article and extract it. In the archive you will find a file called ‘Taskmgr_Enabler.reg’. Double click on it. Then, Windows Vista will prompt you about your decision to add the data contained in the file to the registry.

After you have clicked on the Yes button, Windows Vista will tell you if the data was added to the registry or not.

Now, the Task Manager is enabled again.

How to disable the Task Manager

If, for some reason, you want to disable the Task Manager, download the archive below and run the ‘Taskmgr_Disabler.reg’ file. You will receive the same prompts as above.

NOTE: If you followed the above steps to enable this tool and the Task Manager still doesn’t work, then you might have a virus. The virus may have blocked your access to the Task Manager and other similar tools that might help you to find, close and delete that virus. To get rid of the virus, scan your computer with your antivirus or use a different antivirus than the one you currently had installed. Chances are, if the installed antivirus didn’t detect your virus when it got on your computer, it won’t detect it when you will scan to find that virus.

Even if Windows Defender is offered for free and it has decent protection features, some people might prefer other applications to secure their system from spyware and other threats. In this case there is no point in having two similar applications running at the same time, both of them consuming system resources. This is why disabling Windows Defender can be a good idea.

This is how you do it:

Launch Windows Defender and go to Tools -> Options.

Here you will find a lot of configuration options. Scroll down to the end of the list. You will find there a section called Administrator options. Deselect the Use Windows Defender box and press the Save button.

If UAC is turned on, you will need to confirm that you want to continue with the change.

Now you will receive a notification saying that “Windows Defender is turned off”. Click on Close and you are done.

The guide is divided into the following five parts:

Farewell to soft 404s

It’s 404 Week at Webmaster Central

Guidelines to create a 404 page

How to create a custom 404 page

Make your 404 page more

Response codes are a numeric status (like 200 for “OK”, 301 for “Moved Permanently”) that a webserver returns in response to a request for a URL. The 404 response code should be returned for a file “Not Found”.

When a user sends a request for your webpage, your webserver looks for the corresponding file for the URL. If a file exists, your webserver likely responds with a 200 response code along with a message (often the content of the page, such as the HTML).

So what’s a 404? Let’s say that in the link to “Visit Google Apps” above, the link is broken because of a typing error when coding the page. Now when a user clicks “Visit Google Apps”, the particular webpage/file isn’t located by the webserver. The webserver should return a 404 response code, meaning “Not Found”.

Now that we’re all on board with the basics of 404s, stay tuned 4 even more information on making 404s good 4 users and 4 search engines.

• A mistyped URL, or a copy-and-paste mistake
• Broken or truncated links on web pages or in an email message
• Moved or deleted content

Confronted by a 404 page, they may then attempt to manually correct the URL, click the back button, or even navigate away from your site. As hinted in an earlier post for “404 week at Webmaster Central”, there are various ways to help your visitors get out of the dead-end situation. In our quest to make 404 pages more useful, we’ve just added a section in Webmaster Tools called “Enhance 404 pages”. If you’ve created a custom 404 page this allows you to embed a widget in your 404 page that helps your visitors find what they’re looking for by providing suggestions based on the incorrect URL.

Example: Jamie receives the link www.example.com/activities/adventurecruise.html in an email message. Because of formatting due to a bad email client, the URL is truncated to www.example.com/activities/adventur. As a result it returns a 404 page. With the 404 widget added, however, she could instead see the following:

In addition to attempting to correct the URL, the 404 widget also suggests the following, if available:

• a link to the parent subdirectory
• a sitemap webpage
• site search query suggestions and search box

How do you add the widget? Visit the “Enhance 404 pages” section in Webmaster Tools, which allows you to generate a JavaScript snippet. You can then copy and paste this into your custom 404 page’s code. As always, don’t forget to return a proper 404 code.

Can you change the way it looks? Sure. We leave the HTML unstyled initially, but you can edit the CSS block that we’ve included. For more information, check out our guide on how to customize the look of your 404 widget.

This feature is currently experimental — we might not provide corrections and suggestions for your site but we’ll be working to improve the coverage. In the meantime, let us know what you think in the comments below or in our group discussion. Thanks for helping us make the Internet a more friendly place!

How does a soft 404 look to the user? Here’s a mockup of a soft 404: This site returns a 200 response code and the site’s homepage for URLs that don’t exist.

As exemplified above, soft 404s are confusing for users, and furthermore search engines may spend much of their time crawling and indexing non-existent, often duplicative URLs on your site. This can negatively impact your site’s crawl coverage—because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently.

What should you do instead of returning a soft 404?
It’s much better to return a 404 response code and clearly explain to users that the file wasn’t found. This makes search engines and many users happy.

Can your webserver return 404, but send a helpful “Not found” message to the user?
Of course! More info as “404 week” continues!

If you have access to your server, we recommend that you create a custom 404 page. A good custom 404 page will help people find the information they’re looking for, as well as providing other helpful content and encouraging them to explore your site further.

(Note: This article covers guidelines for creating the content of your custom 404 page. For information on configuring your server to display your new 404 page, check your server or web hoster documentation. You should still make sure that your webserver returns a 404 status code to users and spiders, so that search engines don’t accidentally index your custom 404 page.)

Because a 404 page can also be a standard HTML page, you can customize it any way you want. Here are some suggestions for creating an effective 404 page that can help keep visitors on your site and help them find the information they’re looking for:

• Tell visitors clearly that the page they’re looking for can’t be found. Use language that is friendly and inviting.
• Make sure your 404 page uses the same look and feel (including navigation) as the rest of your site.
• Consider adding links to your most popular articles or posts, as well as a link to your site’s home page.
• Think about providing a way for users to report a broken link.
• No matter how beautiful and useful your custom 404 page, you probably don’t want it to appear in Google search results. In order to prevent 404 pages from being indexed by Google and other search engines, make sure that your webserver returns an actual 404 HTTP status code when a missing page is requested.
• Use the Enhance 404 tool in Webmaster Tools to embed a search box on your custom 404 page and provide users with useful information to help them find the information they need.