Oh, Blogger.

I'm working on transitioning this blog to my own domain name, cleverly called www.bossylittledogs.com. With help from the nice folks at HostGator, I thought I had it successfully redirected. My understanding is that the redirect should be seamless - people clicking on the Blogspot address would just magically go to the new address, unaware of the transition. Easy, right?

I clicked on the old address to see what would happen, and hit a message that went something like: "This blog is now being hosted at www.bossylittledogs.com. This is not a Blogger website and it hasn't been scanned for viruses and malware, and your computer will probably die if you go on, do you wish to continue?" SERIOUSLY, BLOGGER? The whole point of going to my own domain was to make my blog more accessible and in time build traffic, and Blogger's cheery little redirect would scare away the people who've been reading for years! I quickly disabled that little feature, and now I"m back to square one. Blogger has NO useful help to speak of; it directs you to user forums where I could die of old age trying to figure out the answers. I am good at many things, but website design and management are not on my list. I want to USE it, not reinvent it.

I don't think that scary, scary redirect message is how it's supposed to work - I think it should be seamless and behind the scenes, and I'll keep trying to figure that out. But meanwhile, I thought I'd better post an explanation/warning, in case someone clicks here and gets that scary, "AIEEEEE! Ahead There Be Dragons!" redirect message. Bossylittledogs.com is my domain name, the blog hasn't been hijacked. Eventually I'll figure this out.