Using your own domain name with blogger

Using your own domain name instead of generic blahblah.blogspot.com is a pretty easy change.

Login to blogger.com and select the blog (in case you have more than one)
Click "Settings" > "Basic"
Scroll down a bit until you see "Publishing" section
Click "Add a custom domain"

If you already have a domain, you can use that:

• Click "Switch to advanced settings"
• Enter your domain name under Advanced settings
• Click "Save"

If not, you can buy one through blogger as described here. Or the other option is to buy through Google Apps by following the wizard here. I chose to use Google Apps to buy the new domain. It takes about 10mins to get your new domain up and running. All DNS records are automatically pointed to Google's ghs.google.com name servers.

After this was done, I went back to Blogger and and wanted to use my new domain name. I got an error:
"Another blog or Google Site is already using this address".

Reason is pretty straightforward, but solution is a bit tricky. I was getting this message because Google Sites are part of Google Apps and when you type "www.yourdomainname.com", you are redirected to Google Sites. In other words, DNS record for "www" is mapped to Google Sites address.

Problem is that Blogger needs to use this address to be able to serve your blog when someone requests your site. Uninstalling Google Sites should have fixed this:

• Logon to Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a/yourdomainname) 
• Click Settings on the top menu bar
• Click Sites on the left 
• Click "Uninstall Sites" (Do not do this yet, keep on reading)

This, however, did NOT fix the problem because to my surprise it seems that this process does not remove 'www' record.

Following is the correct procedure:

• Logon to Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a/yourdomainname) 
• Click "Settings" on the top menu bar
• Click "Sites" on the left 
• Click "Web Address Mapping"
• Delete "www" mapping
• Click "General" > "Uninstall Sites" (Optional)

If you, have already uninstalled "Google Sites", you can add it back:

• "Dashboard" > "Service Settings" near the bottom > "Add more services" 

That way you can get access to the Sites menu to complete the procedure above. Once done, simply head over to blogger.com and add your domain. That's all there is to it.