Return of the blog

Just a shade under two years after my blog first went kaput, it’s back. 2 VMs, one MySQL data recovery, and an absurd amount of time fussing with DNS later, it’s back.

I’m using wordpress.com this time around instead of fussing with my own setup; many of the plugins for which I self-hosted are now part of the core featureset, so I’m going to give this “cloud” business a run for it. I’ll probably fuss with themes a bunch more, so don’t be surprised if next time you’re here things are unrecognizable.

One thing I was frustrated by the last time I went to set up hosted wp was the way they expect you to set up your DNS if you want to do domain mapping; it turns out it’s pretty simple to map your domain directly to their set of IPs.  Once you have your domain mapping paid for and set up (from the “Store” link in the dashboard), do the following:

dig @ns1.wordpress.com example.com A

Then assign to example.com’s DNS the 6 A records that WordPress’s nameserver gives you.

At some point in the future they may change those IPs and your blog will stop working etc etc (which is why they’d rather you use their DNS instead) but for now that’ll do the trick.

This is fairly obvious stuff once you know what to look for but I haven’t seen it documented on the web, so enjoy 🙂

-Leigh