Joker . alias url

Shelline · September 20, 2007

Okay . finally, I got approval, and set up my "cname" ... supposedly . either I have the alias typed in wrong . or Joker.com takes forever for changes to take place . others have said anywhere from 3 hours to DAYS! There are only 2 boxes to fill in . one for the "WWW" in front of the domain name which is shellinewattsphotography.com, and the other being the "alias" should it be just www.smugmug.com ... or www.shellinewattsphotography.smugmug.com or something else???? Their CS is really not great, figured I might get an answer here. So did I do it right or wrong? I still can't google myself.

ivar · September 20, 2007

Shelline wrote:

Okay . finally, I got approval, and set up my "cname" ... supposedly . either I have the alias typed in wrong . or Joker.com takes forever for changes to take place . others have said anywhere from 3 hours to DAYS! There are only 2 boxes to fill in . one for the "WWW" in front of the domain name which is shellinewattsphotography.com, and the other being the "alias" should it be just www.smugmug.com ... or www.shellinewattsphotography.smugmug.com or something else???? Their CS is really not great, figured I might get an answer here. So did I do it right or wrong? I still can't google myself.

Hello

Something is going on here. The domain that you have set up according to your Control Panel, is forwarded to photosite.

dns_stuff__dns_tools__dns_hosting_tests__whois__traceroute__ping__and_other_network_and_domain_name_tools.-20070920-220723.jpg

dns_stuff__dns_tools__dns_hosting_tests__whois__traceroute__ping__and_other_network_and_domain_name_tools.-20070920-220723.jpg

The CNAME should be set up to point towards 'www.smugmug.com'.

See also: http://www.smugmug.com/help/joker.mg

I hope this helps. Let us know if you have any questions!

Shelline · September 20, 2007

Whoa!
I do have a Photosite account and as you probably know, they are shutting down on the 27th . I changed my URL ...domain name from photographybyshelline to shellinewattsphotography for my smugmug account (as not to cause confusion because photosite had their own hosting provider, )and THAT is what I used at Joker.com. obviously I have to change something somewhere . but what?

www.shellinewattsphotography.smugmug.com

S.

P.S. I don't mind giving you my joker.com username and password if it will help to figure out what is going on

ivar wrote:

Hello

Something is going on here. The domain that you have set up according to your Control Panel, is forwarded to photosite.

The CNAME should be set up to point towards 'www.smugmug.com'.

See also: http://www.smugmug.com/help/joker.mg

I hope this helps. Let us know if you have any questions!

Shelline · September 20, 2007

I think I found it .....
I guess we'll see in 24 - 48 hours!

Thanks!

ivar · September 21, 2007

Shelline wrote:

I guess we'll see in 24 - 48 hours!

Thanks!

Let me know if it doesn't work

Ed911 · September 23, 2007

host renaming...
I'm sort of in the same boat.

I had the folks at Godaddy set up my account to forward to my SmugMug account, but now I keep getting a blank page..."cannot find web page"...message.

When I type in my host domain name, I get it forwarded to my SmugMug account, but then it shows www.pumpkinriver.com and a blank page shows up the with above error. I copied and applied the java script as was indicated to my JS folder in the control panel, and set the custom host name to www.pumpkinriver.com in the pro features dialog box. And still the above happened.

So:

I went back to my accounts at Godaddy and set up my own Cname...which was blank.

I will see in a couple of days if this indeed works. Somehow the instructions need to be a little clearer with more examples. I will post on this when problem is finally worked out.

Any suggestions in the mean time will be greatly appreciated...

Thanks,

Shelline · September 23, 2007

Still not resolved!!
Alright, I am almost 100% POSITIVE I corrected what was wrong on my "Smugmug" end .. and I e-mailed Joker.com supposrt 3 days ago, and the only response I have gotten is a computer generated reply saying my questrion has been successfully delivered to their support "team" ..TEAM?? right now their "TEAM" is batting ZERO!!

Now when I try to google myself . it goes straight to THIS thread!

Maybe somebody here can tell me if I have everything entered correctly or not . I did have the alias as www.smugmug.com and NOTHING came up . It said "no matches found" I amde the changes three days ago at the same time I e-mailed support . and it still points to this thread today!

I have as follows:

(sub-) Domain www.shellinewattsphotography.com
alias: www.shellinewattsphotography.smugmug.com

HOST www.shellinewattsphotography.com
Target: www.shellinewattsphotography.smugmug.com

I am about ready to GIVE UP!! eat the $24.00 and find another company . preferably one in the good ole USA!

Shelline

ivar · September 23, 2007

Shelline wrote:

Alright, I am almost 100% POSITIVE I corrected what was wrong on my "Smugmug" end .. and I e-mailed Joker.com supposrt 3 days ago, and the only response I have gotten is a computer generated reply saying my questrion has been successfully delivered to their support "team" ..TEAM?? right now their "TEAM" is batting ZERO!!

Now when I try to google myself . it goes straight to THIS thread!

Maybe somebody here can tell me if I have everything entered correctly or not . I did have the alias as www.smugmug.com and NOTHING came up . It said "no matches found" I amde the changes three days ago at the same time I e-mailed support . and it still points to this thread today!

I have as follows:

(sub-) Domain www.shellinewattsphotography.com
alias: www.shellinewattsphotography.smugmug.com

HOST www.shellinewattsphotography.com
Target: www.shellinewattsphotography.smugmug.com

I am about ready to GIVE UP!! eat the $24.00 and find another company . preferably one in the good ole USA!

Shelline

The CNAME should really point to 'www.smugmug.com' and not to your SmugMug account. It can potentially cause problems this way. Please set it back to www.smugmug.com

I think you might be mixing up a few things here. When the domain name is set up correctly, the only thing that will happen is that when you type in www.shellinewattsphotography.com your SmugMug pages will show with the correct domain name. In no way does this have any influence on search results!

We get a lot of these kind of questions on the helpdesk as well; "Hey, when I search for my domain name, it doesn't show up in Google, what is going on?!"

You should never search for a domain name. Google has become such a big part of the internet that it is sometimes easy to forget that it should not be used for everything.

Think about this: If you want to call your friend, and you have her telephone number, are you going to call information to ask for the telephone number and connect you?
You have the web-address where you should go, so why search for it? Just enter the address in the address field, and away you go!

Search engines are not meant for direct addresses to be searched. They will search for keywords, like 'photographer', 'photo', 'weddings', 'Shelline Watson', etc.

The results depend on what you have on your page. If you don't have your name on the page, it can never produce a result for your name. Have a look at the first post of our Search Engine findability thread on how to help your pages get found better in search engines

I hope this helps. Holler if you have any questions!

Ed911 · September 23, 2007

I went back to my accounts at Godaddy and set up my own Cname...which was blank.

I will see in a couple of days if this indeed works. Somehow the instructions need to be a little clearer with more examples. I will post on this when problem is finally worked out.

Seems as the above was the problem. The Godaddy tech just forwarded my account to SmugMug, but didn't set up my Cname. I finally figured out how to setup my own Cname. Once I set up my Cname, it took a couple of hours for my domain to link to SmugMug and my site and work correctly.

So, Everything is working now...

Thanks Andy for your direction.

Shelline · September 24, 2007

Thanks !
For explaining it in "plain English"I changed it back, and yes, I can type it in the browser bar and it goes straight to it . what you said makes sense . I never thought about it that way , I even find myself even though i KNOW the wesite address, typing it into google and clicking on it from the list . why? The heck if I know?

(

) I guess I am just wanting people that DON'T know the site and maybe just heard my name and want to see my work to be able to "google" and find the site. I bookmarked the search engine findability thread and am reading it. It is all still a bit confusing to me, but I will figure it all out!!! ... eventually:D

Thank You!!

S.

ivar wrote:

The CNAME should really point to 'www.smugmug.com' and not to your SmugMug account. It can potentially cause problems this way. Please set it back to www.smugmug.com

I think you might be mixing up a few things here. When the domain name is set up correctly, the only thing that will happen is that when you type in www.shellinewattsphotography.com your SmugMug pages will show with the correct domain name. In no way does this have any influence on search results!

We get a lot of these kind of questions on the helpdesk as well; "Hey, when I search for my domain name, it doesn't show up in Google, what is going on?!"

You should never search for a domain name. Google has become such a big part of the internet that it is sometimes easy to forget that it should not be used for everything.

Think about this: If you want to call your friend, and you have her telephone number, are you going to call information to ask for the telephone number and connect you?
You have the web-address where you should go, so why search for it? Just enter the address in the address field, and away you go!

Search engines are not meant for direct addresses to be searched. They will search for keywords, like 'photographer', 'photo', 'weddings', 'Shelline Watson', etc.

The results depend on what you have on your page. If you don't have your name on the page, it can never produce a result for your name. Have a look at the first post of our Search Engine findability thread on how to help your pages get found better in search engines

I hope this helps. Holler if you have any questions!

Belg · September 25, 2007

There's several parts of the DNS records that can alter how fast or slow the process works. Often times, the expire field of publicly hosted DNS is set to 24 hours, although it can be as long as a week in some cases. My domains have a neat selector to set the expire time of the dns records... I set anything I think I am going to move to 1 hour expire... well in advance of the move.

You can find this out (in unix and mac) by doing a dig of the domain name, then doing a dig against the authoritative server for that domain name to get the expire time of the A/CNAME/PTR records. The time is in seconds, so 3600 is one hour. There are 3 fields... Refresh, Expire, TTL.. Time To Live. Refresh is how long before it asks the DNS server if the record is current. Expire is how long it keeps an entry if no record can be found. TTL is how many seconds remaining until the next query for the record.

Your next step would be to query -your- nameserver... usually cache-something.whateveryourhostis.com using dig again, and find out what it's clock says.

I can't do this from work, so I can't show you real-world examples at the moment... but if anyone wants to see how to do some dns debugging, I'd be happy to post a little help.

Belg · September 25, 2007

Okay, here goes....

First, I find out what my modem thinks of my domain...

greywolf:~ belg$ dig terrawolf.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> terrawolf.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 2602
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;terrawolf.com.                 IN      A

[B];; ANSWER SECTION:
terrawolf.com.          2606    IN      A       216.69.169.237
[/B]
;; Query time: 2 msec
[B];; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)[/B]
;; WHEN: Tue Sep 25 07:57:39 2007
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 47

It, indeed, has my correct IP information in the Answer Section. It shows that my DNS info is being cached locally (192.168.1.1) by my cable modem. The number 2606 is the time remaining until it tries again to see if the information is still valid... now it's less:

terrawolf.com.          2390    IN      A       216.69.169.237

Now, to find out if there are problems, first, we look for the main nameserver for the domain:

greywolf:~ belg$ dig terrawolf.com NS

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> terrawolf.com NS
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 19615
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;terrawolf.com.                 IN      NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
[B]terrawolf.com.          3600    IN      NS      ns5.secureserver.net.[/B]
terrawolf.com.          3600    IN      NS      ns6.secureserver.net.

;; Query time: 95 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
;; WHEN: Tue Sep 25 08:02:56 2007
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 83

The answer tells you it's served by two nameservers (this is standard) and to find out what we need to know... our expire time... we do this... we query that specific authoritative nameserver for the record associated with the domain... the "expire time" in the Authoritative query is what the clock starts at... in seconds.

greywolf:~ belg$ dig @ns5.secureserver.net terrawolf.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> @ns5.secureserver.net terrawolf.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 21183
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;terrawolf.com.                 IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
[B]terrawolf.com.          3600    IN      A       216.69.169.237[/B]

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
terrawolf.com.          3600    IN      NS      ns5.secureserver.net.
terrawolf.com.          3600    IN      NS      ns6.secureserver.net.

;; Query time: 77 msec
[B];; SERVER: 208.109.78.180#53(208.109.78.180)[/B]
;; WHEN: Tue Sep 25 08:05:21 2007
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 99

Note that the answer did nto come from your local machine, but from the remote.

So, according to this, my 3600 second (1 hour) refresh cycle has only... well, somewhere just over a half hour till it checks the server again for updates.

It is not unusal to see 24 hours, 72 hours, and 96 hour expireys on the auth servers for domains. That ticking counter cannot be speeded up at all.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Cheers,

Belg

Joker . alias url

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