Heartland Genealogy

 When I decided to move Heartland Genealogy from WordPress to Blogger, I thought the biggest challenge would be moving the content. Instead, I've received an unexpected education in DNS records, custom domains, HTTPS certificates, RSS feeds, featured images, redirects, and social media previews . And, as has happened several times during this move, ChatGPT has served as my troubleshooting partner. The Custom Domain Adventure One of my goals was to use my Heartland Genealogy domain with Blogger. I already owned heartlandgenealogy.org , and I wanted readers to reach the Blogger site through www.heartlandgenealogy.org rather than a Blogspot address. That sounded simple. It wasn't. Blogger provided the CNAME records that needed to be added to my DNS settings. After making those changes, there was the inevitable waiting period while the new DNS information propagated. Then came the questions. Was the CNAME correct? Did I need to turn on Redirect domain in Blogger? Why did Blogger ...

Instead of Chasing It For years, my primary focus with Heartland Genealogy has been the blog itself. I research, write a post, publish it, and then try to remember to share it somewhere on social media. As I've been working on moving Heartland Genealogy to Blogger, I've also been looking more closely at how I share those posts. Moving away from WordPress meant giving up some of the automatic sharing features I'd become accustomed to. At first, that seemed like another disadvantage of making the move. However, it has also forced me to rethink how I'm using social media. Discovering Meta Business Suite One of the tools I'm learning to use is Meta Business Suite . Since Facebook and Instagram are both Meta platforms, Business Suite allows me to manage my Heartland Genealogy Facebook page and Instagram account from the same place. More importantly for me, I can schedule posts . Instead of publishing a blog post and then immediately trying to share it everywhere, I can p...