This morning while I was drinking my coffee in my comfy chair in our backyard I took some time to do some sketching. My 7 year old happened upon me and asked me to sketch the fort that stands in our backyard sandbox.
I am posting it here to remind myself to put down my computer and pick up a pencil and paper more often. It’s so satisfying to just draw, for no real purpose, just for me, for fun.
For some reason I was having a very hard time getting my domains ready for domain mapping. We have been getting a new website ready for WordCamp Albuquerque 2011 and for our new Albuquerque WordPress Meetup group. Some time ago I set up a MultiSite website for K Design and I run my main site, my blog, the wordcamp site, and the meetup site off of it.
Obviously I don’t want people to see wordpress.karenarnolddesign.com when they go to the MeetUp site, so I bought a couple of domains to point to it. But for some reason I missed the primary domain part of the whole domain mapping thing. When I pointed albuquerquewp.com to the MeetUp site it was creating a redirect loop.
So, I undid everything and started from scratch. First I made sure I followed the instructions very carefully laid out on this fabulous tutorial about the domain mapping plugin.
Then, I undid all the settings on the domains I bought, just to be safe. When I redid the settings, I did this:
Set the nameservers to ns1.mynameserver.com and ns2.mynameserver.com (use your own nameserver here 
)
In my CPanel and parked each domain on my main domain.
Logged into my MultiSite dashboard and went to Super Admin=> Domains
Added the domains I wanted to associate with my new site, site id (from the site list on Super Admin => Sites), Domain name, and checked the Primary button for only the one domain I want to show up in the browser address bar.
That’s it! I think the piece I missed first time around was the parking. I thought I only had to set the nameserver on the new domains, but I had to park them as well. The Domain Mapping plugin talks about cnames and that sort of thing, I found a reference on the WordPress Codex that mentioned namesevers working better as IPs can change from time to time. I have no idea if that is accurate or not, but I am choosing to go with that.
I like the idea of having a link be extremely obvious to website visitors. I am working on a new link setup on this blog. Here is a regular link. Here is a link to an external site. This link is for a pdf (which I would rarely link to my site, but hey, fun to have anyway)
