Wednesday, April 16, 2008

More DNS Woes

So what happens when your DNS changes more often than your IP address? The whole point of DNS is so that your IP address can change, and you don't have to update your links (also, there's something about being human-friendly, but who needs that?). Sadly in my case, athena has had a string of DNS subdomains that haven't lasted quite so long as I had hoped. My problem is that I link to pages from my blog (mostly containing pictures, audio, and PDF documents) that I would like to be accessible on a permanent basis. Recently, I lost athena.sexypenguins.com, and so I've moved to athena.goddns.net. At some point, I'm just going to have to purchase my own domain. Thus far I've resisted out of (mostly) momentum, but now that I've registered my first domain and found that it's not so bad to be parked, I'm more inclined to plunk down the money. The question is, what should I choose? In the meantime, I've decided to create an "athena-link" label on my blogs, that will at least keep track of which posts have links to athena, so that I can update them whenever I have to change the DNS, which it appears will happen at least one more time. For now (and for the first time in a while), all of my links are up-to-date. Another problem with my current setup is that FreeDNS's policies dictate that I need to have Google's ability to access my server manually enabled every time that I switch to a new domain. This wouldn't be that big of a deal, except that I've started hosting feeds on my site, and Google Reader uses Google's DNS. Also, Google just bought out FeedBurner, and one of my feeds uses that as a proxy.