First Print Sale

[Kestrana]

So, orionid and I are doing a wedding for one of my high school friends in May and one of the things they requested was the whole “online gallery with ordering” thing. I’d been meaning to set up a Zenfolio account for this purpose and finally got around to it after I ordered the camera rental stuff we are getting for the wedding (D800 wut wut). Posted a link to it on G+ when I was done.

Bam! This morning when I woke up, I had my first print sale. So, that was cool.

Also, for the technical minded, I did secure a domain name to point at my site and followed the instructions to set up a new A record to get it to work. When I type in the domain, it goes to Zenfolio but it gets a 404 not found error. Any suggestions?

cjbuckwalter.zenfolio.com

buckwalterphotography.com

[CauseISaidSo]

I get a 404 when I go directly to the zenfolio URL (cjbuckwalter.zenfolio.com), so it looks like the domain (buckwalterphotography.com) is pointing to the right place but the original URL isn’t correct. http://carolejbuckwalter.zenfolio.com/ gets me to your gallery, but I don’t know if that’s the same one you’re wanting to point the domain at.

If you just now setup the subdomain cjbuckwalter.zenfolio.com, it may take up to 24-48 hours for it to propogate across the DNS network.

Also, note that while http://buckwalterphotography.com looks like it points to cjbuckwalter.zenfolio.com, http://www.buckwalterphotography.com points to an “under construction” web page. I’m not a DNS expert (or even up on it much), but I think you need to add another record that maps the www URL to the non-www address.

[fluffybunny]

Conga-rats on the print sale, I wondered about whether random people would buy prints from such an account.
I thought about setting up with Zenfolio some time ago and still may do it.

I don’t mind selling but I don’t want hassle. I am trying to keep photography in its own little happy place and I wonder if selling prints would start me down the slippery slope of making it more work than play.

[Kestrana]

I did just set up the domain yesterday but I’m guessing I might have done something wrong too. Although the errors I was getting when I did the DNS test indicate that it hadn’t correctly propogate yet since it still have me the original IP address returning as an A record and I deleted that for sure.

[chupathingie]

So, not only did you sell a first print, you did it from a website that isn’t up yet! 😆 Congrats!

/no help at all on the data in the tubes

[ravnostic]

IIRC from my days working at GoDaddy, people always had difficulty getting domains to point correctly at sites like these (I saw a lot of it with people in the travel agency business). And I’ll be danged if I recall the fix for it. It had something to do with the www. part (which is normally incidental in most browsers, but played some importance in stuff like this. While you may not be at GoDaddy, their help files might be helpful–the nuts and bolts are the same across the interwebz. http://support.godaddy.com/help/680/managing-dns-for-your-domain-names

[Choc-Ful-A]

I don’t think it’s a DNS problem. Instead, I think browser requests to http://buckwalterphotography.com or http://cjbuckwalter.zenfolio.com ARE getting to your hosting company. But I suspect those servers aren’t configured to handle requests for those domain names. If I’m right, that means the DNS entries are fine, but the hosting site only setup your service to respond correctly to requests for http://carolejbuckwalter.zenfolio.com so far.

I can explain why I think that’s the root cause if you like. For instance, if you want to forward specific details to your hosting provider… But at a high level, webservers are typically configured to handle requests for many websites using a single IP address. So the “Host: blah.blah.com” headers in the requests are what they use to distinguish them. And the DNS setup in place for your older domains are just mapping those requests to the right IP address without getting the browser to add the “Host: carolejbuckwalter.zenfolio.com” header.

[Kestrana]

Ok it looks like the propigation period is over because one of the 2 errors I was getting is now resolved. This is the error I get from Zenfolio when I try to link the domain name:

Error: http://www.buckwalterphotography.com does not resolve correctly

We found that the A record(s) for http://www.buckwalterphotography.com are not pointing to the Zenfolio IP address. If you have to use an A record, it must point to 64.62.158.18. The recommended configuration is a CNAME record pointing to custom.zenfolio.com.

Below are the A record(s) that we found:
http://www.buckwalterphotography.com. A 65.254.248.149

So I have created new A records for “www.buckwalterphotography.com” and “http://www.buckwalterphotography.com” attached to the Zenfolio IP

Theoretically this record will also need to propigate for everything to work correctly then, yes?

[sleeping]

Your A records should be for “buckwalterphotography.com” and “www.buckwalterphotography.com” (with and without www, not http://)

[Kestrana]

Yeah I have one for buckwalterphotography.com and that one is resolved correctly. I’ll remove the http one.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Ok it looks like the propigation period is over because one of the 2 errors I was getting is now resolved. This is the error I get from Zenfolio when I try to link the domain name:

Error: http://www.buckwalterphotography.com does not resolve correctly

We found that the A record(s) for http://www.buckwalterphotography.com are not pointing to the Zenfolio IP address. If you have to use an A record, it must point to 64.62.158.18. The recommended configuration is a CNAME record pointing to custom.zenfolio.com.

Below are the A record(s) that we found:
http://www.buckwalterphotography.com. A 65.254.248.149

So I have created new A records for “www.buckwalterphotography.com” and “http://www.buckwalterphotography.com” attached to the Zenfolio IP

Theoretically this record will also need to propigate for everything to work correctly then, yes?

FYI, the IP address in the quote above, meaning 64.62.158.18, is definitely one of Zenfolio’s. Here’s an excert of the the output from “whois -h whois.arin.net”.

Hurricane Electric, Inc. HURRICANE-4 (NET-64-62-128-0-1) 64.62.128.0 – 64.62.255.255

Zenfolio, Inc. HURRICANE-CE1581-521 (NET-64-62-158-16-1) 64.62.158.16 – 64.62.158.23

Also last night I used a command line HTTP command to fetch the website using the IP address and forcing the appropriate “Header:” line. It worked fine.

[Kestrana]

Yeah I just didn’t realize when I set up the A records that I needed one for both “buckwalterphotography.com” and “www.buckwalterphotography.com”. I had only set up the first one; now I’ve set up the second and need to wait for it to propigate I guess, since it didn’t instantly start working.

Thanks for the help everybody!

[Choc-Ful-A]

Sorry to keep acting like the town naysayer but I just read the Zenfolio help pages and I’m pretty sure DNS along is insufficient for what you want to do. I believe any domain name you want to access your site has to be configured as a “Custom Domain” as they call them.

Otherwise no matter how successfully you manage to direct browsers to the right IP address with DNS settings, the Zenfolio service won’t know what to do when it receives the request. I think that’s why going to your alternate domain names results in a 404 error page FROM Zenfolio now.

Here’s a link to a page on the Zenfolio site that might be helpful.

http://help.zenfolio.com/customer/portal/articles/408210-using-your-own-custom-domain-name

If you already setup the “Custom Domains” on Zenfolio, then the DNS changes may be all you need. But both changes need to be in place for this to work as far as I can tell.

[Kestrana]

Sorry to keep acting like the town naysayer but I just read the Zenfolio help pages and I’m pretty sure DNS along is insufficient for what you want to do. I believe any domain name you want to access your site has to be configured as a “Custom Domain” as they call them.

Otherwise no matter how successfully you manage to direct browsers to the right IP address with DNS settings, the Zenfolio service won’t know what to do when it receives the request. I think that’s why going to your alternate domain names results in a 404 error page FROM Zenfolio now.

Here’s a link to a page on the Zenfolio site that might be helpful.

http://help.zenfolio.com/customer/portal/articles/408210-using-your-own-custom-domain-name

If you already setup the “Custom Domains” on Zenfolio, then the DNS changes may be all you need. But both changes need to be in place for this to work as far as I can tell.

Yeah this is correct and I’m aware of it. There’s an options page where you instruct zenfolio to use a custom domain. But in order to use that option you have to complete a successful DNS test, which is where I got the error message about the A record. Once that propigates, I’ll be able to set Zenfolio’s settings to use my domain name. Thanks again!

[Choc-Ful-A]

Yeah this is correct and I’m aware of it. There’s an options page where you instruct zenfolio to use a custom domain. But in order to use that option you have to complete a successful DNS test, which is where I got the error message about the A record. Once that propigates, I’ll be able to set Zenfolio’s settings to use my domain name. Thanks again!

Got it, my bad! I would never have imaged that Zenfolio would require the DNS check before you can config the custom domain. Doing them in the other order makes a lot more sense to me and would allow people migrating from an existing site to do so without any downtime at all.

But c’est la vie! Sounds like you’re on the way to getting everything in working order.

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