Redirecting back to my own domain [Updated!]

I moved my domain registration from eNom, where I originally signed up with my Google Apps account, to Hover back in November, and my website has been broken ever since.

Still not quite working

After the initial two straight days of beating my head against the (internet) wall [The walls here are concrete - only have to try that one time to learn not to do it again!], trying to get mnthomp.com to actually point to my Blogger blog, I gave up and went on vacation to Southern China.  I've tried a couple more times since to bend the MX, CNAME, and TXT records to my will and point my domain to my blog instead of some random placeholder page that I didn't even want, but I only have the patience for that about once a month, and there was really no progress, so I was on the brink of giving up hope.

Maybe this is a quick fix?

Today I went to check my Apps email, and realized that I could no longer go to "mail.(domain).com" to get my mail, instead I got the same stupid placeholder, and I was inspired / angered into action again.

After about three hours of mucking about, I think I've got everything back to how it should be.  Kinda.  I ended up doing a forward/redirect instead of actually pointing the domain to Google's hosting service, which should work.

Until I go and check it and get the above pictured nice feature of being in China: "This webpage is not available.  The connection to sh.114so.cn was interrupted."  I didn't even want to connect to "sh.114so.cn"!!!

Theoretically this is caused by whatever crappy DNS servers China Telecom uses refusing to redirect certain pages.  How this happens even when you're connected through a VPN ths is supposed to be shuttling all of your data through California, I don't know, but supposedly manually switching the DNS servers can fix this.

I'll try that later and maybe report back, but not right now.  It's noon, I've been at this for over three hours, and I haven't eaten yet today [maybe that's part of the problem...], so I'm going to go eat, not stare at the computer for a bit, and maybe try again later.


Oh, but the reason I switched from eNom to Hover in the first place is that eNom is a pain in the but to use and Hover is much more user friendly when it comes to renewing, changing records, adding redirects, subdomains, etc.  That being said, my website worked when it was a eNom, and now it doesn't.  But I honestly think that's Google's fault.

UPDATE!!  Feb 24 -- After taking some time to eat some lunch and not look at the computer screen, I realized that everything was setup correctly, I had just mistyped one line in the configuration.  Now that the mistake is corrected, everything seems to be working correctly.  I guess I could rescind my statements about the crappy China Telecom DNS servers... but they're still pretty slow, regardless.