I had the most difficult time trying to get my domain set up. I searched, and searched and searched again to find some guidance. I came across this delightful and easy to use instruction. But it looked just like the steps I had completed. I took a closer look and I realized I had put an “*” instead of an “@” in step 5. I tried using the “@” and I immediately was hooked up. yay!!!

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Yay!

Finally got this working, took almost all week of off and on messing around with it.  The trick was patience to be perfectly honest.  I just expect things to happen quickly, but in the world of Nameservers and such thats not really the case.  The rest of this post will explain what I did to get this working.  This is because honestly there was no straight up guide on how to get this to work anywhere online.  Most of the information was scattered through multiple websites each explaining only a small bit of the full picture.

So to start here was my delima.  I finally wanted to get some use out of my wonderful Bulushi.com domain I bought almost 2 years ago and renewed last week.  But I didn’t want to have www.bulushi.com point at my tumblr page because I was hoping Emily and the rest of my family might want to get some use out of the domain.  So the idea came to me to use sub-domains ismail.bulushi.com sounds great for a personal blog.  But the catch was that Tumblr wants you to set it up on your own so they don’t have to have pages after pages of specific instructions regarding setting up a domain with subdomain pointing to a Tumblr page.

Godaddy has an odd domain admin system that makes it tough to find what the Tumblr help describes you should change to have this to work.  Here are the steps by steps:

1. Log in to godaddy and then hover over domain button (top left corner almost) and click on “My Domains”
2. In the middle of the page you should see a list of your domains you have, click on the domain you want to create a subdomain to
3. You should see a bunch of details about the domain you own.  Look in the center of the page for a phrase saying “Total DNS Control and MX Records” and click on that.
4. Now you should see a long list of stuff that might be confusing.  What you really want to get your domain running is to add a “A Record” under the A (Host) list.  So click on the button on the top right of the list that says “Add New A Record”.
5. A form should pop up with 2 text boxes to fill and one combo box.  The first text box is the Host Name (aka the subdomain, or “@” if your just having your domain point to tumblr without a subdomain).  In my case I put “ismail” for the host since it is the name of the subdomain i wanted.  The next text box is the IP this subdomain (or once again main domain name) should point at.  If you look in the Tumblr help they tell you that IP address should be “72.32.231.8”.  The TTL combo box I have no clue about, I just left it to 1 hour.  Now click Ok and your done with the Godaddy part of this.
6. Now you go into your Tumblr dashboard, and on the top hover on Accord and click on settings.
7. The first thing you should see on your settings page will be URL section.  There should be a check box that says “Use a custom domain name”, make sure its checked. Right under the check box should be a text box asking you for the domain you want to use, in my case that was ismail.bulushi.com.  Go to the bottom of the page and save the new settings.
8. Your done, step 8 is just to remind you to be very patient. For this to work for me, it took about 6 hours.  Tumblr says it could take up to 72 hours.  So just be patient, it will work.

Hope this is helpful to anyone who wants to set this up for themselves.  I’m just happy I go this to work.  Now what to blog about?