Domain Pain

Those of you who have subscribed to the RSS Feed URL http://www.macartan.de/rss.xml as instructed in my post from Jan 20th will have noticed that the feed is currently out of action. This is entirely my fault, and will be rectified, but I can't say when.
Some background: when I set up this blog last month, I started with the FTP publishing option from Blogger. I did this because I wanted a friendlier URL than something.blogspot.com, and I already owned http://www.macartan.de.
Once up and running however, I found that FTP publishing has some disadvantages compared to using a Blogger-hosted URL, particularly when it comes to template layouts and access control.
So I resolved to set up the blog as a custom domain, so the URL would be owned by me, and hosted by Blogger.com. This necessitates creating a CNAME record within my domains DNS record, a procedure which according to Blogger, is widely available from ISPs, and should you run into difficulty, "you can contact your registrar directly and they'll be able to help you out".
To cut a long story short, my provider 1&1 was crap. They told me I couldn't change DNS settings on my current tariff, then when I upgraded they said I could only change the "simple" DNS settings A record and MX records.
So, currently I'm at the dreaded blogspot URL as an emergency solution, and all www.macartan.de traffic is redirected here. The feed is dead, as I mentioned above. I'm switching domain provider to Strato.de. I'll let you know if this revitalises the feed, or whether I simply stay with Blogspot.
Have a great weekend...