Using subdomains

I want to create subdomains for a couple sites I am doing - the photo galleries for starters - but I am not sure how to handle this in FW4Pro. (I have the 5 upgrade purchased). Right now I have one gallery page that is gallery.html and an iFrame inserted for the flash show. How would that page translate to the subdomain?

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Firstly you have to create the subdomain in your server control panel.

Usually in domains>subdomains

All this actually does is create a folder on your domain.

Say you wanted photos.yourdomain.com

You would create the subdomain ‘photos’ in CPanel

This would create a folder structure like public_html/photos But I cant see why you would specifically want to create a subdomain to do this.

Why not just create another folder in the Freeway site palette called photos and put your Gallery stuff in there.

David

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Sometime around 1/3/08 (at 14:52 -0500) Beatrice said:

I want to create subdomains for a couple sites I am doing - the photo galleries for starters - but I am not sure how to handle this in FW4Pro. (I have the 5 upgrade purchased). Right now I have one gallery page that is gallery.html and an iFrame inserted for the flash show. How would that page translate to the subdomain?

First of all, read what’s shown here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdomain

What I think you’re after is probably just a folder within your regular site, not actually a sobdomain at all. Just make that new folder in Freeway’s Site panel and drag pages into there. Upload, and you’re done.

k

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Great - that helps. I think it might be useful in the near future to tell clients (or mine or otherwise) to get info on a particular spot if the subdomain is given - dedicated spot rather than a subfolder of the existing site. One you often see is support.site.com kinda thing. So a gallery could be gallery.site.com for quick reference if need be.

If I have a FW folder created “photos” and then on my server I have the subdomain photos created - would the folder from FW automatically configure to access those pages as the subdomain? Or would those folders appear as site/photos/….

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Sometime around 1/3/08 (at 22:43 -0500) Beatrice said:

One you often see is support.site.com kinda thing. So a gallery could be gallery.site.com for quick reference if need be.

If I have a FW folder created “photos” and then on my server I have the subdomain photos created - would the folder from FW automatically configure to access those pages as the subdomain? Or would those folders appear as site/photos/….

A subdomain is only ‘sub’ in the sense of the domain name structure hierarchy. In the sense that you’re considering, it is an entirely different place. In the simple sense it is a different domain.

Although a document can contain folders and upload that folder structure and contents, you cannot have one document upload to two different domains.

Folders are the way to go if you want to keep things simple. www.site.com/photos rather than photos.site.com. Anyway, SO many people assume that a web site absolutely requires ‘www.’ that they’ll tack it on the beginning and try to visit www.photos.site.com - which wouldn’t work unless that was set to map to the one without the www part.

Subdomains can look nifty and important and they can be useful, but they can also lead to confusion. But on the other hand they can also be useful to split things up into more self-contained site parts.

k

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Keith

It can be used to tidy up long URL’s so if you’ve got www.mysite.com/work/program/anotherfolder/stuff/ this could then be converted to stuff.mysite.com

also…

On our hosting, each sub domain you add you also have full email capabilities, for example you could have an email box, forwarder, catch all forwarder or autoresponder on anything@what-ever- support.mysite.com

David

On 2 Mar 2008, at 10:21 am, Keith Martin wrote:

Subdomains can look nifty and important and they can be useful, but they can also lead to confusion. But on the other hand they can also be useful to split things up into more self-contained site parts.

David Owen :: Freeway Friendly Web Hosting and Domains http://www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk

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Sometime around 2/3/08 (at 13:11 +0000) David Owen said:

It can be used to tidy up long URL’s so if you’ve got www.mysite.com/work/program/anotherfolder/stuff/ this could then be converted to stuff.mysite.com

Abslutely; there are uses. Although other ways to tackle that could be htaccess redirects - or just a different approach to folder structure logic.

Also, subdomains have to be treated as entirely separate sites altogether when it comes to FTP uploads. I’ve yet to see any site creation tool support file management across multiple subdomains.

And there’s still the issue of people not understanding that www is actually a subdomain itself, not something magic that is required ‘for a site to be web’. I regularly notice people having trouble visiting subdomains because they add the www. on in front when it isn’t meant to be there.

Do you automatically map www.subdomain.domain.com to subdomain.domain.com? That would be a useful thing to offer in your bag of hosting tricks.

Subdomains vs. subfolders - there are pros and cons to both.

k

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One of the hosts that I use (Modwest) has this handy automatic Folder == Subdomain trick in their hosting. If you create a folder in your htdocs folder (which is not the same thing as your site folder) then a subdomain is automatically created in your account. A vanilla site, set up for http://example.com would have a folder structure like this:

/bin
/dev
/etc
/htdocs
    /_
    /www
/lib
/logs
/sitebin
/tmp
/usr
/var

/htdocs/_ is an alias which silently routes domain-only requests to / htdocs/www

If you add another folder called /htdocs/foo, then you can navigate to it instantly at http://foo.example.com

It’s a very nice setup, and here’s where this gets even more interesting for Freeway users. If you create folders in your Freeway document called www and foo, and move the appropriate pages for each site into those folders in Freeway, and set your Upload preferences to go into htdocs rather than htdocs/www, you can upload to two different subdomains at the same time from one Freeway document. Kind of the reverse of having a bunch of Freeway files uploading in the same site!

Walter

On Mar 2, 2008, at 8:49 AM, Keith Martin wrote:

Also, subdomains have to be treated as entirely separate sites altogether when it comes to FTP uploads. I’ve yet to see any site creation tool support file management across multiple subdomains.

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Sometime around 2/3/08 (at 10:12 -0500) Walter Lee Davis said:

One of the hosts that I use (Modwest) has this handy automatic Folder == Subdomain trick in their hosting. If you create a folder in your htdocs folder (which is not the same thing as your site folder) then a subdomain is automatically created in your account.

DANG, that’s clever. :-)

I just tested this on my Dreamhost account. I can do everything you mentioned, but it looks like the initial subdomain folders need to be set up first - not surprisingly, so they’re added to the DNS. The automatic folder setup trick is the missing step here, but it isn’t hard to get past that bit by setting those up first.

Proper multi-domain management from a single site document, just like I said wasn’t possible… thanks for the info!

k

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Walter, that sounds really cool - if I follow it correctly. My head hurts LOL. Are you saying I can setup my folder structure at siteground with that and disregard the public_html folder? (I get the part where the FW file folders would only work when the subdomain is created with siteground first)

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No, I am just relating that Modwest has this cool feature. I have never used siteground, so I can’t speak for them.

Walter

On Mar 2, 2008, at 12:39 PM, Beatrice wrote:

Walter, that sounds really cool - if I follow it correctly. My head hurts LOL. Are you saying I can setup my folder structure at siteground with that and disregard the public_html folder? (I get the part where the FW file folders would only work when the subdomain is created with siteground first)

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Sometime around 2/3/08 (at 12:39 -0500) Beatrice said:

Are you saying I can setup my folder structure at siteground with that and disregard the public_html folder? (I get the part where the FW file folders would only work when the subdomain is created with siteground first)

You’d have to do some tests first, but in my tests with Dreamhost it seems that if I set up the subdomain first, then make the correctly-named folder at top level in the Freeway document’s Site panel, and then upload to the place where those folders can be seen… the data will be put into the right folders automatically. And just work.

Your milage may vary - test and experiment.

k

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Hi, Folks —

I have a question regarding subdomains.

I’m creating a mobile version of my site. My understanding is that if I create a subdomain with “m” as the subdomain, then mobile browsers see that as the site. (For example, www.m.MySite.com)

Based on that, and reading through the stream here, it would appear that I first have to go to my hosting provider and get them to create an “m” subdomain? Or is that something I do in Freeway?

Just curious.

Thanks, Jamie

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Hi Jamie

www. is already a subdomain, so it should be http://m.mydomain.com

Just by calling it m won’t automatically make a mobile device change to that URL.

David

On 12 Jun 2010, at 18:26, “Jamie Turner” <email@hidden > wrote:

Hi, Folks —

I have a question regarding subdomains.

I’m creating a mobile version of my site. My understanding is that if I create a subdomain with “m” as the subdomain, then mobile browsers see that as the site. (For example, www.m.MySite.com)

Based on that, and reading through the stream here, it would appear that I first have to go to my hosting provider and get them to create an “m” subdomain? Or is that something I do in Freeway?

Just curious.

Thanks, Jamie

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Here is an article on the subject from Smashing Magazine http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/13/mobile-web-design-trends-2009/

But as David says just calling your site m.yoursite.com does not make it the default for mobile browsers.

It is recommended that you use a subdomain but what you call it is neither here nor there - it really is to differentiate it from your normal site.

And remember to use the iPhone/iPad redirect action to bring those mobile users to the correct pages and especially direct them away from Flash content to an alternative.

David

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Thanks, David and Delta Dave. I’ll read the article that DeltaDave mentioned.

Do either of you know where there’s a step-by-step guide on how to create a mobile site using Freeway?

I guess I could get a .mobi Domain and build one specifically for MySite.mobi.

Is that the best option for creating a mobile website?

Thanks, Jamie

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I just read through the article DeltaDave mentioned. (I should have done that first. Sorry.)

It says to use a subdomain for a mobile site.

So, given that, how do I create a subdomain? Is that something I do in Freeway? Or is it something I do with my hosting service first?

Thanks, Jamie

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Most good hosting providers allow you to set up subdomains through your Cpanel.

What this really does is create another folder on your server like yoursite.com/mysubdomainfolder

This can then be accessed as mysubdomainfolder.yoursite.com

You can then create a corresponding subfolder in your FW doc which will upload to your subdomain.

David

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Excellent! Thanks.

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Hi, Folks —

After a long delay, I’ve finally added an m. subdomain to my existing site via my hosting provider (GoDaddy). In other words, GoDaddy has installed a folder on my hosting account called “m” which is a subdomain to 60SecondMarketer.com.

DeltaDave says the next step in this process is to create a corresponding subfolder in my FW document. I know how to create a folder in Freeway, but I don’t know how to create a subfolder.

In other words, if I go in a create a folder called “m,” I’d end up with www.60SecondMarketer.com/m. What I need is for it to be m.60SecondMarketer.com.

How do I do that? Any suggestions? Thanks.

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They are one and the same.

Create it as a subfolder of the FW doc and link to it as m.60SecondMarketer.com

D

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Sorry to be slow on the uptake about this, DeltaDave, but I don’t really understand what’s meant by, “Create it as a subfolder of the FW doc and link to it as m.60SecondMarketer.com.”

Can you dumb that down for me?

I know how to create a FOLDER in FW, but as far as I can tell, there’s no drop-down menu for creating a subfolder.

Also, what do you mean by “link to it”?

(Side note: What I’m doing, by the way, is creating pages for a mobile version of my website. After a lot of research, it looks as thought one of the better ways to do that is to create an m. subdomain and have pages to the mobile version of the site there.)

Thanks!

— Jamie

Thanks, Jamie

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When GoDaddy created this subdomain, did they create a new web root for it, or did the create a folder inside your existing site root folder called m, and tell you to upload your mobile site there? Either of these scenarios are possible, and they’re equally valid from the server’s perspective.

In Freeway, if you make a folder in the site pane, that folder is actually a subfolder of the main site root folder. But if you create your mobile site in the same document as your regular site and your mobile site is in the m subfolder, then all your links will be broken if you link from one site to another using Freeway’s normal linking. You’ll also have a decent chance of missing graphics on the mobile site.

What I recommend you do is create a new document for the mobile site, and upload to the m folder wherever it may be from that document. Don’t create the folder in the site pane, just set it as the site root in Freeway.

All your links from one site to the other need to be external links, just as if you were linking to a site you didn’t create.

Walter

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Hi, Walt —

Thanks for the follow-up. I think I’m tracking here.

Essentially, you’re saying I need to create a new Freeway website that’s the mobile site and upload that to an m. subdomain in my existing hosting account.

I’ve tried that, but it hasn’t worked yet.

Here were my steps:

1) I contacted GoDaddy with a request to create an m. subdomain 2) The guy at GoDaddy seemed to know exactly what I wanted to do, so I trust he did it correctly, but you never know. 3) Our steps were to go into my domain manager and create a subdomain called “m” that’s in a folder called “/m” 4) Then, I created a new Freeway mobile website document and saved it into a folder on my hard drive called m 5) I tried to upload the new Freeway mobile site to the 60SecondMarketer.com server and to a directory called /m.

Unfortunately, this is the message I got:

“Cannot complete upload because a file or folder could not be accessed. (550 Can’t change directory to /m: No such file or directory”

Thoughts or comments?

Thanks so much.

— Jamie

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The /m folder may be in your htdocs or public_html or whatever the root folder for your web site is called. So if the rest of your site is in /htdocs, your m folder would be /htdocs/m. Give that a try. And really try looking in the folder using Transmit or Fetch or CyberDuck or whatever other FTP application you may have handy. Even that awful Java applet that GD foists on their customers will help you see the directory structure on the server and find that elusive /m.

Walter

On Dec 3, 2010, at 11:16 PM, Jamie Turner wrote:

Unfortunately, this is the message I got:

“Cannot complete upload because a file or folder could not be accessed. (550 Can’t change directory to /m: No such file or directory”

Thoughts or comments?

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Very interesting, Walt. I looked in the directory structure on the server and wasn’t able to see the /m folder.

I’m going to call GoDaddy on the phone later today to find out what the scoop is, but that should explain why I couldn’t upload the mobile site.

Once I find/install the proper m. subdomain folder, I’ll upload a separate mobile site to that subdomain and we should be good-to-go.

As always, thanks go out to you and DeltaDave.

Best, Jamie

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That worked!

It turns out it was a problem on the GoDaddy side. They set up the subdomain, but it didn’t create a folder on the hosting account.

We fixed that. So, theoretically, I now have a mobile website.

People who have a smart phone should be able to type in www.60SecondMarketer.com from their mobile device and they’ll be re-directed to m.60SecondMarketer.com, which is my site set up specifically for the small screen.

I’ll be testing it today and tomorrow to work out any kinks, but I think I’m good.

Thanks!

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You will need a script to sniff the device to auto re-direct to m.60SecondMarketer.com

Kind Regards David Owen

On 4 Dec 2010, at 20:07, “Jamie Turner” <email@hidden> wrote:

That worked!

It turns out it was a problem on the GoDaddy side. They set up the subdomain, but it didn’t create a folder on the hosting account.

We fixed that. So, theoretically, I now have a mobile website.

People who have a smart phone should be able to type in www.60SecondMarketer.com from their mobile device and they’ll be re-directed to m.60SecondMarketer.com, which is my site set up specifically for the small screen.

I’ll be testing it today and tomorrow to work out any kinks, but I think I’m good.

Thanks!

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Hi, David —

You’re right. I do need a script for that. I tested it just now and it’s not working for a Blackberry or an Android phone.

Do you know who can write the script for me? Or is there an action?

I’m willing to pay for the script, if necessary.

Thanks, Jamie

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A quick google search brought up a JavaScript re-direct

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
if (screen.width <= 699) {    document.location = "mobile.html";    }    //-->
</script>

(adjust to suit)

David

On 4 Dec 2010, at 20:26, “Jamie Turner” <email@hidden> wrote:

Hi, David —

You’re right. I do need a script for that. I tested it just now and it’s not working for a Blackberry or an Android phone.

Do you know who can write the script for me? Or is there an action?

I’m willing to pay for the script, if necessary.

Thanks, Jamie

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Remember that you can also use the iPhone/iPad redirect action on your index page (and others)

D

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And it works on my iPhone - and looks good!

D

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I see you have used the iPhone redirect to/Mobile/index.html

D

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It be redirecting to the URL http://m.60SecondMarketer.com

David

On 4 Dec 2010, at 21:21, “DeltaDave” <email@hidden> wrote:

I see you have used the iPhone redirect to/Mobile/index.html

D

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Sorry that should have been “it should be redirecting to…

(tapping this in iOS)

David

On 4 Dec 2010, at 22:22, David Owen <email@hidden> wrote:

It be redirecting to the URL http://m.60SecondMarketer.com

David

On 4 Dec 2010, at 21:21, “DeltaDave” <email@hidden> wrote:

I see you have used the iPhone redirect to/Mobile/index.html

D

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Hi, David and Dave —

Yes, I’m using the iPhone redirect and it works great. What a terrific Action. Thanks.

Now, I’d like to add the script that David mentioned so that people arriving from non-iPhone smart phones can be re-directed.

I’m not all that well-versed in adding and adapting scripts.

Two questions: 1) Where would I add that script? Would I go to Page —> HTML Markup and add it there? 2) Also, how should I adapt the script? I don’t know HTML, but I’m assuming that I’d simply change the line that says “document.location = “mobile.html” to “document.location = “m.60SecondMarketer.com.html” Is that right?

Thanks!

— Jamie

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1 - Yes - probably before /Head would be best

2 -

    <script type="text/javascript">
    <!--
    if (screen.width <= 699) {    document.location = "http://m.60SecondMarketer.com";    }    //-->
    </script>

Try this link from your Blackberry/Android http://www.deltadesign.co/odds/3dcube.html

Provided their screens are less than 699 of course.

D

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Hi, DeltaDave —

That worked like a charm. I tested it from my smart phone and it re-directed to the appropriate page.

Bravo.

What I’ve learned from all this is that I don’t actually need an m subdomain after all. As long as I have the script installed, I can re-direct to any page I want. And as long as that page is set-up to be mobile friendly, it works perfectly.

You guys were probably saying that all along during this Forum stream, but I was too slow on the uptake to figure that out.

Anyway, we’re off to the races. All is good.

As always, thanks so much for all your help.

P.S. If any of you are interested in learning more about social media, you might enjoy my book just published by the Financial Times Press called “How to Make Money with Social Media.” My next book? “How to Make Money with Mobile Media.” LOL.

Thanks,

Jamie

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