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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