HIding full Url

[kangated]

Hi Folks,
Some may disagree with what I am doing but I am trying to put something back into the sport I love. Clubs are struggling for funds and I am offering them a vehicle to attract sponsorship dollars on their own named website without the cost of registering a domain and taking out their own hosting etc.
I have a server setup which allows me to support unlimited sub-domains so the concept is to offer them a template website, weekly result publishing and their own sub-domian name relevant to their location.
ie townsville.mysport.net.au where www.mysport.net.au is the registered domain name I hold.
However I would like to hide the redirect string to the sub-directory in the browser. for example www.mydsport.net.au/townsville/index.html
would look much better as
townsville.mysport.net.au
My hosting service does not offer cloaking software so can anyone suggest a script or method I can use?
Thanks

kangated

[phpmaven]

Sounds like a job for mod_rewrite. This is a question you need to ask in the Apache forum. The moderator, jdMorgan, is one of the most knowledgable people around when it comes to Apache.

[kangated]

Thanks I will give it a try. Not sure whether I was welcome with this topic because it seems as if half the community is against cloaking and I am not sure whether what I want to do is cloak or just redirect or what.

Anyway thanks for the suggestion

kangated

[DoppyNL]

let me get this in 1 line:

you own mysport.net.au and got a site running on www.mysport.net.au

Now, you want to run a site for some club on townsville.mysport.net.au?

If you manage to do that in a nice way, that would NOT be considered cloacking. That would be considered a subdomain, wich is perfectly fine.

You can do this with modrewrite in apache and it should be to difficult once you get the hang of modrewrite.
Do make sure that searchengine's don't find or are not allowed to index www.mysport.net.au/townsville ... it might be considered duplicate content, wich is fine by itself, but not good for your ranking ;-).

[volatilegx]

it might be considered duplicate content, wich is fine by itself, but not good for your ranking ;-).

It would only hurt the ranking of the version indexed second. The one already in the index wouldn't be affected.

[kangated]

Thanks everyone for the help!
As it turns out (and bear in mind I have not worked with or controlled my own server directly before), the system automatically points the sub-domian to the file directory of the same name

eg townsville.mysport.net.au points to a sub-directory townsville inside of the main directory

The mistake I was making was in entering a re-direction location after creatig the sub-domain, hence the browser was always going to the re-directed page (www.mysport.net.au/townsville).
When I removed the re-direction string it goes straight to and only ever shows townsville.mysport.net.au.

The only time of course this won't work is if the sub-directory name is not the same as the sub-domain name but I can't think of this ever being the case.

Anyway the pointers everyone has been giving me having been interesting to research and learn about all the same and many thanks to everyone that replied.

I've enjoyed browsing around webmaster forum!

Cheers

kangated