Forum Moderators: phranque
The first site is a demo site for our a product at my employer. Someone (not me) decided rather then use www.productname.com we would use demo.productname.com. The demo site contains a lot of text, but it is a dynamically generated using the product itself. Actual customers using the product get their sites listed in Google but I don't think they use sub domains.
The actual www.productname.com merely points to www.companyname.com/Products/productname currently. I've submitted demo.productname.com to Google and others but dances come and go and it is not in the index. Up until recently our server logs/web stats haven't been kept too well. The demo site isn't linked to much at all around the web, so it has no link popularity to speak off, but neither does the next site and it was in Google in it's original location.
My second issue is with a hobby site. I originally put it up at www.companyName.com/employee/hobby/ and now it is quite well indexed in google after I submitted and patiently waited. Because it and other employee sites are polluting our webstats and I wanted full control over my site I finally registared a personal vanity type domain: www.familyName.ca (Plus I was wasn't keen on .Mac)
After researching here, I put a duplicate of my site up at the vanity site. The rest of the vanity site consists of index.html currently. I linked the original site to hobby.familyName.ca and posted that URL to a hobby related mailing list and many people (a couple hundred) have visited the site at the new URL. I have yet to submit the vanity domain to search engines because it has no original content.
The duplicate site has been updated several times in the last few weeks but not the original. I thought the duplicate worked perfectly but I found a bug. I implemented a Style Sheet Switcher useing a technique from a list apart. This worked in the original location but does not work for hobby.familyname.ca because as far as I can tell the actual .js file is in www.familyname.ca/Scripts/styleswitcher.js and I address it from the hobby site useing ../Scripts/styleswitcher.js
I discovered this (as my webhost uses CPanel [and the guys who run it aren't the sharpest in all honesty]) myself that the sub domain is merely a directory in my public_html/documentRoot directory. So if I try www.familyname.ca/hobby/ I can switch styles but can not using the sub domain.
Sorry for the lengthy post, I'm not famous for brevity.
So what should I do about the demo site, just keep waiting, and checking the logs?
Should I basically scrap the subdomain since it busts the style switcher, leave it and start giving out the traditional URL? It's only the style switcher that doesn't work, I could even update the site to move the .js file which should solve the problem. It doesn't matter that much, but since the demo site is still not in Google I'm starting to be leary of sub domains though I think they are nice and short and easy to remember which is why I used it. Plus I thought different family members could use them too.
Thanks in advance,
Muskie
For the demo site, I really wanted it to be indexed by now. I don't think I could easily convince whomever to change the URL, it's in our documentation, and sales and whoever give it out. I know sub domains can get indexed, the popular example in threads I've read is ask.com
I'm going to link to the demo site, just for fun, from a personal webpage of mine that has been online for six years or more. It doesn't have high page rank or anything but it does get indexed. I also might link to the site from my online resume, that is indexed in several search engines and I really did work on it. ;-)
I used link:www.companyname.com in Altavista and one of the sites that links to this is demo.productname.com which means it is indexed at least by one spider.
Odd that Altavista found it and I may not have submitted it there and Google didn't and I specifically submitted to Google.
Oh well I knew it was indexable (is that a word?) I'll just have to keep waiting for Googlebot.
Muskie
does not work for hobby.familyname.ca because as far as I can tell the actual .js file is in www.familyname.ca/Scripts/styleswitcher.js and I address it from the hobby site useing ../Scripts/styleswitcher.js
I believe you are mixing up URI and filesystem namespace. This is the cause of your problem. If you really use a relative URI such as ../Scripts/styleswitcher.js from within a document at hobby.domain.tld whose base URI is not explicitly set then that relative URI is considered to be wrong according to RFC 2396 [faqs.org].
[hobby.domain.tld...] is not valid. Your idea behind this probably was that within the filesystem namespace the hobby subdomain is a subdirectory of your main domain. But relative URIs are resolved in the URI namespace. And there is simply no path component that could be removed in [hobby.domain.tld...]
Andreas
You see some hideous web page design in hobby sites. :-/ I was on a big standards kick so before I put up a single page I made sure the entire site validated and was spell checked.
It is possible some quick changes or recent pages don't validate perfectly. But my template in BBEdit should be pretty clean.
I'll probably just get away from using the subdomain too much, though I think it was nice from a statistics point of view in cPanel too. It really isn't all that important, as far as I know I have the only site in my hobby with style switching and standards compliance so I can just rest on my laurels without a sub domain :-P
I think cause I used a BBEdit template (.tmpl) I should be able to fix this in a snap. But I'm not 100% certain.
Muskie
I now plan on point my various links to the subdomain) from my work and if I can my school home page and removing the old copy which is in Google. I don't even have any fancy redirect technique, I talked to the sys admin about it, but neither of us really have time, it's just a hobby site...
Muskie
My webhost has switched to AWStats which I'm so far enjoying but I need to see more then a few days worth of data before I'm sold.
