Kenny Carlile

Last Friday, I launched my first Drupal website: ScooterDad.com. I've been wanting to create a site for parents and kids who are new to freestyle scootering and competitions for a while now. There are some resources for scootering online, but none of them are targeted at beginners and people new to the sport. My family has learned a lot in the last year and I thought it would be nice to share that information with other people so they don't have to make all the same mistakes we did.

We won't be trying to compete with the other scooter news outlets, but rather we will provide a different angle on information that they don't typically cover, such as tutorials, instructions, and what to expect in certain situations. There is a whole unspoken culture in the scooter community that you have to learn, so hopefully ScooterDad.com can help convey that to beginners and parents.

If you or your kid are taking the leap into the world of freestyle scootering, check out ScooterDad.com! Thanks!

If you're using GoDaddy for your web hosting and you've installed Drupal on your shared hosting (Economy, Deluxe, or Unlimited hosting plans), then you may have run into the issue where you can't enable Clean URLs for Drupal. Fortunately, there's an easy fix. Unfortunately, the fix is so easy, I'm not sure why GoDaddy hasn't fixed this.

In your FTP client or the file browser in GoDaddy's tools, navigate to the root where your Drupal instance has been installed and look for your .htaccess file. Look for this important line, noted in red:

#
# Apache/PHP/Drupal settings:
#
...

# Various rewrite rules.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 ...

 # Modify the RewriteBase if you are using Drupal in a subdirectory or in a
 # VirtualDocumentRoot and the rewrite rules are not working properly.
 # For example if your site is at http://example.com/drupal uncomment and
 # modify the following line:
 # RewriteBase /drupal
 #
 # If your site is running in a VirtualDocumentRoot at http://example.com/,
 # uncomment the following line:
 # RewriteBase /

...
</IfModule>

# $Id: .htaccess,v 1.90.2.5 2010/02/02 07:25:22 dries Exp $

All you have to do here is delete the # in front of that line, which will uncomment that directive and allow Drupal to be able to successfully manage your site with Clean URLs. You will, however, have to enable it in your site configuration.

Don't forget to save your file after editing and best practice is that you should probably backup the .htaccess file before editing it.

See how easy that was? I wonder why GoDaddy hasn't fixed that yet. *shrug*

Sources: http://drupal.org/node/89089, http://drupal.org/node/364511

Note: I'm aware that there are several places on the web that this is explained, but it's important for GoDaddy users to know if they are using Drupal, so I thought I would add one more instance of this information to help spread the knowledge.

If you use GoDaddy's shared hosting plans that support multiple domains (the Deluxe or Unlimited plans) and you've tried to manage multiple domains and subdomains, then you probably are already familiar with the organizational frustrations that can occur.

In a standard web server environment, each domain and subdomain has it's own directory, usually under a hosting directory, like this:

~/
     myprimarydomain.com/
          www/
               index.html
               ...
          somesubdomain/
               index.html
               ...
     myotherdomain.net/
          www/
               index.html
               ...
          someothersubdomain/
               index.html
               ...

Unfortunately, with the Godaddy shared hosting plans, some domain must be the primary domain and it must live in the root. That is, you'll end up with a directory structure like this.

~/
     footer.php
     header.php
     index.php
     images/
          ...
     javascript/
          ...
     myotherdomain.net/
          index.php
          ...
     picturessubdomainforprimarydomain/
          index.php
          ...
     someotherdomain.org/
          index.php
          ...
     ...

As you can see, this gets pretty muddy when you have the code for a website for your primary domain mixed in with your other domains and subdomains. Unfortunately, there's no way to completely fix this issue with the inexpensive hosting plans. However, you do have a few options to organize your hosting directory.

Option 1 – The "Primary Domain Gets Screwed" Solution

You can setup a domain that you don't care about for the primary hosted domain. Then, just don't put anything in the root and start organizing your domains in folders with subdomains in those folders. With that method, you have to buy an extra domain that you aren't going to use.

Another way you can do this is with a root-level redirect. You can put a single redirect in the root to point the primary domain to its properly nested directory. The problem with this is that you are going to get a long junky URL (after redirect, http://www.mydomain.com/managed_domains/mydomain.com/www/index.php) for the primary domain unless you can get mod_rewrite to work with GoDaddy. I haven't tried this, but I suspect you won't be able to rewrite the URLs in a pretty manner as you aren't allowed access to the Apache httpd.conf file.

Option 2 – The "Try To Keep The www Subdomain Content For Your Primary Domain Well-Organized/Minimal And Manage All Your Other Domains And Subdomains Correctly" Solution

Okay, maybe that solution needs a better name.

This is the solution I'm currently using. My kennycarlile.com is my primary hosted domain, so I have to keep my www content in the root. I wanted to organize my other domains (and subdomains for kennycarlile.com), so I put my www.kennycarlile.com content in the root and then created a folder for other domains called "000_other_domains". I chose this name, with leading 0's because that will force it to always (well, in theory) put that directory first in an alphabetical listing of the parent directory.

Within ~/000_other_domains/, I then create a folder for each domain, independent of the subdomain. That is, I have ~/000_other_domains/kennycarlile.com/ as a parent folder for all my other subdomains. For this case where this is for the primary domain, the www directory exists at the root (~/), but all other domains exist in this directory:

~/
     000_other_domains/
          528digital.com/
               www/
          frofrolynx.com/
               www/
          kennycarlile.com/
               demo/
               wiki/
               [www/ does not exist here because this is the
                    primary domain and it must exist at ~/]
          kennycarlile.net/
               gallery/
               www/
          moonfar.com/
               www/
          nwdirtriders.com/
               forum/
               gallery/
               www/
          ...

While you still end up with your primary domain's www directory mixed in the root with the 000_other_domains/ directory, you have the rest of your domain and subdomain structure organized logically.

Option 3 – The "You're Actually Making Money From Your Site So You Can Afford Some Real Hosting" Solution

If you're making money off your site and it's not just a hobby, you can probably splurge for the $35+/month virtual dedicated hosting that allows you to have a lot more control over your Apache configuration. This isn't a really a solution since the issue is trying to fix the shared hosting problem, but I just wanted to point out this option.

Fixing A Poorly Planned Hosting Setup

I hope that helps someone out there. I would have liked to have seen this kind of write up prior to starting to manage my hosting. As it was, I had all of my domains and subdomains in folders at the root (~/) of my hosting directory. To clean this up, I had to move many of my installs. I was worried about breaking/corrupting my applications that GoDaddy had installed for me (WordPress, PHPbb, Twiki, etc.), so on the advice of one of their very helpful and articulate tech support reps, I followed these steps:

1. Using GoDaddy's File Manager in their hosting tools, create the 000_other_domains/ directory.
2. Now create a directory for each domain under 000_other_domains/, such as kennycarlile.com/, frofrolynx.com/, etc.
3. Using the File Manager tool, COPY the improperly placed folder where your subdomain (that includes the implicit ones like www, except for your primary domain, which has to stay at ~/) and rename the copied folder as appropriate. You should now have a directory structure like ~/000_other_domains/frofrolynx.com/www/ where a copy of your frofroynx.com content resides.
4. In domain management, modify the record for each domain and subdomain (do subdomains first so you can go back and mange the parent domain while you are waiting for the subdomains to take effect, which happens every 30 minutes), so that it points to the NEW location: ~/000_other_domains/frofrolynx.com/www/. Again, this will take ~30 minutes to take effect.
5. Rename your OLD directory to something like xxx_[foldername] so that you know 100% that you aren't accidentally seeing the old install because the domain change hadn't yet taken effect. This also helps you identify which folders you need to delete later.
6. Now test your install. For some applications or plugins for applications, you may have to edit config files to point to the new server path, such as changing /home/content/u/s/e/username/html/old_domain_directory/… to /home/content/u/s/e/username/html/000_other_domains/frofrolynx.com/www/…
7. Once you've been able to correct all the absolute paths to point to the new one, test again.
8. After a day or two, if you feel confident that everything is working as is, you can delete your xxx_[foldername].

Well, that about covers my experience with trying to fix a poorly-managed (by me) hosting account on GoDaddy's shared hosting. Hopefully that will safe someone else some pain and hassle by learning from my mistakes and experience. Good luck!

Well, I think I've finally got things tweaked the way I want them enough to announce the re-launch of KennyCarlile.com and the aggregation of KennyCarlile.net into one site. Currently and for the immediate future, KennyCarlile.net will 301 redirect to KennyCarlile.com.

This is a completely original design and implementation from scratch, new logo, and some new content, although there are some sections of the site still thin on content. I hope to be able to fill those out soon. I've also got a handful of blog posts that I've been wanting to write but have put on the back burner because I wanted this new site to be a priority. Unfortunately, when you have a big project that takes a while and you put it ahead of the little stuff…you end up just procrastinating on doing anything.

I'm relieved to have this redesign done as I think it's a lot cleaner and less cartoony than my previous sites. Additionally, I've been wanting to have my professional and personal content all under one site for a while now.

Currently, I'm planning on the redesign of the Western Skies site to be my next big project, then on to Moonfar on Google App Engine. Also, if you haven't been spammed by me about this yet, please check out 528Digital.com to see my new venture in photography (as art, not for hire).

Thanks for stopping by and look for more upcoming blog posts including tips for domain and subdomain management in GoDaddy hosting.

I recently wanted to send someone a clip from The 'Burbs on YouTube, but I wanted them to see a specific line from the movie. I knew that if you added a timecode in MM:SS format to a comment that YouTube would parse that as a link to that timecode in the video, but I figured they had to have a way to do it in the URL as well.

After a little bit of Googling, I ran across this post from the New York Times, that explained exactly how to do it. I hadn't run across this before, so I thought I'd share to perpetuate the knowledge.

If your video link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krsdKDkyQds and you want it to jump to 5:40 in the clip, simply add #t=5m40s to the URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krsdKDkyQds#t=5m40s

This doesn't seem to work for embedding, at least not with the WP plugins that I'm using or by hacking it into the embed code from YouTube. If someone knows a work-around for this, please post it in the comments. In the mean time, if you want to enjoy the specific scene that I wanted to reference, you'll have to drag the playhead to 5:40 manually. The clip ends at about 6:50.