Two separate sites from one station

[PaulMy]

Hi Ken,
A bit long winded perhaps but hope it makes sense -

Back in early 2011 with your help I started to set up my site with the Saratoga templates but put that aside for a while as I continued with a modification of the standard Cumulus pages. I have continued with a link on my site to the http://www.komokaweather.com/wxindex.php but have not done anything further with it and would now like to have another go with this as a second active site.

My main domain is http://www.komokaweather.com but I also have http://www.komokaweather.ca registered and this .ca domain had been forwarded through GoDaddy to .com and have not used .ca for anything else. Thinking I could use the .ca domain for the Saratoga template site I called GoDaddy and they said that was not possible with my current economical hosting plan. However they said I could add a new folder on my .com to which I could upload anything I want and then have .ca forwarded to this new .com folder.

All the original Saratoga template files and related Cumulus files are in my .com root and all the Cumulus template files in the .com/weather folder.

I have now created that suggested new folder in .com - http://www.komokaweather.com/dotca - and have forwarded http://www.komokaweather.ca to this new URL. Then added a new index.html file in .com/dotca which has links to the wxindex.php file so that going to http://www.komokaweather.ca gets one to the Saratoga template site (for the moment in my trials I have the wxindex.php and some other pages linked in this new index.html file but would likely change this to directly load wxindex.php). This seems to work fine but GoDaddy says it is not good for searches, etc. When my domain and hosting services expire in December I will consider going to their Deluxe plan at about $3.50 per month extra which will allow two fully independent domains. I suspect though that setting up a second independent domain would require the Saratoga template files to be reinstalled in the .ca root and there may be other complications to operate both the .com and .ca from the same Cumulus FTP, would this be correct?

As I would like to maintain both the Cumulus based and the Saratoga templates are there any potential issues with my new arrangement and is there another way to accomplish what I would like to do?

Thanking you for your comment,
Paul

[saratogaWX]

Hi Paul,

Based on your descriptions, what you want to do is possible, but maybe a bit tricky to accomplish.

You have one instance of Cumulus running which provides all the data to be used for two domain names that will be used on the same hosting, but separated by having different home directories so something like this arrangement:

http://www.komokaweather.com/ (main site) homes to the document root directory
http://www.komokaweather.com/weather/index.htm is actually the Cumulus HTML/upload directory ./weather/

http://www.komokaweather.ca/ (AJAX/PHP template site) homes to a subdirectory of the hosting document root directory like ./dotca/

The issue is how to 'replicate' the data needed for the AJAX/PHP template set to appear in a different filesystem directory at the same time.

Since you're using (I think), Linux/Apache hosting, the answer may be the same one I use to 'clone' info from one directory into another by using Linux symlinks to link together the data. It likely requires SSH access to your website to do the commands needed to accomplish this.

Login to your webserver using SSH

cd public_html/dotca
ln -s ../weather/CUtags.php CUtags.php
ln -s ../weather/realtime.txt realtime.txt
ln -s ../weather/images images

and that should map the key files (CUtags.php, realtime.txt and the ./images/ directory) to where they are uploaded to your main website.

I hope this helps...

Best regards,
Ken

[PaulMy]

Thanks Ken, and you understood perfectly. I will give it a try, and the first thing is "how do I Login to your webserver using SSH" I have searched SSH and found ssh.com and others. Do I download ssh and install and then proceed as you suggested?

Paul

[saratogaWX]

I recommend using a SSH client like PuTTy (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgta ... nload.html ) for SSH connections. I've used this freeware client (with some updates) since the mid '90s.

You'll need to peruse your webhoster tech support help on how to acquire SSH access to your websites .. some hosters allow it (1and1), some hosters require you to register to use it (GoDaddy), and some hosters disallow it altogether .. I don't know which category your hoster fits into.

[PaulMy]

Thanks again Ken. I am with GoDaddy and will call them after I download. I see there are many options on that PuTTy site.

Paul