GeminiGeek’s Online Journal

Building GeminiGeek’s Online Journal #1

August 6th, 2007 in Site Related and Wordpress

I did my site revamp since few months ago, and there’s a lot of changes made here and there since the last revamp. Today, I am going to do a write-up on the process of building GeminiGeek’s Online Journal, ala Building Alex King 2.0 style. I will split this write-up to a few sections, and I believe this write-up is especially useful for those who would like to use WordPress for not only as a blogging platform, but a CMS for their site.

Part #1: The Change of Site Structure

The first thing I did when doing revamp is to change my site structure. My blog used to be located at blog.geminigeek.com, and all pages resides in blog.geminigeek.com/xxxx. It doesn’t seem wrong to me at first. But after a while, I guess I should better off pimping my domain rather than subdomain because there was a time where blog.geminigeek.com has PR5 and my geminigeek.com only PR3!! So, I changed my site’s blog to geminigeek.com/blog.

When you talk about talk about PR, I’m sure you will think about the search engine result. I have a few blog entries that turns out to be first in Google Search. I don’t want to lose my visitor. I did a 301 Redirection on my blog subdomain to geminigeek.com/blog, while retaining the permalink structure. This way, I manage to retain my visitor and successfully changed my site structure! And this is what I paste to my .htaccess in the root of blog subdomain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.geminigeek.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://geminigeek.com/blog/$1 [L,R=301]

This rule will automatically redirect blog.geminigeek.com/some/dir to geminigeek.com/blog/some/dir. Nifty eh? There’s a lot you can do if you know how to use mod_rewrite. Too bad, I don’t understand anything about it

Ok, I have the structure that I wanted. But because of this, a second problem arises. I installed my wordpress in a /blog directory of my domain root. That means that all my Pages will reside under my /blog directory. To make explanation simple, my About Page is now located at geminigeek.com/blog/about/!! And that doesn’t make sense to me. Ah, call me a perfectionist, because even a small site structure thing is my concern I wanted my about pages in geminigeek.com/about/. The solution? Move the wordpress installation to domain root. However, by doing that, going to geminigeek.com/blog will throw a 404 File not found error. So, I leave it as it is.

Then, WordPress 2.1 is released, and there’s a feature where you can set pages as your home and make your blog reside in some other pages. One good feature for those who wants to use WordPress as more than just a blogging platform. With this feature, I can put all my blog post in a /blog page and have my home used some other pages. And so, a new site structure like the this current one is born. Now my site structure makes more sense to me.

Tips for Part #1

1. Always think about the Search Engine, if your site traffic relies a lot on Search Engine traffic. Do proper 301 redirection if you’re doing site structure change so that your site’s URL is updated on the search engines index, and your site won’t throw 404 error to the visitor.
2. WordPress 2.1 and above supports Static Front Page. For those who installs their wordpress in the domain root, but wants to have their blog in its own “virtual” /blog directory, use this feature. I will write on a guide to create an interactive homepage for your site.

For the next section, I will write about the layout and designing process for GeminiGeek’s Online Journal. Stay tune.

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