Okay, so now I've finally figured out how to get a subdomain working... and I'm now strangely (after the fact) asking myself -- are subdomains a good idea?

How are they for users?  Useful?  Confusing?  Cool looking?  Lame looking?

And of equal importance, how about Google and other search engines.  Do they like subdomains?  Dislike them?  Not care one way or the other?  And will I get spanked when Google discovers that blog.smilezone.com is the same as smilezone.com/blog?

What do you think?

Regards,
Adam

Subdomains seem to be a cool way of adding directories to sites right now.  :)  I'm using several myself on sites, and nobody (or google) has whined at me about it!.

I don't think I've ever had a User question me about my use of subdomains.  I think you should just do what you think is cool and go for that!

And some hosts will even let you point domains at your subdomains, so it adds another level of cool

One thing to consider - if you used relative paths to images and links when you were still smilezone.com/blog, they won't work the same as they will on blog.smilezone.com - I'm guessing that if you have figured out how to get a subdomain working, you probably have already noticed this; just thought I'd throw it out there just in case

Kristine

Yep, Kristine, I did notice that.
I pointed http://adam.smilezone.com/ at http://smilezone.com/adam and whomp!  Graphic pointers no longer worked.  Bummer :|

So I guess I need to start using absolute references for page graphics on pages that I want referenceable via subdomain OR /.  Extra work.  Blah

Thanks for the heads-up, though!

Regards,
Adam
http://blog.smilezone.com/

Yeah, be careful about your file paths and stuff.

I have it set up so that my MT installation is in a subdomain mt.muhajabah.com while my blogs and the rest of my site are in the www.muhajabah.com domain. This sometimes makes it tricky configuring paths and cookies especially with the pop-up comments forms.

Wow, I can imagine that'd get complicated!

I'm curious; if I may ask, why'd you decide to put your mt installation in a subdomain, but your blog in your 'regular' site area?

Regards,
Adam
http://blog.smilezone.com/

You could use the search and replace button in notepad or wordpad

If you have links in your entries you can use the search function that comes with MT. When I moved one of my blogs to a different directory I realized I would have to change all the links and just thinking about going through all of the entries gave me a headache. But the search and replace function really really helped. Just be careful though

Adam - It seemed like a good idea at the time... If I had realized the complications it introduces, I might have thought twice about it. My main motivation was to make it easy for me to get into MT. I used .htaccess to set mt.cgi as the directory index file so I just need to type in http://mt.muhajabah.com and MT comes right up.

I've seen several other people with MT set up this way as well.

I just moved my weblog to a subdomain, simply because some people were "shocked" to find that I wrote about my life online on the first page of my website. I now, just have an opening page and menu options. I feel it takes the burn out for those weblog-phobic friends.

I have a test subdomain where my MT install lives and two other subdomains where I have different blogs, one's a weblog and the other is a photoblog.