Jean Eng Blog

Designing websites is not always as simple as people think it is. Especially when it comes to building them for SEO (search engine optimization).

Recently I’ve been moving a subdomain onto its own website and it’s been such a headache. Not only was I moving the entire section out, I was revising the content so it was fresh and up to date. For the past few weeks, I’ve had this confusing mind map in my head of how I would restructure the pages what to do with the old urls from the subdomains that are already indexed in the search engines.

If you do a search for advice on the proper ways to redirect url without losing your page ranking, you’ll find a number of theories on which approach is best. I honestly don’t know what’s the better solution. Some “experts” say 301 redirects are the better approach if you want to play nice with the search engines while others say 302 redirects which are the temporary redirects being the better choice.

Then one could theoretically place redirect coding within a page to send visitors to the new pages. But again these so called “experts” say that meta refresh codes are often seen as spam. Would a php redirect be a better solution?

After some time researching, I just had enough and said, ok 301 redirect it is. In cPanel, there’s a redirect tool in the domain section that basically helps you to redirect either 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) to the new pages by automatically writing to the .htaccess file. I’ve altered my .htaccess file before but people online always say to be careful with what you put in there. I wasn’t sure which of the coding I found online was the most appropriate for my hosting server so I just decided to use the tool in cPanel to do it for me.

Here’s where things got sticky for me.

I manage to redirect all my subdomain urls to their new respective pages on the new domain. I loaded up the old urls and everything flew over to the new urls without a hitch.

What was interesting was that redirecting /index.html to a new page didn’t automatically assume / is going to the new page. I didn’t test to see if just doing a redirect for / would be assumed for both domain.com/ and domain.com/index.html . No big deal, I just put in a redirect line for / along with /index.html and the problem was solved.

Then it got me thinking about the way websites are structured. In case you don’t know, subdomains are essentially subfolders within the main directory that you have specified to use a subdomain url instead of a subfolder url.

Subdomain URL: yoursubdomain.yourdomain.com
Subfolder URL: yourdomain.com/subfolder/

The content of that directory are the same things. subdomain files = subfolder files for the same name. So in reality, yoursubdomain#1.yourdomain.com/file#1.html is the same as calling it by the URL yourdomain.com/yoursubfolder#1/file#1.html The same page, two different addresses to bring it up by.

When I started thinking about it this way, I discovered that my same exact subfolder URLs were not being redirected. So I decided to put redirects for those urls to the new pages, thinking the same principle applies.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to work at all. Subdomains redirect fine but the subfolders are not and all my pages are called. At this point, I dunno if I should just delete these files already or whether that would hurt my page ranking and indexing for those pages….since they are of course tied to the subdomain URLs.

Then I noticed that cPanel created new .htaccess files for each of the subdomain folders and the redirects for them are housed there…while the subfolder redirects were housed at the main directory’s .htaccess file. I’m not sure if something is conflicting or if the main directory’s commands are being overridden by the subdomain’s .htaccess commands.

It’s really peculiar and continues to be a mystery. For now, I think I’ve wasted enough time trying to figure out why and how to fix it. I’ll just wait a few months til things settle down with the indexing and page ranking and aging of my new site before I pull the plug on those pages completely but keeping the 301 redirect prompts. Not sure what is the correct solution but I’m done. I’ve already spent all of last night making another attempt at rescuing a wordpress blog upgrade gone wrong from a couple of months ago. Luckily, it was a success this time!

If anyone knows what I’m doing wrong with the 301 redirects, please let me know! I don’t know a lot of stuff with designing but I know more than my peers so asking them for advice is like an exercise in the blind leading the blind. To all the super techies out there that are in the know, help me!!!!!!

I’d been using this miracle conditioner for many years and a couple of years ago, the manufacturer discontinued it. I bought up what I could from various places and I was finally down to my last bottle of this stuff.

Ironically, in the past 3 weeks, I started to notice that my hair was falling out all over the place, more so than normal. I read that we lose about 80-100 strands of hair per day and we “shed” more during the autumn months but it was getting ridiculous how much hair was coming off my head during my showers! I found more hair on my pillows upon waking than I ever did before. I’ve had to vacuum much more frequently because I was shedding all over the place!

Just a brief history of my hair: I have really thick and long hair that reaches the middle of my back. Each strand is really thick and I also have A LOT of it. I have the lovely bone straight asian hair that’s cut in layers to keep the weight down. I do dye my hair perhaps every other month, sometimes every two months depending on how lazy I am. I do it because well…I’ve been dying my hair for so many years, I can’t even remember the first time I did it. Probably when I was in my early 20s and I wanted to cover up some premature gray (although I’m not sure why people say gray when it’s white to me). Then I liked to experiment with different colors, going lighter than my naturally black hair. And occasionally adding in highlights. I tend to allow my hair to natural dry and hardly use a hairdryer unless I’m going out somewhere and need to really dry my hair. I love curls in my hair but I don’t want to really spend all that time curling my hair with a curling iron but it looks great when I do it! My niece got me fascinated with a straight iron to give it a sleeker look since my hair is pretty tamed already. I rarely use that but I like how smooth it looks with it. It’s rare that I have any split ends, probably because I don’t use a lot of heat on my hair to dry it out plus I was using that amazing conditioner that seem to make my hair drink up and say aahhh, that was quenching!

So I was starting to think that my “miracle” conditioner may be suspect to the cause of my hair loss. I mean, it was just ridiculous how much hair would come off in the shower when I would do a comb through at the rinse of my conditioner…it was gross! I probably lose like 30-50 strands of hair in the shower, yuck!!

I went on searching for a new conditioner and being that I’m looking to stay away from “bad” ingredients, it was a really daunting task. There are so much crap on the market these days with really awful chemicals that have names I can’t even pronounce nor know what the hell they are. And apparently, the word “organics” really doesn’t mean it’s organic these days.

I ended up picking up a bottle of this “Yes to Carrots” conditioner and a “Yes to Tomatoes” conditioner. The carrots is for normal hair I think and the tomatoes one is more for volume and body. After just one application of the new conditioner, I was shocked that my hair stopped falling out as much. Now three days into the switch, alternating between the regular and volume kind, it is amazing that it basically halted my hair shedding. I mean, when I do a comb through in the shower, I still have hair coming out but it’s more like 10-20 strands! That is a huge difference! And upon waking, I only notice maybe like 4-6 strands on my pillow and I’m not shedding left and right! Thank god I have a lot of hair cuz I would seriously be freaking out if I had thin hair to begin with.

Upon a closer look at this brand’s ingredients, there’s still some funky stuff in them. Like two ingredients in the carrots one and one in the tomatoes that’s suspect. But I guess you just have to pick and choose your battles sometimes. It’s like, which ingredient is the lesser of two evils?

Ongoing research on this topic of finding the right conditioner landed me at forums where women discussed this concept of no shampoo and using a conditioner only method for cleansing one’s hair. Ironically, sometime last week, I was watching late night television and happened to catch part of an infomercial on this product called “Wen” that even Jenni Garth say it’s the miracle for her hair she’d been using…she’s got gorgeous hair! When I did research on it, I just couldn’t justify plunking down $30 for a 30 day supply which would probably only be like a 15 day supply on my thick long hair. I basically decided to either look for an alternative to this Wen product or let it sit on the back burner for a later revisit.

Then when I was looking at the no shampoo method, someone in some forum mentioned that it’s basically like the Wen concept of not using a shampoo and using their conditioner serum to massage and clean your scalp and hair. That was a light bulb moment!

So after reading pages of forum posts about this method, I’ve decided that I would give it a try and see how it will go. I’ll use the two conditioners I bought above to test out this new theory and if all goes well, I can permanently stop looking for a “good” shampoo! That will cut my research time in half and only focus on having to buy just conditioner. I’ll still be on the lookout for a truly “good” conditioner to use that’s healthy for us. The supposedly good ones I’ve tried just wasn’t good for my hair period. So far, I am liking the Yes to Carrots and Yest to Tomatoes conditioner a lot. They are really light weight which is excellent for my thick hair and gives my hair good enough conditioning too.

My first application of the Conditioner Only hair washing turned out pretty good. I did it really late last night, around 3am so I guess you can say it was this morning. I wet my hair under the shower and put conditioner on my scalp and really massage it in as if I was using a shampoo. Then I worked it through the rest of my hair as usual with conditioner and clipped it up in the shower to allow the conditioner to do it’s thing to my hair while I washed the rest of me. That’s always been my routine! Then I rinse out all the conditioner at the end. I think I may have over rinsed it cuz that’s what was suggested in the forums, to really get the conditioner out. I think I’ll rinse how I normally rinse and see what happens.

So far, my hair today feels smooth, tangle free, not weighted down so my hair really swings and fluffs, it seems shinier and darker too. Maybe the extra glossiness is making the color appear deeper. I’ve noticed that with this new conditioner. I guess there’s a reason why the other brand was discontinued, it really “conditioned” my hair well despite the fact that now I am convinced it was the culprit for my hair loss! What if my “gray” starts growing in black again? Not that I have a lot of gray but it’s just noticeable with dark color hair!

I’ll update the next time, perhaps with some pics. I should take pics as the experiment progresses..