For some time now, I’ve been working on my own project in little bits and pieces. It’s a big project, and the bits and pieces have been small and far apart, so it’s been a couple of years and it’s only now beginning to resemble anything at all. I’ve had a simple local news/blog aggregator running on a WordPress install for quite a while, but the original stuff is all a giant, hand-coded custom job. Eventually, it’ll have a complete directory of shops, parks, artists, etc. on the Mendocino Coast and in the Anderson Valley; photo galleries; an events calendar, a multitude of interesting and informative articles about the area; and more.
Part of the “more” will be webpages for some of the local businesses which currently have no website. I’ve been working on developing a template and series of scripts so that any Luddite can put together and maintain a simple little page to tell the world that particular shop exists, where it is, what it sells, and what’s so gosh-darned cool about it. Which brings me to the point of this post: if I assign each of these stores a subdomain, and re-direct the subdomain’s traffic to the script which generates the page, will Google and the other search engines index the store’s page? Or, will the search engines barf at the redirect? So, if I point a link from my unread, but reasonably well-indexed, blog to my working template, Generic Store of Mendocino, will it pop up on the search engines?
Just in case any human is reading this and wants to check out the progress, the realMendocino homepage is here. The Mendocino aggregator is here.
At this point, the directory is nearly complete for Mendocino town itself, with just a smattering of links from the rest of the region. I’ve got a lot of the back end done for the rest of the site, but theres a lot of coding, and a mind-boggling amount of data entry, still to do.