Okay everyone, here's my issue... It's not nearly as nefarious as the subject makes it out to be. I'm working on a wordpress site for my girlfriend, hosted on a friends domain. I currently access it through a sub domain so it's site.domain.com Now, I wanted to show my mother-in-law so she can see that there's some progress... But I don't want her just sharing out the link with the entire extended family. All I'm looking for is a way of giving her a link, *any* link, that when clicked upon will forward her to my domain, but keep the original link in the addy bar. The only way I can think of is using an iframe and pulling the site into that... BUT, I haven't got another site to host an iframe on. I've spent the last two hours grinding through 'url hiding', 'url cloaking', 'url shortening', etc etc. Any ideas anyone?
Take a look at http://shoutkey.com/, will create a you a short url with an expiry so after a while the link you provide your mother-in-law wont work after a few hours.
Cheers Chaos... I saw a couple other sites that did similar to this... But they all fall down in the same way... It gives you a link which expires within a time limit, that part of it is perfect for me... But the link takes you to the url, once there, the address bar has the original url in it... She'll bookmark that and spread it like and endless amount of butter on a never ending supply of toast. If I could find a site that did the same, but chucked their links through an iframe or something, so that whilst looking at the linked site I would still see the shoutkey.com/link in the url bar, then I would be one seriously happy chappy. Anyone else got an idea?
You're on the right track with knowing that you need an iframe to accomplish this. But it makes it a bit tricky when you don't have anywheres to host an iframe. I suppose you could just go find some free Web Hosting service online to use. Personally for me, I would suggest just using the same domain you are working with. Here's an example. Say you created the actual site on "domain.com/devolpment/" and you do all the work there, and then once it's created, you just move it to the root directory ("domain.com/"). In the meantime, if you wanted to show her a preview of the site, you could just create a folder here "domain.com/preview" containing the full screen iframe to your hidden URL. When you're done, just remove the /preview directory and she won't know that it's stored into the "development" folder. Unless of course she knows what she's doing and decides to look at the source code or link URLs when hovering over them.
Yeh, the penny dropped whilst I was laying in bed this morning... I had the answer right in front of me... So I've just signed up with some shoddy freebie web hosting, and chucked an iframe on there. It does the job fine, I also pinched a bit of code from somewhere online to keep the site within the iframe regardless of the links they click on the site. It works a treat and means I can just kill the freebie hosting as soon as I know she's had a gander at it. Massive thanks Tim, if I hadn't come to the same conclusion this morning, you'da been my saviour!
Here's the link, incase anyone else is after the same thing: Hide URL in address bar using iframe http://ycouriel.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/hide-url-in-address-bar-using-iframe.html Awesome forum btw, I shall make this my new home!
Girlfriend... mother-in-law.... thanks for sharing your most interesting life. Got an extra mistress on the side for that? Does your wife know?!?
URL Framing is what you are looking for. I know you can do it with NameCheap, Not sure about other registrars, this method also requires you to have another domain you can use for this purpose. https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/313/77/what-is-url-frame-feature
If all you want to do is show it to her, can't you take screen shots and send those images to her? You could also create a temporary sub-domain. Let her look at it, then delete the sub-domain.