| What
is a Home Page?
the "home page" of a web site
is the page that is displayed if you simply type in the
domain name of the site in the address bar of your browser
and press enter. For instance, when you type in www.cnn.com
and press enter in the address bar, you go to CNN's home
page. "Home page" can also refer to a page that
serves as the table of contents and logical starting point
for any collection of web pages, such as the personal web
pages of an individual, even if it is not actually the top-level
home page for the domain name. Also sometimes referred to
as a "homepage."
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What
is Domain Name?
The term "domain name" usually
refers to a particular organization's registered name on
the Internet, such as example.com, boutell.com or udel.edu.
There may be many distinct computers within a single domain,
or there may be only one. The term "fully qualified
domain name" refers to a complete web site or other
computer's name on the Internet, such as www.boutell.com
or ip2039.cleveland.myisp.com. The holder of a domain name
may delegate almost any number of names within that domain,
such as www1.example.com, www2.example.com, whimsical.example.
com, and so on.
Registered domain names are themselves
part of a "top-level domain." See the top-level
domains entry for more information about top-level domains
such as .com, .edu, .mx, .fr and so on.
For more information about registering domain names, see
the setting up web sites entry.
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How
do I set-up a Domain Name?
First, you must register a domain name
for your site, and find a company to host it for you. In
other words, you need to stake out "mycompanyname.com"
or something similar as your own, and make arrangements
for that name to point to a web server provided by one of
many hosting companies. Domain name registration prices
vary, but should be $35 per year or less (the best deals
are much lower, but read the fine print; make sure you will
legally own your domain name). Hosting prices vary from
$10/month on up depending on the nature of your site and
the amount of traffic you expect; extremely popular sites
can expect to pay for a more expensive plan, or to pay extra
bandwidth charges. Many web hosting companies can handle
domain name registration for you in order to speed things
along. They often offer the best deals on registration because
they are counting on you to sign up as a hosting customer
as well. Web Hosting Ratings offers reviews of the many
different plans and companies available.
Second, you will need to create your web
site's content. In most cases you will already own one or
more programs that can be used to make web pages. For instance,
both the 100% free OpenOffice suite and Microsoft Office
offer a "Save As HTML" option in their word processor
software. Also, both the Mozilla browser and the Netscape
browser offer a built-in web page "composer;"
just pull down the file menu, pick "New," and
then pick "Composer Page." Creating a page with
these tools is much like working with any word processor,
with the addition of the ability to make links to other
pages and sites.
You will also need to create graphics
for your site, of course. Your graphics must be in GIF,
JPEG or PNG format to be used effectively on the web; please
do not put BMP files on the web as they are very, very slow
to download and do not work with every browser. All Linux
users, and Windows users who are willing to take the time
to master a somewhat confusing interface, will want to use
GIMP, which is free and very powerful. Windows users should
consider the very affordable and user-friendly Ultimate
Paint; many features are available without restriction even
without the $39.95 registration. Macintosh users and high-end
graphics mavens swear by Photoshop.
Third, you will need to upload the pages
and images you have created to your new web space. Your
hosting company will provide instructions for this. Typically
your hosting provider's instructions call for moving files
via FTP; you can use the "Publish" option on the
File menu of Netscape/Mozilla composer, or any of the many
FTP programs available.
Now your site is up!
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What
is a Proxy Server?
Proxy servers are specialized web servers
that allow web browsers to receive web pages from web servers
without communicating with them directly. Proxy servers
are often used to provide more secure web access in organizations;
the proxy server is allowed to connect to the Internet,
but the individual web browsers are only allowed to "talk"
to the proxy server. When there are many users sharing a
single proxy server, the proxy server can also speed up
web browsing by caching popular pages.
The HTTP protocol used by web browsers
and web servers contains provisions for proxy servers. In
addition, most major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) now
run "transparent" proxy servers without your browser
being directly aware of it. This is done by intercepting
Internet packets that are recognized to be part of the HTTP
protocol and silently redirecting them to the proxy server
rather than sending them directly to the intended web server.
When an ISP such as America Online has many customers, this
can result in a significant speed increase, because pages
can be cached "closer" to the users. It also provides
an opportunity to work around slow modem speeds; the proxy
server can convert large image files to a more compact format,
at a considerable cost in quality, and send those lower-quality
images on much more quickly to web browsers that request
the original images.
Since no one is in charge of the Web as
a whole, there is a business opportunity for anyone to create
an index of its contents and an interface for searching
that index. Such interfaces are known as search engines.
Typically the user will type in a few words that relate
to what he or she is looking for and click a search button,
at which point the search engine will present a links to
web pages which are, hopefully, relevant to that search.
While some early indexes of the web were
created by hand, modern search engines rely on automated
exploring, or "spidering," of the web by specialized
web browsing programs.
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What is
a URL?
Look up at the top of this web page. Above
the page you will see the "location bar" of your
web browser, which should contain something very like this:
http://www.webnetph.com
This is the Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
of the web page you are looking at right now. A URL can
be thought of as the "address" of a web page.
A URL is made up of several parts. The
first part is the protocol, which tells the web browser
what sort of server it will be talking to in order to fetch
the URL. In this example, the protocol is http.
The remaining parts vary depending on the
protocol, but the vast majority of URLs you will encounter
use the http protocol; exceptions include file URLs, which
link to local files on your own hard drive, ftp URLs, which
work just like http URLs but link to things on FTP servers
rather than web servers, and mailto URLs, which can be used
to invite a user to write an email message to a particular
email address.
The second part of the example URL above
is the fully qualified domain name of the web site to connect
to. In this case, the fully qualified domain name is www.boutell.com.
This name identifies the web site containing the page. The
term "fully qualified domain name" refers to a
complete web site or other computer's name on the Internet.
The term "domain name" usually refers only to
the last part of the name, in this case boutell.com, which
has been registered for that particular company's exclusive
use.
The third part of the example URL is the
path at which this particular web page is located on the
web server. In this case, the path is /newfaq/basic/url.html.
Similar to a filename, a path usually indicates where the
web page is located within the web space of the web site.
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What is
HTML?
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is
a simple markup language used to make web pages. Although
all modern word processors and many specialized tools can
be used to make web pages without learning HTML at all,
learning HTML itself is a useful way to learn more about
the web and provides more control over the results. Luckily,
HTML is very simple and quite easy to learn.
Here is a simple example of an HTML document.
To try this out for yourself, simply create a new file called
mypage.html with any text editor, such as Windows notepad.
Paste in the HTML below, make any changes that please you,
and save the document. Then pick "open" from the
File menu of your web browser, locate the file you have
just made, and open it. If you make further changes, you
will need to "save" again and then click "reload"
or "refresh" in your browser to see the results.
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What
is a Firewall?
A firewall sits between your computer and
the rest of the Internet, filtering out unwanted traffic
and foiling attempts to interfere with or take over your
computer. Firewalls can be separate devices, which is very
common today, or simply pieces of software for your own
computer, which is also fairly common. Separate firewall
devices are often preferable because their very simplicity
makes them less likely to have unknown security problems;
however, it is still important to keep up with "firmware
updates" released by the manufacturer, otherwise your
firewall may be vulnerable to attack. "Cable/DSL routers"
and similar devices sold by companies like Linksys provide
simple firewall capabilities which are adequate for most
home users.
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What
is Web Server?
Web servers are the computers that actually
run web sites. The term "web server" also refers
to the piece of software that runs on those computers, accepting
HTTP connections from web browsers and delivering web pages
and other files to them, as well as processing form submissions.
The most common web server software is Apache, followed
by Microsoft Internet Information server; many, many other
web server programs also exist. For more information about
web servers and how to arrange hosting for your own web
pages, see the creating web sites section. arkup Language,
is a simple markup language used to make web pages. Although
all modern word processors and many specialized tools can
be used to make web pages without learning HTML at all,
learning HTML itself is a useful way to learn more about
the web and provides more control over the results. Luckily,
HTML is very simple and quite easy to learn.
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What
is a Hyperlink?
Every time you click on a link on a web
page, such as the link you may have clicked on to reach
this page, you are following a hyperlink. See also the URL
entry.
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What is
HTTP?
When in order to fetch a web page for you,
your web browser must "talk" to a web server somewhere
else. When web browsers talk to web servers, they speak
a language known as HTTP, which stands for HyperText Transfer
Protocol. This language is actually very simple and understandable
and is not difficult for the human eye to follow.
A modern web browser would say a bit more
using the HTTP 1.1 protocol, and a modern web server would
respond with a bit more information, but the differences
are not dramatic and the above transaction is still perfectly
valid; if a browser made a request exactly like the one
above today, it would still be accepted by any web server,
and the response above would still be accepted by any browser.
This simplicity is typical of most of the protocols that
grew up around the Internet.
Human Beings Can Speak HTTP
In fact, you can try being a web browser
yourself, if you are a patient typist. If you are using
Windows, click the Start menu, select "Run," and
type "telnet www.mywebsitename.com 80" in the
dialog that appears. Then click OK. Users of other operating
systems can do the same thing; just start your own telnet
program and connect to your web site as the host and 80
as the port number. When the connection is made, type: GET
/ HTTP/1.0
Host: www.mywebsitename.com
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