Can someone either give me some basic info - or point me to a source of info
regarding URL's? 
        a)  What does URL mean?
        b)  If I want to post something which can be found by search engines,
           is my URL "http://www.cyberspace.com"   ?        
Thanks

33 responses total.

URL is Universal Resource Locator.  It's a standard format for all
Internet resources, including (but not limited to) WWW, FTP, Usenet
news, telnet, and Gopher.

   If you put up a Web page here, people on the Internet could access it
using the URL "http://grex.cyberspace.org/~mcpoz".

Ok, thanks.  I have made a "prototype" homepage, can you tell me how I can
access it to edit it?  

Thanks again.

Your home page and other web page documents are stored in a directory
called "www" in your home directory.  To edit the prototype home page,
then, you'd type "!pico www/homepage.html", or whatever editor you 
want to use.

I access Grex home pages by starting with "http://www.cyberspace.org",
rather than "grex.cyberspace.org", though both seem to work.  Is one
better (e.g., likely to be around longer) than the other?

Hmm... looks like Grex redirects www to grex.  In that case, i would use
www.  If Grex ever gets the funding and bandwidth to set-up a seperate Web
server, it will use www.cyberspace.org, which would cause problems for
those using grex.cyberspace.org.

Correction to #1: URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator".

Here's a computer logic question:
Since most things for computers that spell pronouncable syllables, albiet
somethings spelled incorrectly, and we usually pronounce them that way -
is it the least bit sensible to call URLs U-R-L's, instead of pronouncing
"earl"?

Seems more like a linguistic question.  I think both are sensible.  When
I'm talking to a novice, I usually pronounce it U-R-L, while if I'm talking
to someone who I think will correctly parse "earl", I'll say it that way.

I try to avoid pronouncing it "erl", since people may think I'm
talking about some guy named "Earl".  >8)  Pronouncing it
"you are ell" is fine with me.  (You are Elle?  As in Elle Macpherson?)

This item has been linked from Info 289 to Intro 84.
Type "join info" at the Ok: prompt for discussion of
how the heck you get Grex to work.

Okay.  Interesting.

Re #9 slipped in.

I thought a Uniform Resource Locator was a service provided for Civil War
reenactors.

Indeed, our official URL is http://www.cyberspace.org/ .

This is so that we could run the web browser on another computer if we had
one and thought it would be a useful thing to do. In the fututre it may be,
therefore I discourage the use of grex.cyberspace.org in URLs, although they
work fine, and probably will do so for a long time.

Many sites use www.domain ftp.domain or gopher.domain as CNAMES for the 
real host that does the work. A CNAME is a special record in the DNS 
database that defines a hostname to be an alias for another host,
This is just a convention, but it is very common.

Re the pronunciation issue: I say "you are ell" and avoid "erl",
which I dislike. I would much rather pronounce GUI as "gee you
eye" rather than "gooey", but the latter is so universally
practiced that I've given in on that one.

This response has been erased.

This is getting very silly - not that that's necessarily a bad thing . . .
;-)

To get even sillier, I'd add that using cyberspace.com (as the original item
stated in the question) won't get you grex at all.  It has to be
cyberspace.org.  Odd that no one has commented on this earlier in the
responses.

Hmm, you're right, and you would think we would have noticed
that one right off...  Sorry!

I bet the folks at cyberspace.com would be thrilled if you paid
them a visit, though.  >8)

Not really, I did that accidentally once - 'twas annoying.

While I'll admit the sloth of not reading TFM before asking this, it seems
that grex has been set up to use the filename "homepage.html" instead of
"index.html" for the home page of ~anyuser.  Will index.html also work?

I know this belongs in another item, and undoubtedly this is the right
conference - I'm just too lazy to search for the right item: Is there a way
to force pine to destroy duplicate messages so that mailing lists that get
f***ed up can't bombard me with their stupidity?

That was rude, bjorn - when in doubt put it in the intro item.
OTOH, this item really belongs in the internet conf...

Going back to albaugh's original question:  We switched over from
homepage.html to index.html well over a year ago.  mkhomepage now
creates "index.html" files.  I'm actually startled that anyone
remembers that it used to create "homepage.html" files instead!

(In fact, ~userid should NOT be able to access homepage.html at
this point.)

Re #22: being lazy is rude?  Usually, that's what I would have done anyway
- put it in the intro item, that is - I actually did conduct a b "pine" but
it was taking a long time.  Anywho, time to get back on the topic . . .

Actually, homepage.html will work now, although for a long time it would not.
Here's the history (as I remember it, which is a but vague).

Initially, we came up on the CERN httpd, with the "directoryindex" set to
homepage.html. This means that if homepage.html is present, it is used as the
"index" and returned when the URL refers to the directory itself.

Later, that httpd was reconfigured to use index.html. This latter file name
is much more standard nowadays, but changing to the new standard was a pain.
I wish we could have had a smoother transition.

Then, when we went to the Sun-4, I installed a new (much nicer) web server.
Apache (initially 1.0.3, but now we are up on 1.1). Apache, unlike the other
servers, allows you to configure *multiple* directoryindex file names.

You can find the apache settings in /usr/localetc/apache/conf
There are three files there. httpd.conf, access.conf, and srm.conf
These are described in the apache docs, which are easy to locate on
http://www.apache.org/

The current setting for "directoryindex" is in srm.conf, and it reads as
follows: index.html home.html welcome.html homepage.html index.htm
I recommend that people use index.html, but homepage.html will now work again.
The most recent addition is index.htm, which is there for the convenience 
of people who must create their web sites on a windows 3.1 system. They
don't need to rename their file to make it work.

If somebody has more than one of those files, am I right in guessing that it
would look for them in the order they are listed in?

That is correct.

Someone above said that www.cyberspace.org is prefered but grex.cyberspace.org
works too and will keep working for a long time.  Well, another pointer to
the same IP address is easier to type and is what I use to get to grex's web
page:

 cyberspace.org

I gather that it's possible that when grex gets a separate machine with a
separate IP address to handle the web stuff, http traffice aimed at
cyberspace.org could still be redirected to the future distinct
www.cyberspace.org, right?  When guessing url's, I'm never sure if I should
include the www. or not.

intro 84 has been linked to Internet 116.

I generally just include the www, unless it fails, in which case
I remove it and try again.  I know M-Net's Web server wouldn't
answer to www.arbornet.org a while ago, but arbornet.org worked
just fine.

I think we could set up something on Grex to redirect from cyberspace.org to
www.cyberspace.org for web stuff, but it may be more trouble than it's worth,
especially if we're really trying to get web stuff onto a separate machine.
(as far as I know, there's no MX record equivilant for http).

There isn't. that's why I recommend continuing to use www.cyberspace.org.
The chances of our putting our web stuff on another server is quite remote,
so it isn't going to make any difference. However, we cannot redirect
cyberspace.org for web stuff. That's why we have the www.cyberspace.org CNAME
in the first place. For URLs you put into files on Grex, don't specify the
host name at all. For URLs you put into web pages on other sites, please use
www.cyberspace.org unless you don't mind it breaking some day (not soon).
For URLs you type in by hand, type in whatever's easier.

I'll come again

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss