Week 8: Clear

This week we learned about the internet and the world wide web. This internet thing has been around for a large part of my lifetime but a relatively short time in other respects (ie mankind). I personally first experienced the internet in 3rd grade with what I believe was AOL. Today the internet is estimated as more then 1 billion users.

The internet can be defined as a web of servers that are linked together but are physically all over the earth. One might ask who is the owner of the internet? Well no one owns the internet (yet) but there is a sheriff per say and that is ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This corporation helps keep the domain names in check around the internet for a small fee of currently .18 cents per year per domain name which every domain owner must pay.

This week we covered a lot of information however I would first like to talk about a web address which is an important part in understand how the web works. There are 5 important parts to a web address. The first is the protocol used. Common protocols are http which stands for hypertext transfer protocol or https which is secure. Another is ftp which is file transfer protocol. The second part of an address is the domain name. Such as scottrpaterson.com (visit it!). Third is TLD which stands for top level domain. This is .com, .org, or .ca and helps identify what the site is and where it is from. Forth is the path. This is the direct path on the server where the file is located. Last is the file name. A common file is index.php which is the page the server will load first when the directory is requested. When a user types in scottrpaterson.com to their browser a DNS server or domain name server translates that name to an IP address (in this case 64.202.189.170) which is then checked on a table and transferred to the correct server location.

There are two common ways to connect to the internet. One is dial up and the other is broadband. Dial up usually requires a phone line while broadband, the new more preferred choice, usually comes through the cable line or satellite NIC.

There are many ways to make a website which can be put "live" or hosted on a web server for all the internet to see. The most popular way is to use a WYSIWYG editor which stands for what you see is what you get. This works well for most people who do not want to mess around with the code. The other way to make websites is using good old fashioned notepad. Or better yet programmers notepad. This is simply a text editor. I prefer this method because it give me much more control over specific details in page design that you don't get access to using an editor. The other reason is that you need it when you build dynamic elements into pages using server sided languages such as PHP.

This is it for now. There is a lot more that can be learned about the internet and I encourage any noob that happens to stumble upon (haha) this page to read more about THE INTERNET. Until next week. :)