October 20

Well, I went to Wikipedia to read up about web servers. I generally got the gist of how it works, but I feel like because the Internet is put together by techies who know how these things work a lot of information can be way too complicated for a novice like myself. So I went to youtube where at least if it was complicated, I'd have some visual that might help me understand it. I found this video that's from a Harvard extension school.

I had a lot of trouble finding something that told me what web server applications actually were instead of the different kinds. I ended up reading about APIs, though I'm not sure if that's what I needed to know. What I can gather is that a web server application formulates specific information based on user input, rather than just taking the user to a pre-formulated page (I hope that makes sense).

FTP was equally if not more complicated. It's a protocol, like HTTP. It's used for transferring data between computers. Apparently, you can also use it to hack usernames and passwords. I found a lot about the different FTP clients. I assume that anytime I download something off the Internet I'm using FTP.

DNS translates hostnames into IP addresses. The address I read from right to left in order to find the website. So when I type in the address of my blog (ktlawton.blogbspot.com) it looks for "com" first, which subdivides into "blogspot" which subdivides into "ktlawton1642." So it works from the general (com) to the specific (ktlawton1642). It's difficult to understand that in most cases "www" is the most specific just because it appears before almost everything and in a lot of cases typing in example.com will bring you to the same place as www.example.com.

CHMOD has to do with permissions. I guess this is what is used when you have to register for a site before you can use it. For instance when looking for custom content for the Sims you encounter a lot of "paysites" where you have to donate money to the site before you can access certain files. This was actually pretty easy to understand thanks to this website http://catcode.com/teachmod/index.html.

I'm still very much a novice and a lot of this is still Greek to me, but I think I'm started to get a better grasp on it.