URLs - web addresses
URL stands for Universal Resource Locator.
Readings
pp. 32-35 or 
pp. 34-37.- The GCWeb publishers' manual deals with publishing at GC.
Anatomy of web addresses
Let's take apart a URL like the one below:
http://www.goshen.edu/communication/326/syllabus.php3
http (hypertext transport protocol) is a kind of service that computers can use on the internet. Other services that you can use on the internet include:
www.goshen.edu is the name of a computer (or 'host', or 'server') connected to the Internet. Every computer also has an ID number, called its IP number (Internet Protocol). Browse here to find your computer's IP number. You can also reach the GC webserver (don't memorize this!) at http://199.8.232.90/.
"www" is one computer with an address in the goshen.edu domain. Other computers include "gconline", "webmail", "mailman" and others.
communication/326/syllabus.php3 is a path to a particular file on the webserver. 'syllabus.php3' is a file in the 'comm326' folder. 'comm326' is a folder inside (or below) the 'communication' folder.
Publishing pages
Web pages, graphics, and other things distributed through a webserver are just files sitting on a "webserver" computer. So the publishing process is all about getting the files onto the right computer and in the right location.
Even a small website might involve hundreds of different files, so it is worth understanding how to talk about files on a computer, and the slightly cryptic notation used to uniquely identify one file or another.
A filesystem is a fancy way of talking about how files are located on a disk drive.
We'll move around the file system and manipulate files using Windows Explorer (PC) or the Finder (Mac).
Your webspace on the GC webserver
Everyone at GC has a personal folder on the campus webserver www.goshen.edu. There's a 'shortcut' or 'alias' set up to yours, making it look like the folder is on your "M:" drive:
And if you put a file 'toys.html' in the folder above, then...
M:\web pages\mypages\toys.html
shows up to the world at
http://www.goshen.edu/~[youruserid]/toys.html
From off-campus, you can use the gcfile link on the oncampus page to upload things to your webspace. There is a link to this service on the oncampus page. Of course, you don't need this service to download things from your webspace. Why?
default page index.html
When a browser asks just for a directory name without an explicit page name (e.g., http://www.goshen.edu/, the webserver will first look for a file in that directory named index.html. Failing that, it will look for index.htm (then index.php, index.shtml, and a raft of others....). If it doesn't find any file with one of these special names, it may show a listing of all the pages in the folder or it may show an unfriendly notice that "You don't have permission..." to view the contents of the folder.
So, name your home page one of these special names in order to have short, memorable URLs. You can tell people "My page is at www.goshen.edu/~paulmr" instead of "My page is at www.goshen.edu/~paulmr/homepage.html".
Privacy
How private is the stuff in your personal folder on www.goshen.edu anyway?
- If you don't tell anyone about it, and no one has constructed a link to it, it's unlikely that someone who doesn't know you would think to type something like ~jillgc. It's perfectly OK to have very preliminary drafts of projects on the webserver. In fact it's very convenient, because you can tell "clients" a URL to view the work in progress at any stage.
- As soon as someone else has linked to your page (something you have no control over) search engines might come visiting.
- Insulted somebody influential? Wanna take it back? Too bad: even if you remove a page from your site, copies might still persist in Google's cache, or on the Wayback Machine. So, don't put up anything that you truly want to keep private, or would be embarrassed if it was ever made public.
Your M: drive contents (where your e-mail is stored) are a good deal more hidden from view. But *not* M:/webpages which is another shortcut to the webserver.
The dreaded file:///... location
When you create a webpage in your webspace, you can open and view the page in your browser:
- As if it were any file on the computer in front of you.
- Or, via the GC webserver with an address that begins with http://www.goshen.edu...
In the first case, you'll see a "location" in your web address bar that begins with "file:///....". Don't ever send such a URL to someone else to view your page. This url literally means a file on the computer at which I'm seated, and of course means different computers to people who are seated at different computers. (To make matters worse, this is hard for *you* to detect, because, just about everywhere you go on campus, it looks to you like you have the same M: drive.)
Instead, figure out the address on the GC webserver (beginning with "http://www.goshen.edu...", and send that address. This address means a file on www.goshen.edu, and this always refers to the same computer, no matter where you're sitting.
Your W: drive
If you need access to shared (department) content on the webserver, you should instead Map the W: drive
Go to "Start | GC Utilities | Map W Drive". That's it!
Consult the GCWeb publishers' manual for more information on publishing, e.g. how to map the W: drive from your personal PC, from Macs, with ftp, fetch, and more.
When you connect to the GC webserver, you'll find that you have at least two folders, mypages and deptpages. (In this document, I use "folder" and "directory" interchangeably.) Click on this diagram which is showing the correspondence between what happens on your W: drive, and URLs on the webserver.
Want more information? Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL to learn more.