In July's column we introduced a Web server on a dial-up PPP link, while awaiting installation of a 56-Kbps leased line. In August, we went live on the leased line, but the names www.byte.com and ftp.byte.com weren't hooked up yet. You could get to the server only if you knew its IP address. Now the names map to IP addresses, and we're officially open for business.
How did we register our name? We registered byte.com with the InterNIC (Internet Network Information Center) years ago and used it for UUCP (dial-up) mail routing. Once we got a real IP link to the Internet, there were three ways to create the names www.byte.com and ftp.byte.com and define their IP mappings:
1. Leave naming authority
for by
te.com in the hands of InterNIC and ask InterNIC to add our names to its database. (You do this by mailing a form to hostmaster@internic.net; the forms are available at
ftp://rs.internic.net/templates
.)
2. Delegate naming authority
to our service provider MV Communications (again by mailing a form to hostmaster@internic.net) and ask MV to add the names to its database.
3. Take over naming authority
ourselves.
The problem with 1 is that there's a big administrative backlog at InterNIC, so we opted for 2. We'll likely want additional names, and we won't want to wait two weeks for InterNIC to handle each request -- MV's far more accessible to us. Why not 3? In that case, we'd have to run our own name server. We aren't ready to do that yet.
"The wait is about a week for change requests," said MV's Mark Mallet, "and two weeks for new records." He requested the tra
nsfer of byte.com's name service from InterNIC to MV. A week later it was done. The command
whois byte.com
listed MV's name servers, ping www.byte.com worked, and www.byte.com was open for business.
Magic Hot Links
When Netscape's news reader finds a string like
http://www.somewhere.com
in the text of a posting, it automatically converts that string into an active hypertext link. I've added this to BYTE's Web site with my Epsilon Extension Language translator. It's one regular-expression search-and-replace statement:
string_replace("((httpftpgopher)://\<tab><space><nl>\..more non-URL chars..",\"<a href=#0>#0</a>",\ REGEX);
A similar trick activates E-mail addresses that appear in the text.
Well-Mannered GIFs
I hate downloading bit maps I didn't ask for. BYTE's server has plenty of pictures to offer, but it wo
n't shove images down your throat. The translator now suppresses illustrations, photos, and screen shots behind links that announce the size of each GIF (
see the screen
).
screen_link (94 Kbytes)
In the BYTE collection, a link to an illustration reports the size of the image
(a)
(b)
.
The Road Traveled
