Unit 6 Web Servers

This week the combination of learning something about the elements of HTML or at least enough to post a rudimentary web page with an internal link to an embedded image and hyper links to external sites while also setting up, pinging and configuring a LAN was a tall order. Not sure if I did it all according to Hoyle or even Fulton but it all seemed to work which surprised the heck out of me.

More than once I thought the ship was lost only to find a solution here and there either among the readings or from a haphazard if sometimes desperate investigation of other web sites. One glitch that almost had me down for the count was saving a file with the txt extension using Notepad. Since I wanted to ultimately save the file as a .html document rather than as a .txt this turned out to be surprisingly difficult. With the benefit of doing Assignment 6 "provide Name Resolution via your HOSTS files" I now know that the Notepad app has some quirks that require a bit of knowledge to resolve. Running Notepad as an administrator and using it to edit hidden system files like the etc/hosts file was a first for me. This issue almost got the better of me as I tried to save my HTML work within Notepad as an html document and then send it sFTP to the U of A public web site server. Eventually I learned from a web site named “www.thesitewizard.com” about a nasty eccentricity of Notepad's and a way to work around it.

According to the Wizard “Notepad has the practice of adding a “.txt” extension to your files even when you don't specify it. So if you give your file a name of “blahblahblah.html”, Notepad will change the name to 'blahblahblah.txt” without informing you. Compounding this problem is Windows Explorer's policy of not telling you the fullname of your files. Hence if you use Explorer to check the file, it will only show “blahblahblah.html”.

The solution to this problem involved going into Tools inside Windows Explorer and unchecking the hide file extensions box. I also learned that if you want to force Notepad to save a file without the txt extension it is necessary to put the full file name inside “quotation marks” in the Save As dialog box.

Not sure if others had this problem but it seemed to be a moment of enlightenment on my journey to the illuminating light of the LAMP.

I also had a world of difficulty getting my image file to load in my web page. Apparently the code I was writing wasn't pointing to the location of the img src file although I was able to load the image when working on it off line on my desktop. After using WinSCP to sFTP the files to my Arizona U-System account I failed to see my image load. A website entitled www.amailsender.com revealed that a common reason for this failure was not including the web site address in front of the file name.

I'm pretty sure this is not the “right” way to do this because I think it violates the best practice of linking to a relative location rather than to a fully qualified url and an absolute location, but it worked.