Re: FHUG Searching
Posted: 19 Aug 2022 15:28
I'm not sure that there is a great mystery - as I expect you know. But for those who don't.
example.com is a domain
www.example.com used to mean "The World Wide Web physical server (think computer with a big disk) connected to example.com domain". Pedantically I suspect on some setups it still does. www.example.com is a "host name" defining where stuff is located.
ftp.example.com would mean the "File Transfer Protocol server sitting on the example.com domain" - a server specifically for file downloading (still found in some places for big downloads of things like operating system images), A different host.
Looking at my own domain, I have a shared server and www.mydomain.org maps onto a particular directory of my account on my shared area. My email maps onto a different subdirectory. Everything is virtualised now-a-days and actual individual physical machines are rare.
On a previous iteration of my setup I had subdomains e.g. tutor.mydomain.org which mapped onto yet another subdirectory - the host name being www.tutor.mydomain.org. On my current setup it actually maps onto a subdirectory of my "www" directory, so tutor.mydomain.org would be equivalent to www.mydomain.org/tutor - but in url terms my hosting company has it so they are equivalent! (So I saw little point in using sub-domains except as a short-hand)
I think most domains have redirect rules (see earlier regular expressions) to ensure that:
http://www.mydomain.org
https://www.mydomain.org
http://mydomain.org
https://mydomain.org
all map onto a single place on a server (and appear in the location bar in your browser to be one of the two https examples above). (I also "park" a 2nd domain so that mydomain.org and mydomain.org.uk are functionally the same - so that is 8 variations!)
https is the securer form of http (the hypertext transfer protocol) and is now widely adopted as the certification of the security has become much easier and cheaper.
Most servers will if you enter mydomain.org
assume: the https
redirect to a www or non-www form according to the rewrite rule
assume: a /
assume: a default page index.htm, index.html, index.php etc (by configuration)
The front page of the forum for instance is not fhug.org.uk/forum, but https:∕∕www.fhug.org.uk∕forum∕index.php - but the system tolerates the shorthand!
Where pages are created "on the fly" (as with KB and Forum pages) the server software may explicitly add some of the above, or may leave it to the server defaults. It will also in most cases account for users who do or don't use prefixes etc. when inputting links.
If your set up has an historic mix of hand crafted static pages and "served pages" (with multiple authors) it is quite possible that you will have a mix such as you have found.
The trick is to make the server tolerant of the variety.
example.com is a domain
www.example.com used to mean "The World Wide Web physical server (think computer with a big disk) connected to example.com domain". Pedantically I suspect on some setups it still does. www.example.com is a "host name" defining where stuff is located.
ftp.example.com would mean the "File Transfer Protocol server sitting on the example.com domain" - a server specifically for file downloading (still found in some places for big downloads of things like operating system images), A different host.
Looking at my own domain, I have a shared server and www.mydomain.org maps onto a particular directory of my account on my shared area. My email maps onto a different subdirectory. Everything is virtualised now-a-days and actual individual physical machines are rare.
On a previous iteration of my setup I had subdomains e.g. tutor.mydomain.org which mapped onto yet another subdirectory - the host name being www.tutor.mydomain.org. On my current setup it actually maps onto a subdirectory of my "www" directory, so tutor.mydomain.org would be equivalent to www.mydomain.org/tutor - but in url terms my hosting company has it so they are equivalent! (So I saw little point in using sub-domains except as a short-hand)
I think most domains have redirect rules (see earlier regular expressions) to ensure that:
http://www.mydomain.org
https://www.mydomain.org
http://mydomain.org
https://mydomain.org
all map onto a single place on a server (and appear in the location bar in your browser to be one of the two https examples above). (I also "park" a 2nd domain so that mydomain.org and mydomain.org.uk are functionally the same - so that is 8 variations!)
https is the securer form of http (the hypertext transfer protocol) and is now widely adopted as the certification of the security has become much easier and cheaper.
Most servers will if you enter mydomain.org
assume: the https
redirect to a www or non-www form according to the rewrite rule
assume: a /
assume: a default page index.htm, index.html, index.php etc (by configuration)
The front page of the forum for instance is not fhug.org.uk/forum, but https:∕∕www.fhug.org.uk∕forum∕index.php - but the system tolerates the shorthand!
Where pages are created "on the fly" (as with KB and Forum pages) the server software may explicitly add some of the above, or may leave it to the server defaults. It will also in most cases account for users who do or don't use prefixes etc. when inputting links.
If your set up has an historic mix of hand crafted static pages and "served pages" (with multiple authors) it is quite possible that you will have a mix such as you have found.
The trick is to make the server tolerant of the variety.