Your computer, the internet, and the web A brief overview
Your computer Windows computers place the operating system on the C: drive
Your computer Hard disks are organized into files and folders using an inverted tree structure The top of this tree is the root written as C:\ To get to the Musarch folder, the path is C:\musarch
An organizing tip Place a copy of your images in a subfolder of the Musarch installation folder. Use a relative path in the Image File Name field. For example, don t type C:\musarch\images\abbey.jpg although this is the correct path, you can find the same image by typing.\images\abbey.jpg the decimal point at the beginning means to start at the current location. If you ever need to move your installation to another drive or to another folder, you can just copy the data without breaking the image paths stored in the database.
Getting online Typical setup is a modem/router combination and one or more computers A modem converts signals to and from the outside line A router accepts transmissions and routes them to the correct destination (plus it performs other tasks)
LAN (local area network) Typical home-based LAN Internet Router Computer #1 Computer #2 Router s IP is 192.168.1.1 (typical default value) Each computer s IP is 192.168.1.x (where x is any unique number from 2 to 255) typically assigned by the router
IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX is the current format (IPv4) XXX is a number from 0 to 255 (256 numbers) 256 x 256 x 256 x 256 = 4.3 billion numbers Some ranges are reserved/private The IP address is unique within the network in the case of a local area network (LAN), each connected device has a unique IP
Getting unique IP addresses from the LAN s router (DHCP)
Your PC s IP address
My own network
LAN suggestion LAN for a small organization without an internet connection Internet Router Computer #1 Computer #2 NAS (network addressable storage) drive with Musarch software installed
Typical router ports Lan (local area network) ports where you plug in computers and other devices Wan (wide area network) port where you plug in your internet connection
The internet (from wikipedia) The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is an international network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the World Wide Web (WWW), the infrastructure to support email, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony.
Internet enabled functions File transfer (FTP client, streaming media) Email (email client) VOIP (telephony) World Wide Web (www, web browsers, webenabled apps) Remote login and device sharing (LogMeIn, join.me, GoToMeeting, VPNs)
Using the IP address to connect Just as we saw in a LAN, the IP address identifies a particular device on the network in this case, the Internet The IP address for any device attached to the Internet is unique Your home s router is connected to the Internet, while your home computers are connected to the router
Your router has two IP addresses The local area network IP address (typically 192.168.1.1) The wide area network IP address (assigned by your internet provider) The WAN IP address is not a private address The WAN IP address is often dynamic it can change each time you go online Static IP addresses are available (extra $)
Domain names Domain names are used to find the actual IP address of a site, just like you would locate a phone number by looking up a name
Domain Name registrars You can claim an unused domain name and pay an annual fee to have it pointed at your web site Some web hosting plans include one domain name registration in their monthly fee WhoIS lets you look for unused domain names Your registrar notifies the Domain Name Servers around the world about your domain name
FTP client An easy way to copy files to another computer The interface is similar to Windows Explorer, showing you files and folders Access is controlled by user name and password
The web (from wikipedia) The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW, commonly known as the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents that are accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks.
Browser Software that uses the internet to ask for web pages (and other files) Browsers receive the components of a web page and then render the page for viewing Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE), Safari, Opera
Browser web page request Green requests IP address for domain name Yellow returns IP address Red requests web page Purple returns web page components Domain Name Server (DNS) Internet Web server Browser
Sequence of events Your browser sends a request to a Domain Name Server for the IP address of the server that hosts the requested web page this passes through your router, which remembers which LAN IP address made the request Your browser now contacts the web server and requests the specified page and all of its associated files
Hypertext Text that has additional information attached to it linking it to other files Shows up as a link in your browser Creates a powerful interface that provides access to related information
HTML Hypertext Markup Language Used to create web pages A mixture of ordinary text and tags The tags mark-up the text in a way that allows browsers to add features, functionality, and content
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) A method of separating the content of a web page from the presentation of that content Ideally, the content is contained in the HTML file and all of the style specifications are contained in the CSS file This separation enables you to alter the look and feel of a web page simply by editing the CSS file If an entire site shares the same CSS file, you can change the look and feel of every page by editing a single CSS file
Web hosting options Your own computer with your own internet connection Your computer placed on someone else s network A rented computer from a hosting company A web hosting plan from a hosting company
Typical web hosting You pay someone $X per month to host your web site They give you space on one of their computers and point your domain name at that space Your space is actually a folder on a single computer; other web sites share the same computer and inhabit different folders All of the web sites on a single computer share a single IP address when a request comes in, the web server software figures out which site is requested and serves files from the correct folder
Web Server software Handles web requests Provides protection for your files Apache, IIS are the two most common web servers