I Am What?? No!! U.R.L. (explained)
By Melissa Rahko; Your Off~Site Secretary
Off~Site Secretary answers this one:
“I didn’t know what to say when someone asked me what my “Earl” was!”
What is U.R.L?
The acronym URL stands for Universal Resource Locator, which is “geek-speak” for ~ the path your computer takes to get to a specific piece of information. It is like an address that also specifies the vehicle you need to get to your destination.
Most Common URL
There are different types of URLs, but the most common one used and recognized by the average computer user is the web address – usually beginning with “http” or “https”. When we see something like ~ http://www.offsitesecretary.com/ ~ we understand that it is a web address which is also a URL. This one is “my” URL, because I purchased the domain name offsitesecretary.com. To “visit” my “home”, you need a special “vehicle” to drive down the right “road”.
On and Off the Super Highway
The “vehicle” you need for a web address URL is a web browser ~ Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc. Your computer can then hop onto the “super highway” ~ the www part (world wide web) and take the correct exit off the “super highway” down the much less traveled path to my “home”. Welcome to Off~Site Secretary. When the last element listed in the URL is the .com, .org, .net, etc. then the “resource” that the URL ends up at is the website’s homepage.
Not Only to the Front Door
The cool thing about URLs is that they can bring you to the “side door” of my website as easily as the homepage. If the domain name is followed by a backslash, additional words or letters or numbers and lastly another “dot” designation ~ .html, .htm, etc. ~ a different webpage or file within the domain will open. For example ~ http://www.offsitesecretary.com/about.html ~ will open my “About” page in Off~Site Secretary’s website.
How About the Guest Cottage
The URL can contain even more information to direct the web browser to look deeper into the website. Again, using “my place” as an example ~ this blog is in an additional folder of my website. The “News” folder in http://www.offsitesecretary.com/News/2011/02/what-is-url/ is where my entire blog is stored with this article’s URL pointing specifically to the “what-is-url” file. Since the blog is in its own little compartment, I like to think of this blog as the “guest cottage” behind the quaint, little Off~Site Secretary house. Again, the URL can bring you directly to the “front door” of my blog as easily as the “front door” of the main site.
The URLs for my website are easy to interpret and understand. In the next article, we can look for URLs that don’t appear to match the normal pattern. Understanding why some URLs are shortened or altered is important to understand for safe web surfing.
Until then, feel free to wander down the path to my “house” or “cottage”.
the attachments to this post:
URL Path explained
