Category: Explainers

  • The Internet Analogy List

    To help you think about the concepts we employ… The World Wide Web is a World Wide Town Your computer is like an assistance dog, trained to run and fetch things for you to look at. Your website is your collection of belongings and furniture and appliances. Your webhost is your landlord. Your server, where…

  • Cookies

    Cookies? Nope, no-one’s baking anything. Here’s the simplest way to describe a cookie:Imagine that you’re a first-time customer in a great big store. When you walk in, the greeter pats you invisibly on the back, and slips a business card in your front shirt pocket. The card has on it only the name of the…

  • HTML

    Called hypertext markup language, HTML ain’t very daunting if you start easy.Think of a page from a textbook from your high school days. Now imagine that it all had to be typed out on an old-time typewriter, and you couldn’t make some things bold and some things italicized and couldn’t separate the paragraphs in any…

  • Fonts

    When you build a website or contract to have one built, you decide what fonts (typefaces) you’d like to use. (Fonts can be in word-graphics, like in a logo, or in navigation bars. Human eyes can see this as text, but it’s really a picture of text, and machines can’t read it, and search engines…

  • Email

    POP3 mail POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol 3. That’s because your server acts very much like a real post office. Here’s how it goes. Firstly, You have to have an agreement with some server somewhere to act as your post office, and you’ll have gotten a username, password, and the names of the POP3…

  • Design and Content

    Design is more than the look of the page and the fonts you choose. It’s also how the material is presented an used, how the navigation gets you from place to place, plus any interactivity — like forms, or membership log-in areas.In its simplest form, bare-bones design is putting unadorned text and graphics together (content)…

  • Webpages and Surfing

    A webpage, generally, is a single file, with perhaps other files attached to it (by means of the author linking stuff within the text of the document), such as graphics, sounds, or scripts.When you type in a URL (the wordy version of the address of a file) in the address bar of your browser, or…

  • What’s a Website?

    A website is just any size of collection of files on a server. If we’re talking about the website covered under the domain name TechDonkey.com, all the techdonkey files will be sitting on that server. Webpage files here, graphics here, mail over here, web scripts here, and so on. Think of the server computer as…

  • Server

    Just as a server in a restaurant hands you dishes and salt-shakers and drinks; a computer-type server hands you files like graphics and webpages and your email. Think of it as a smart, fast computer sitting blindly on a steel rack somewhere, with a fat cable up its arse connecting it to the internet. Really…

  • Domain Names and IP addresses

    Continuing the house analogy — imagine the house (server) your domain lives in as having an absolute street address, and when you move in, you put a sign over your door with your domain name, like a quaint wooden carved sign saying “Elaine Miller”. Instead of your house address reading 1234 anywhere st, Vancouver, Canada,…

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