Misc' Questions
- What is bandwidth?
Bandwidth is the term used to measure the amount of data being transferred from your web space. When you access a web site, you are downloading a file. This file can be a web page, a GIF or JPG image, a MIDI sound file, a CGI script, or a combination of these. These files are downloaded to your computer and displayed in your web browser. Each time you download a file, data is being transferred. The amount of data depends on the size of the file. If you download a web page that is 1 kilobyte (1,024 bytes), or 1KB, in size, then 1KB of data has been transferred. If 500 people access that same web page, then 500KB of data has been transferred. 1,024KB is equal to 1MB. 1,024MB is equal to 1GB. How much bandwidth a site will use depends on many factors. You have to consider what kinds of files people will be downloading. Certainly a site with mp3 files for visitors to download will use more bandwidth than a small web site with very few graphics. Statistically, most sites use less than 500MB per month, which is half of 1GB - What is virtual hosting?
Virtual Hosting is where multiple web sites (www.domain.com) are served off the same physical server. This saves each customer from purchasing their own expensive server, performing the setup and providing the appropriate environment. This is the most common method of hosting sites of small to medium size with light to moderate traffic. - What is HTTP streaming?
HTTP streaming is an alternative approach to serving Real Audio files on the Web. Although this technique is not well-suited for high-volume sites serving numerous simultaneous streams, many smaller Web sites can benefit tremendously from this simple and inexpensive approach. This technique relies on HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) which is already used by all Web servers to store and transmit ordinary text and graphics files on the Web. - How do I set up HTTP streaming?
You can easily set up streaming audio and video on your web site by doing the following. 1)Upload your audio or video file, generally RealAudio sound and video files have a .ra or .ram extension. So for instance you might name the sound file soundfile.ra. 2)Create a text file with a .ram extension. In that file, put the location of your audio file as a URL. For instance you could create a file name sound.ram and its contents would be: http://www.yourdomain.com/soundfile.ra 3)To offer sound or video, place a link to the .ram file in an HTML document. For instance: http://www.yourdomain.com/sound.ram - What do the different error codes mean?
Here is a list of error codes and there meaning: 100 - Informative -100 Continue -101 Switching Protocols 200 - Client Request Successful -200 OK -201 Created -202 Accepted -203 Non-Authoritative Information -204 No Content -205 Reset Content -206 Partial Content 300 - Client Request Redirected, further action necessary -300 Multiple Choices -301 Moved Permanently -302 Moved Temporarily -303 See Other -304 Not Modified (This means the file was loaded from the browser cache instead of being resent by the server) -305 Use Proxy 400 - Client request incomplete -400 Bad Request -401 Unauthorized -402 Payment Required -403 Forbidden -404 Not Found 405 Method Not Allowed -406 Not Acceptable -407 Proxy Authentication Required -408 Request Time-Out -409 Conflict -410 Gone -411 Length Required -412 Precondition Failed -413 Request Entity Too Large -414 Request-URL Too Large -415 Unsupported Media Type 500 - Server errors -500 Server Error -501 Not Implemented -502 Bad Gateway -503 Out of Resources -504 Gateway Time-Out -505 HTTP Version not supported - What is SSI?
Server Side Includes allow users to create documents which provide simple information to clients on the fly. Such information can include the current date, the file's last modification date, and the size or last modification of other files. In its more advanced usage, it can provide a powerful interface to CGI and shell programs. When using a UNIX system it is sometimes necessary to enable certain HTML files executable for the purpose of using SSI. Server Side Includes are often used to run a cgi script. An include is called with an example such as this: After you insert your include, you must mark the HTML file as executable so the server will parse the file. - What is a Search Engine?
A search engine is a giant database that lists sites on the Internet. You access the database when you enter keyword searches and receive a list of relevant sites. Search engines utilize indexing agents, often called robots or spiders, that constantly crawl the Web in search of new or updated pages (URLs). This means that even if you don't submit your URL to a search engine, your Web site will eventually be listed — though you won't know when the listing occurs. When you submit a URL to a search engine, the submission notifies an agent to visit and index your site. Agents revisit your site periodically to refresh information. Because agents automatically revisit links, some search engines don't require you to notify them of dead links. After trying unsuccessfully to update the information on a dead link, their agents will conclude that it no longer exists. An easy way to tell whether a Web index is a search engine or a directory is by the information it requires to add your URL. A search engine needs only the Web address. Its indexing agent takes care of the rest. - What is favicon.ico and why are people requesting it?
When you look through your logs or stats, do you see a lot of requests for favicon.ico? Ever seen the customized icons in your favorites menu or location bar, the ones that replace the standard IE logo? Favicon.ico is the icon that's assigned to a page. So you're wondering how you get cool icons? Simple! Just stick an icon named favicon.ico in any directory and it will be the icon downloaded and displayed when someone bookmarks any page in that directory. Or, instead of sticking icons all over the place, you can add a line of code to your HTML: this Article article from Web Developer's Virtual Library. - What is robots.txt
There are well over 250 known web robots that scour pages for their inclusion in search engines. Robots follow links in your HTML pages. robots.txt is part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which was intended to instruct robots on where not to follow links: such as private directories, image directories, cgi-bin directories, etc. It it up to you to determine whether you wish robots to scour your site.