This article series is about moving the web site. Don't worry that there will be a site outage because I am moving the site; the site has moved already. The site is running on another host than it was a week ago. What follows is the how and why.
I registered the tamurajones.net domain name more than ten years ago,
and started using it about five years ago. Back then I made a technically
inferior, but financially superior decision; I decided to host the site using
frame forwarding.
As will become clear, the only real benefit of that decision is that I wrote
this article series to explain to you just how bad a decision that was.
Back then I had, and I still have, an Internet subscription with XS4ALL.
They're one of the best known and best Internet Service Providers in the
Netherlands. As part of that subscription, you get some free web space.
Moreover, as long as it is non-commercial, traffic is unmetered.
They offer various site hosting packages as well, but these start at roughly
€25 per month for the simplest package. That is€ 300 per year for a web
site with zero income and zero readers. I know that this site is fairly popular
now, but like any other site, it started out with zero readers. Spending a lot
of money for a few incidental readers that happen across my new site did not
make much sense to me.
I decided to use the free web space, but did not want to bother my visitors with its long and cryptic URL, I wanted to use the domain name I had already registered.
Moreover, I did not want to have to break any link to my content. I knew that I would not be using that web space for ever. For whatever reason, I would one day decide to move the site to another host. When that happened, users should not notice. Well, they might notice small differences, but they should not find that I had broken their links. The links I used should be permalinks, links that continue to work as long as the site is around, no matter where and how it is hosted.
BulkRegister, the domain registrar I had registered my domain name with offered just the solution I was looking for; for just one American dollar per year extra, they offered domain name forwarding. Practically speaking, they pointed the domain name to my web space directory on the XS4All site. Visitors browsing my domain, were served content from my web space directory.
I recently moved tamurajones.net to the domain registrar of my new host. I did not move tamurajones.com or tamurajones.org. I will probably move them later, These two domains aren't very important, I do not really use them, but they have always pointed to the same site.
Today, BulkRegister, now owned by eNom, still provides frame forwarding to make sure that both the tamurajones.com and tamurajones.org domain serve content from tamurajones.net. This is what their frame forwarding looks like:
<html><head>
<title></title></head>
<!-- Redirection Services ASH01WRED05 H1 -->
<frameset rows='100%, *' frameborder=no framespacing=0 border=0>
<frame src="http://www.tamurajones.net/" name=mainwindow
frameborder=no framespacing=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0></frame>
</frameset>
<noframes>
<h2>Your browser does not support frames. We recommend upgrading your browser.</h2><br><br>
<center>Click <a href="http://www.tamurajones.net/">here</a> to enter the site.</center>
</noframes></html>
Frame forwarding gets its name from using a HTML frame. When you visit tamurajones.com, you visit a site that has just one page, the page shown above. That is all there is on it. All that page does, by using a standard HTML frame, is tell the browser to load the actual content from tamurajones.net.
You could put this tiny web page anywhere on the web, and it would still show
content from tamurajones.net. It works with any web browser that supports
frames.
If your web browser you use is so ancient that it doesn't support
frames, you have other problems already, but even that unlikely scenario is
taken care in the noframes section of the page; anyone using a
browser that doesn't support frames, or a modern browsers with frames turned
off, gets a message that ask them to follow a link to the real site.
Many web site use relative links; most links aren't to website/page.html, but simply to page.html. That has a few advantages; it is easier to type, saves a
few bytes and allows testing the site on another domain name.
If I had used relative links on my site, visitors who clicked a few links could
have ended up on using the long, cryptic URL to the XS4All web space, and then
bookmark or link to that page. To try and avoid that from happening, all internal links
are full URLs using the tamurajones.net domain name; no matter how you arrived
on a page, if you follow any internal links, you'll be using the domain name.
Now that the tamurajones.net site is properly hosted, that reason for using full links does not apply anymore. The site could use relative links, but still uses full links. The first reason that the site is still using full links is that I only just moved the site. The second reason is that the style sheets use the domain name to style internal links different from external links. I could use relative links, but would have to update the style sheet first.
The third, quite practical reason for using full links is that using full links makes it easy to search & replace internal links, for example when you decide to rename some directory, and be sure you change all the references without changing other things. Most importantly, though, the links stays the same even if you move the page to another directory.
It is admittedly largely a matter a personal preference, but there is one practical benefit to using full links; when your content gets scraped by a splogger, they are likely to leave links back to your site in.
Anyway, back to how things used to be. I had paid the domain registrar to provide their frame forwarding service. It is a standard HTML technique supported by every web browser. What could possibly go wrong?
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.