Kavoir » Computer & Internet Literacy

Free 2GB HTML static web pages hosting

Yang Yang — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:56:22 +0000

For every free Dropbox plan, it comes with 2GB online backup storage that has a public folder in which you can publish HTML web page files that are publicly accessible around the Web. It will give you a URL that you can hand out to your friends so they can view the page on the Web anywhere anytime.

Basically, a free static HTML web hosting space (with potentially unlimited transfer).

Simply download the software and sign up with them, put the HTML file in the “Public” folder of your specified Dropbox directory. After a few seconds’ synchronization when there finally turns up a small green tick at the bottom left corner the file icon (which means the synchronization is successfully completed), right click on the file, point to “Dropbox” for the submenu and select “Copy Public Link”. Now you have the public URL address of the page.

Paste it into the address bar of your favorite browser, bravo! Now you have your own HTML web pages freely hosted on the Web! Check out what I’ve published on Dropbox!

The brilliant part is the ease of the hosting. Just create more web documents such as audio files, images and HTML pages, put them in the “Public” folder and you will have them online in no time because Dropbox automatically synchronizes everything you put in the folder. Want to modify the existing files, fine, just do it, save the changes and Dropbox would also automatically synchronize the update to the remote server.

Dropbox is not just a public host though, it’s easy to use and rocks as a photo gallery, online backup storage, file sharing and synchronizing machine.

How to get a web address (top level domain)?

Yang Yang — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:13:15 +0000

There are millions of websites online, each of which has its own unique web address or domain. It’s what the visitors, us, use to type in the browser address bar and go to the site. It universally identifies a website on the web. And it’s something EVERYONE can have.

Yes, you can have one too, in just a minute or even less. You completely own the top level website address in regards to legal terms. It’s officially a piece of the online real estate.

All right, for those of you who can’t wait to own your first web address such as SuperHero.com or Jessica.com, here’s how you can get a domain name:

Navigate to one of the best domain registrars. You may first register an account with them by Create an Account.
Search for a web address or domain by typing it in the “Search For A Domain” text box. For example, mybestfriends.com, and click “Go!”.
The system then prompts with all the results showing the availability of the web address which end in a variety of TLD (Top Level Domain). The domain of your choice may or may not be available with regards to its generic-ness because others may very probably have registered and owned it.
You will also see .com is unavailable the most of time, so you may choose to go with other top level domains such as .net, .org or .us.
After you have made the decision and selected one or more of the web addresses listed by checking the check box before them, you will click “Add to Cart” to process your order of the web addresses. At the same time, you may consider adding domain privacy which basically prevent others from knowing your ownership of the domain.
The web address is now placed in your cart. Click “Checkout” to check out.
If you have not registered an account with them, now is the time. After you have successfully created the account, you will be able to pay for the web address / top level domain of your choice.
An order confirmation email should be sent to your email inbox to inform you of the your successful purchase of the domain name.

Well, if you have followed these steps to this point, you have had your first ever website address! You may create a website for it and spread the address to your friends! They can visit your website by typing the web address in the browser address bar!

HTML Definition: What is HTML Defined – What does HTML stand for?

Yang Yang — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:47:44 +0000

HTML is the abbreviation of Hyper Text Markup Language invented by Tim Berners-Lee, who’s also been called the father of the Web.

HTML is what websites are written in. All websites on the Web are written in HTML that your browsers and email software recognize. It’s a way of representing, organizing and containing information as well as data that need to be stored in web page format and transferred from websites to client computers to be displayed on the screen.

HTML consists of nearly 100 tags in the form of … that contains more tags or plain texts in it. For example, tabular data can be represented and stored in HTML in the following manner:


  11 12
  21 22

Notice that there are 3 types of tags used in this example, namely

, and which represent tables, table rows and table cells respectively. Ideally, this HTML table will be rendered in your browser as something looking like this:

11	12
21	22

A table it is.

All after all, HTML is a programming language that mark things up by tags, thus representing information to help computer programs recognize and process them (such as displaying them). A typical example of such programs is your Internet browser.

Information content marked up in HTML is then styled in CSS to be beautiful.

CSS Definition: What is CSS Defined and Explained

Yang Yang — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:10:47 +0000

CSS standards for Cascading Style Sheets. It’s a descriptive programming language that specifies how web pages look like in appearance and style.

Take a book for example. The texts in the book are content, just like the texts you are reading right now in a web page or HTML page. The publishers of the book decide that it would be too boring to the readers if they had simply printed out those texts as a book with nothing but black ink on the white sheets, instead, they spice things up, such as using light blue as the background color of the pages, employing different typeface for different sections and framing here and there to outstand things, though not too much.

It’s the same with a Microsoft Word document, .doc, if you have ever worked with one. The plain texts themselves are the ultimate content and what we care about in the end. However, without proper styling, it’d look dumb and hard to digest in some cases. You will want to give colors to important snippets such as heading texts and possibly also make them bold.

Basically, that’s what CSS does with web pages – styling things and spicing the plain content up so they become appealing or even striking. Web designers rely on CSS to design everything in the web pages. All page elements, visual components on the Web are styled and beautified by the help of CSS.

A quick example of CSS

Let’s say there are some paragraphs in a web page (HTML page) that you want colored red, then you’ll probably write a CSS rule of this:

p {color:red;}

That’s all it takes. Now all modern browsers will load the HTML page and render and display the paragraph texts in red.

Ask Google for Astronomical Unit, proton mass, planet or sun’s mass and radius

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 06:41:00 +0000

To get the exact Astronomical Unit in kilometers:

astronomical unit 1 Astronomical Unit = 149 598 000 kilometers

To get Google to return the mass of proton:

mass of a proton proton mass = 1.67262158 × 10^-27 kilograms

To get the mass of any planet in solar system from Google, search by:

m_Earth

Will yield the mass of our planet Earth:

mass of Earth = 5.9742 × 10²⁴ kilograms

Try:

m_Mars

And you will get the mass of Mars

mass of Mars = 6.4191 × 10²³ kilograms

To get the radius of Uranus:

r_Uranus radius of Uranus = 25 559 kilometers

The same approach to get the radius of other planets hold true. Also you can get the radius of the Sun:

r_sun radius of the sun = 695 500 kilometers

Or the mass of the Sun:

m_sun mass of the sun = 1.98892 × 10³⁰ kilograms

Google to get the Light Speed or Gravitational Constant

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 06:31:03 +0000

Want a reference to the speed of light in vacuum with a meter / second precision? Just ask Google:

c

And it returns the speed of light in m/s:

the speed of light = 299 792 458 m / s

To get the Gravitational Constant, simply type ‘G’:

G

And it returns:

gravitational constant = 6.67300 × 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2

Google: Restrict matching results by searching only the anchor text, page title, page URL, page text or filetype

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:02:05 +0000

For a normal search, Google decides the best results and the web page order by a variety of matching criteria such as in anchor text, page title, page URL. Sometimes, however, you need Google just to search certain part of the entire spectrum of comparison candidate.

For example, to search with the matching phrase just in the URL of the web page:

inurl:google sucks

To search for results pages with ‘google sucks’ in the title element:

intitle:google sucks

You can also make this match more strict and an exact one by:

intitle:"google sucks"

To search web pages / websites that are called ‘google sucks’ from other web pages:

inanchor:google sucks

That is, if site A links to site B with the anchor text ‘google sucks’, the linked page on site B will emerge in the results.

You can also designate Google to only return results with the specified keywords or phrases in the page content or page text:

intext:google sucks

Each of the above search phrase operator: inanchor, inurl, intitle and intext can all be prepended by ‘all’, resulting in: allinanchor, allinurl, allintitle and allintext that prescribes all the words in the provided phrase must be in that part of the page or it won’t be a match.

To search a specific type of files for the matching results, for example, PDF files, use:

google sucks filetype:pdf

And Google will only return those PDF files that it finds the phrase ‘google sucks’ in.

Google: Find out the population of a country, state or city – Google Public Data Search

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:49:32 +0000

Google identifies data in a lot of fields across the web and population is one of them. To get the local population of a city, a state or a nation, simply type in Google search:

population new york population paris population shanghai population CA

population california population japan

What can be more handy. Google has all the historical population data and figures across the entire US and you can view them in a comparison chart at here.

Google: Search only a specific site

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:12:02 +0000

Sometimes you may only want to pull information and searching results from a specific sites such as nytimes.com, just use the site clause in the searching phrase.

For example, to search ‘mortgage loans’ only from the website nytimes.com:

mortgage loans site:nytimes.com

Google will then only return those web results from the site nytimes.com that’s about ‘mortgage loans’.

Google as an online advanced mathematic calculator for arithmetic calculations and big number scientific computations

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:08:41 +0000

Google’s a supercomputer! With Google toolbar, these can be as handy as they get.

To get the value of pi:

pi // Google spits pi = 3.14159265

Add them up (and don’t worry about overflow):

62385761827351234125236 + 29893847592638741692387568

Calculate the product (same as above):

854736820183475 * 29347568389187

You get the idea. And of course you can subtract and divide. Just use the basic arithmetic symbols: +, -, *, /.

Basically, Google is just a bunch of geeks and anything that’s valid across major programming languages may be used in the search phrase to do a basic mathematic calculation. For more examples, to get the mod of 23 out of 5:

23 % 5 // returns: 23 mod 5 = 3

Get the square root:

sqrt 4 // Google returns sqrt(4) = 2

Get the nth root:

3rd root of 1000 // returns: 3rd root of 1000 = 10

Get the square:

4 squared // Google returns 4 squared = 16

Get the reciprocal:

reciprocal of 7 // returns: reciprocal of(7) = 0.142857143

Get the power of 10:

10^3 // returns: 10^3 = 1 000

Trigonometric functions

All those trigonometric functions commonly seen in programming languages are all implemented in Google search: sin, cos, tan, sec, csc, cot, arcsin, arccos, arctan, arccsc, etc.

Logarithm

ln, log, lg, exp

Factorial calculation

6! // returns: 6 ! = 720

Google: Get definitions of terms and phrases

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:48:08 +0000

Google recognizes HTML definition structures and some of the web’s most prominent definition sites such as wikipedia.org, wordnet.princeton.edu and so on, and it has collected adequate stock of definitions in its database.

You can navigate to your favorite online definition resource or you can just search on Google for any words or phrases’ definition:

define:RAM

Google then pumps out over 10 results trying to explain RAM to you by additionally giving the alternative URL where this term is further defined. Or:

what is RAM

Would also get you all the definition results for RAM.

Google: Search by sentence fragments with forgotten word replace by asterisk or wildcards

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:41:47 +0000

We forget things. There’s a time when we want to search for a full sentence that we read before but can’t remember the full line with the correct wording here and there. To look up its original complete form or the author of it so that we can quote the literature, we have come to Google.

One idea it to just enter to Google the words we have left in our memory for the sentence, but a better approach is to use the asterisk / wildcard substitute, so that Google instead of giving the general results of a weirdly worded phrase (actually sentence fragments with some words or phrases missing), it tries to find any results with one or more words in the place of the asterisks:

To * or not to *

Enjoy!

Google: Search for similar / synonymous terms and phrases

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:34:56 +0000

Google’s getting smart, not only basing its algorithm on existing natural language theories and references but also the feed of billions of searches performed by people around world daily. It learns from you.

For example, Google knows PC and laptop are common types of computer, while when you search ‘computer’ alone it would present results by this arbitrary word, you can command it to give a wider range of results including those by its synonyms such as PC, laptop and so forth.

Just search:

~computer

With the tilde character immediately before the searching term (no space between them), Google will yield results not only by the specific phrase but also those similar in meaning.

Google: What time is it now? Get current local time from Google

Yang Yang — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:48:24 +0000

Other than just glancing at the clock (at the bottom right if you are using Windows) of your desktop or laptop computer screen, you can try a slightly more geeky way of querying the Internet for the current time.

By asking Google.

With Google toolbar installed, this would even come more handy than you think. Now search Google by the following queries:

utc time

Which would return the standard UTC or GMT time before the first web result. And:

what time

Would return the local time of your place, calculated from your IP location.

time New York

Would return the local time of New York.

HTTP Explained: What Does HTTP Stand For, What is HTTP Meaning and HTTP’s Definition?

Yang Yang — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:12:19 +0000

What is HTTP in all the web site URLs / web page addresses you see everywhere online?

HTTP Explained: Just like people communicate with each other following certain protocols, HTTP is the protocol between the client (your computer using web browsers) and the server (web server serving web pages and similar online resources).

So what does HTTP stand for?

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. It’s what browsers and web servers rely on for exchanging data so that you can surf the web, browse web pages, search Google, download pictures, and viewing YouTube. Developed by W3C and IETF in the last few years of the last century, it’s part of a bigger protocol family created to support the whole Internet, called TCP/IP. As a subset, HTTP’s responsibility is the World Wide Web or WWW.

By HTTP definition and usage, it’s fundamentally an information exchanging procedure standard between 2 communicating parties or computers, such as the client and the server. While you type a URL address in the web browser, the browser will have to know the protocol to use when fetching the remote resource such as a web page or a picture at that address. Failing to do so, as we most of the time would do without the http:// part, the browser will assume HTTP by default and prepend it to the URL address.

What does HTTP mean in a web address URL?

A web address representing an access point on the web almost always start with http://, immediately followed by the web page address such as in this one:

http://www.google.com/

This is the root web site address of Google. And browsing to it, the server located at the address would serve up the home page of Google. This is all beyond the meaning of HTTP however, what this basically means is that, a web address consists of 2 basic parts:

Protocol (HTTP)
Address (WWW.GOOGLE.COM)

To understand HTTP and HTTP’s meaning, imagine your need to talk to someone. You will have to get his physical address and then you need to know the language he speaks (or any other possible routines you are expected to follow in order to talk to him instead of being rejected by him). And the role of language here is what the protocol of HTTP is playing in online addressing.

Why is HTTP important?

HTTP as a protocol is just part of a bigger protocol family that has been developed to make the whole Internet possible. Every second, billions of computers are communicating and exchanging data across the gigantic network, however, physically limited telecommunication facilities make it necessary to have rules.

Just like a huge metropolis with millions of cars. Wouldn’t it be a total mess should there be no traffic rules and regulations? It’s the same with the Internet. Without protocols like HTTP, it’d be a nightmare and all of this will be completely impossible.

That said, not only HTTP is indispensable for the Internet and WWW, but all other protocols are as important in Internet communications, albeit in less uses.

What is HTTPS and what does HTTPS stand for?

HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure and is a secure version of HTTP. It’s basically an encrypted HTTP channel that encrypts all the information being exchanged, making transferring of confidential information secure from eavesdropping.

Does HTTP have peers or sisters?

Definitely. And FTP is one of them. You may have seen URL addresses similar to this:

ftp://ftp.xxxxx.com

With a ftp:// preceding, browsers would know it’s the FTP protocol that it needs to initiate the download.

Kavoir » Computer & Internet Literacy

Free 2GB HTML static web pages hosting

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How to get a web address (top level domain)?

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HTML Definition: What is HTML Defined – What does HTML stand for?

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A quick example of CSS

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Google: Restrict matching results by searching only the anchor text, page title, page URL, page text or filetype

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Google: Find out the population of a country, state or city – Google Public Data Search

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Google: Search only a specific site

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Google as an online advanced mathematic calculator for arithmetic calculations and big number scientific computations

Trigonometric functions

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Google: Get definitions of terms and phrases

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Why is HTTP important?

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