No more with the WWW

Nope, GW2 players, I'm not talking about World vs World vs World. I'm talking about our URLs!

Way back in the day when networking computers first started, there arose many large networks that contributed many important technologies what would one day become the Internet. One of those networks was the World Wide Web and we can still see its presence in the Internet today in those three letters, www, in-front of website domains.

Though, today that WWW is largely legacy and isn't necessary for websites to load or be accessed properly. In essence, it's treated as a subdomain that automatically directed to the same location as the domain. For us, having the WWW just complicates matters and since we're now using a subdomain for Stonewall Fleet's website, only complicates its further.

For that reason, I've removed the WWW from our domains. From now on, when someone travels to one of our domains with WWW preceding it, they'll be silently redirected to the same page without the WWW.

Those of you who regularly use WWW, you'll find yourself unceremoniously logged out from the site and you'll have to log back in again, but after that, the functionality should be identical.

I'll admit, I am "old school" as they say and wasn't aware this was no longer required. But I have already switched my bookmarks to those without the www so I don't have to figure out why I keep getting logged out.... :laugh: Us old folks can learn new tricks! ;)

I haven't typed "WWW" in ages. Typically, in either IE, Chrome or Firefox, if you type in something like "stonewallfleet.com" and it is necessary, the browser will take me there anyway.

The only time I did need it is if I was typing a web address into the run command (windows key+R in XP/Vista/7). Typing non-WWW addresses into it gets you an error. Typing in a WWW address has it pop open your default browser with the web page you wanted. (if you want a non-WWW address to run that way, you'll have to type in "http://" at the beginning.)

Not a huge reason to use that run command normally, just something to do if you're having some issues with the home page in your browser (home page gets changed by some malware that sends you into a spiral of uncontrolled redirects or pop ups). Gives you a chance to get into your settings/options to make corrections, if necessary.

This is probably more information that anyone really wants to know. But I couldn't resist given the topic.

As far as the Internet goes, people talk to each other about Internet locations in regards to URLs (ie. google.com) Computers on the other hand talk to each other about Internet locations in regards to their IP addresses (ie. 8.8.8.8) DNS is what translates the URL into an IP address.

A properly formated basic URL is {domain}.{TLD} with domain being the site name such as "google" and TLD being a Top Level Domain such as .com, .edu, .org etc. In most cases, a domain is pointed to an IP address by what's called an A record typically an @ symbol or other format to denote the base A record for the domain.

Another type of record is called a CNAME record. A properly managed domain should have the base A record pointing to the site's IP address. Then, there should be a CNAME for the subdomain of WWW to point to the same IP address. Sometimes, the WWW CNAME record points to the domain itself so that if the site IP address needs to change, then only one record change is needed. Of course you can have a CNAME point to another site hosted by another provider altogether. For example, newbies.stonewallgaming.net can be pointed to an IP address of a server hosting a baking website in another country. You wouldn't typically do something like this, but it is possible.


Of course there are other type of DNS records. But, these are some basic type of DNS entries that allow a site to work. Also, I think things are going to get interesting in a few years when ICANN allows corporations to oversee newly approved TLDs such as .home, .app, .work and so forth. I can forsee having a .com in the future being so passe.

I love learning new things Kasper, so thanks for the info you provided. I have no knowledge of how websites actually work so even basic stuff like this is VERY interesting. Not that I could do anything with it but it helps me to understand a bit of what Nick and other website developers have to deal with on a continual basis. I usually end up learning enough to do whatever work I need to do but not enough to do anything other than probably create a lot of damage if I ever tried to actually make changes to the functionality of something. But I learn quickly, so if someone has the patience to explain what I need to do, I can accomplish it! ;)

*hugs my typewriter.