How Things Live on the Web
by Dave (Felt) Feltenberger

Whether you know it or not, you probably have a pretty close relationship with an Internet Service Provider (ISP).  The majority of folks who surf the Internet do it through an ISP. As the ISP business becomes more competitive, ISPs offer more services. One common service is  Personal Web Storage (PWS), which means the user has the right to store files on the ISP's web server. Not all ISPs do this, but a significant number do. If you want to see an example of the files I have stored on in my PWS, click this link.

Notice that "click this link" is underlined and is of a different color than the remainder of the text. In the wonderful world of the Internet, this is the way you can recognize that a hyperlink has been provided for your use. 

You can get to the same place by opening your browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.) and entering the following text into the address box at the top of your page:

http://home.earthlink.net/~dfelt/

Let's look more closely at this web address.  First the http://. The things you commonly see on the web are addressed using something called Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. The colon and the two slashes are part of the syntax of the protocol, so you must put them in. What follows is the page's address. In this case, the address is the user space on my ISP:  home.earthlink.net/. The last little bit of the address is the place where I get to store my stuff on my ISP's server: ~dfelt.

Now if you wanted to look at a picture (a jpg) of a fine team of horses I stored in the images directory under ~dfelt, you can find it by referring to

http://home.earthlink.net/~dfelt/images/JudyBabeJessie500.jpg

To prove this to yourself, simply copy the above text and place it into the address box at the top of your web page. Nice team! Huh?

Now that you have used this addressing scheme to look at my pictures, you can see how to share yours with other folks. All you have to do is get them onto a web server somewhere.

The reason I have covered this topic to such detail is that if you have personal web space, you need to understand how to find it. To my knowledge, there is no standard way ISPs are compelled to provide this service. So if you understand how http addresses are constructed, you can call your ISP and knowledgably ask for the address of your space. That call may be necessary anyway. While many ISPs offer personal web space, so few customers use the service that they do not set up your space unless you call and ask for it.

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