Some Guy in Baltimore

Choosing and setting up a hosting provider can be a scary endeavor depending on your level of experience. This post is for readers who have never before setup web hosting. If you don't know what a domain name or DNS is, please have a look at my post about DNS. Okay cool you’re back. Now let's get started. By this point you should have a domain name www.whateveryouwant.com . If not, go check out www.namecheap.com or www.gandi.net . If you’re wondering I used Namecheap to register my latest domain. For my web host I chose Hostgator. I like host gator because they use cPanel and the support staff are very helpful and they’re available via IM.  This is one thing to keep in mind when choosing a hosting provider. As a newbie you’re going to have lots of questions and problems, and a dedicated and empathetic support team is a very useful early on in your career. So be sure to read their support documentation and their reviews before buying. After getting a domain name and a host there are still a few steps we have to complete to get everything working correctly. We first have to tell our domain registrar which name servers to use. If you remember from the post about DNS, the name servers will tell the DNS server which ip address our site is using. To do that, we must change the name server for our domain name. I use name cheap. If you use another provider I will include links to those providers pages for setting up your dns. First Sign into your Namecheap account. On the right menu click on Your Domain / Products.

Click on the domain you wish to modify.

On the left menu click Domain Name Server Setup.

Click on Specify Custom DNS Servers. Enter in the name servers from your hosting provider. e.g. ns5555.yourhost.com and ns6666.yourhost.com

Click save changes That’s it! It can take 24-48 for the DNS servers to populate. If you’re like me and can’t wait that long and are eager to get started. You can follow this guide for changing your hosts file so that you don’t have to wait for the DNS change. If you're using another host. Here is a list of providers with links to how to update the Nameservers of popular registrars.

LaunchPad

Domain.com

Bluehost

FastDomain

eNom.com

Registry Rocket (eNom Resellers)

GoDaddy

Network Solutions

Tucows

Hover

1&1

Name.com

Register.com

Public Domain Registry (PDR)

Wild West Domains

You may have heard about this DNS mambo jambo being thrown around the internet and wondered what it was. You may have even Googled "What is DNS?" . After I purchased www.someguyinbaltimore.com I came across a wikipedia entry that tried to explain it. Admittedly a wiki entry that, after reading it, makes you want to stab your eyes out with forks.

Don't stab your eyes yet. Hopefully I will be able to explain in a simple, clear, explain-it-like-im-five kind of way.  So here goes.

Simply put, DNS is a phonebook system for the entire internet. It stands for Domain Name System and it's how your browser knows when you type www.google.com you really mean http://74.125.224.72/ . Those numbers are called the IP address. This is the number that identifies a computer on the internet. Think of it like a phone number. DNS is one of the most essential parts to the functionality of the internet.

We all know how hard it can be to remember a phone number. This is where DNS comes in. Instead of having to remember a number, we now have an easy to remember name. So how does it work?

There are root servers at the top of the internet keeping track of all the name servers. For each domain there is a name server. The name server is the component that takes the domain names and translates it to the corresponding IP address to locate it on the internet.

The flow looks a little like this.

You type www.google.com into your browser.

Your computer then asks the router for a DNS record.

Your router then contacts your ISP

ISP contacts the Root server for the Name server.

ISP then asks the Name Server for the DNS record

The Name Server gives your ISP the DNS record.

ISP give the DNS record to your router

Router gives the DNS record to your computer

Your browser now shows the page you requested.

For this exercise I had to reset check a list of tags and go out and try to find visual representations of these tags. Lucky I didn’t have to go far better because of my messy desk-cube  at work.

A quote on my pin board looks wildly similar to a <blockquote>.

One of my dream cars. This is an <img> if I've ever seen one. 

Over the years I've used many text editors, including but not limited to Vim, Nano, gedit, Scintella, Notepad++, Sublime, Coda, Text wrangler, Aptana, Eclipse and probably a few more that I can't recall without a little searching. Point being I have used a lot. The most important thing I found about choosing a text editor is that it be able to save plain unformatted text to a file.

For all intents and purposes I have chosen Sublime because it will run on my Linux system and my Windows laptop. Notepad++ will always be my backup. Now all of the editors above have that same feature in common. So one may ask.. Why do so many editor exist? Well hopefully by the end of this post you may understand why. To put it simply, I think the reason is because everyone has differing preferences, views, and opinions. Because of that we now have some really awesome time-saving features and shortcuts to be thankful for. 

Basic features of a text editor

Like I said before the most important thing about a text editor is that it save unformatted text to a file. Not all text editors are created equal. For example Microsoft Word will have a difficult time trying to create code because it adds markup for fonts, colors and styles. Text editors just don't do that, they will only save what you type and no more. Some other basic features of text editors include.  Newline conversion - The different newline conventions often cause text files that have been transferred between systems of different types to be displayed incorrectly. This solves that problem.

Undo and redo - Just like graphic programs there are undo and redo functions that will go back and undo your last edit. You can even go back further if you wanted.

Syntax highlighting - This will highlight parts of the code with different colors so that it makes reading easier. For instance it might color HTML tags one way and attributes another. 

Text formatting - Most editors have features like Auto indenting, and tabbing, or list formatting making it easy to type a list of items. Here is a really large comparison of a lot of text editors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors

So what makes the best text editor in the world?

For this challenge we had to explore the different text editors and see which one we were most comfortable with. For my weapon or text editor as some may call it I have chosen Notepad++. It's what I have been using since high school and Scintilla before that. They both have lots of great features and are free. I also like Sublime text editor. It's has really neat features to.  So in addition to exploring different text editors we also had to create a text file resembling our hello world example. Below is what that example looks like.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

        <head>

                <meta charset="utf-8">

                <title>Hello World by Some Guy In Baltimore</title>

        </head>

        <body>

                <h1>Hello World by Some Guy In Baltimore</h1>

                <p>This code is written by hand. I'm not really that awesome.</p>

        </body>

For this challenge most of you know we had to write out html by hand. Here is my interpretation.

So this is my magnificent post or my sad attempt at one. I started this blog not only because it was one of the challenges for P2PU's School of webcraft. But mainly because I wanted a place to collect thoughts and document what I learnt on the web. I also have never been a strong writer, so I guess another reason for starting this blog was to give myself a reason to write again. I've always romanticized about being a great writer and like all things, the more time we spend doing something the better we'll become.

I've had blogs and I have possibly created over 100 websites and applications. But somehow I still don't feel very confident in my skills. Perhaps it's because I have went the unconventional way of learning through self-study, online resources and practice, and not by the way of a collegiate institue. Despite my lack of college degree I am confident that I'll be able to gain a strong grasp of the things I don't know. Maybe that's why I decided to do the challenges from P2PU. To restore that confidence in my skills and learn some new things along the way.

I'm looking forward to the challenges and the things I will learn and also getting to know some of the other participants.

A few interesting things about myself:

I was born in Heidelberg Germany in the same hospital General George S. Patton died in.

I enjoy drag racing, modifying cars and other auto sports.

I enjoy close up and card magic.

I can juggle clubs, torches, hatchets and such.