The Road Traveled

How did we register our name? We registered byte.com with the InterNIC (Internet Network Information Center) years ago and used it for UUCP (dial-up) mail routing. Once we got a real IP link to the Internet, there were three ways to create the names www.byte.com and ftp.byte.com and define their IP mappings:

1. Leave naming authority for byte.com in the hands of InterNIC and ask InterNIC to add our names to its database. (You do this by mailing a form to hostmaster@internic.net; the forms are available at ftp://rs.internic.net/templates)

2. Delegate naming authority to our service provider MV Communications (again by mailing a form to hostmaster@internic.net) and ask MV to add the names to its database.

3. Take over naming authority ourselves.

The problem with 1 is that there's a big administrative backlog at InterNIC, so we opted for 2. We'll likely want additional names, and we won't want to wait two weeks for InterNIC to handle each request -- MV's far more accessible to us. Why not 3? In that case, we'd have to run our own name server. We aren't ready to do that yet.

"The wait is about a week for change requests," said MV's Mark Mallet, "and two weeks for new records." He requested the transfer of byte.com's name service from InterNIC to MV. A week later it was done. The command whois byte.com listed MV's name servers, ping www.byte.com worked, and www.byte.com was open for business.

Magic Hot Links

When Netscape's news reader finds a string like http://www.somewhere.com in the text of a posting, it automatically converts that string into an active hypertext link. I've added this to BYTE's Web site with my Epsilon Extension Language translator. It's one regular-expression search-and-replace statement: string_replace("((httpftpgopher)://\<tab><space><nl>\..more non-URL chars..",\"<a href=#0>#0</a>",\ REGEX);

A similar trick activates E-mail addresses that appear in the text.

Well-Mannered GIFs

I hate downloading bit maps I didn't ask for. BYTE's server has plenty of pictures to offer, but it won't shove images down your throat. The translator now suppresses illustrations, photos, and screen shots behind links that announce the size of each GIF (see the screen).

BYTE Gifs: What You Want and No More

screen_link (94 Kbytes)

In the BYTE collection, a link to an illustration reports the size of the image (a). Following the link leads not to a bare GIF file but to a document that wraps standard links, a headline, a caption, and a copyright notice around the image (b).