UPDATE: The Drawbridges of the Pinellas Beaches is now at its new home, DrawbridgeAhead.com! To get there, simply click here or enter http://www.drawbridgeahead.com into your web browser's address bar. If you have bookmarks or links to my Pinellas Drawbridges pages over at EdwardRingwald.com, be sure to update your bookmarks and/or links!
For those of you that enjoy my Drawbridges of the Pinellas Beaches feature here at EdwardRingwald.com, I got better news for you! Soon I will be moving the content of that feature to a domain name of its own which I feel is well deserved: DrawbridgeAhead.com. Right now DrawbridgeAhead.com points to the Drawbridges of the Pinellas Beaches feature at EdwardRingwald.com. As soon as I work out all the technical odds and ends when it comes to web design (particularly designing this website), I will update the DNS records to have the DrawbridgeAhead.com domain point at the new site rather than pointing to a specific page at EdwardRingwald.com.
For those of you that don't know what DNS is, it stands for Domain Name Server. In the context of a domain name, each domain name out there on the Internet has an underlying IP (Internet Protocol) address plus the addresses of two servers that hold the domain name called domain servers. There's a great article at How Stuff Works that shows how a domain name works, and based on the article I'll show you how DrawbridgeAhead.com works as it is set up.
We'll use DrawbridgeAhead.com as an example while it points to the Drawbridges of the Pinellas Beaches at EdwardRingwald.com. When you type the DrawbridgeAhead.com domain name into your browser you actually contact the DNS server of the Internet Service Provider you are using at the moment, whether it may be at home, work, hotel, airport, coffee shop, or whatever, for directions to DrawbridgeAhead.com. The ISP's DNS server looks the domain name up and most of the time it's in there; if not the DNS server will contact another DNS server to find out.
Now that DrawbridgeAhead.com is in a DNS server, and it points to the IP address of 64.202.189.170, which is hosted at GoDaddy as a parked domain name that forwards to a specific page over at EdwardRingwald.com. There are two server addresses - called domain servers - that resolve DrawbridgeAhead.com to 64.202.189.170. Once at GoDaddy, the DrawbridgeAhead.com domain name further resolves to a specific page over at EdwardRingwald.com, and that page is the Drawbridges of the Pinellas Beaches page.
Hopefully I didn't bore you with all this technical stuff but I tried to present it in layman's terms as much as possible. As for the new DrawbridgeAhead.com web site, I have been working on it feverishly for quite some time. If you also notice, I have used a different web design product called CoffeeCup HTML Editor. It's a great web design program for a fraction of the cost (around $49) compared to the major web design programs out there that feature robust WYSIWYG in coding the HTML and previewing your site, but the downside is the major financial outlay (for instance, Adobe DreamWeaver costs $399 for a new version as opposed to $139 for the upgrade version per Adobe's web site).
Now you're wondering why I did not use Microsoft FrontPage 2003 like I would have done with my websites. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to end support for their FrontPage line of web design software, replacing it with Expression Web. Moreover, more and more web hosting providers are ending support for FrontPage Server Extensions - the little plugins that enable certain features of a web page designed in FrontPage to work such as hit counters and page updates. That's why I decided to go with CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2010 SE; I took a template (HTML Editor 2010 SE comes with several built-in templates; CoffeeCup has a great library of templates for very little cost) and I purchased a template that would work with the new DrawbridgeAhead.com website.
After so many weeks of HTML coding, I have uploaded the web site to what will be the future home of DrawbridgeAhead.com as soon as I update the DNS information. Right now the site is in a beta format which means some features may or may not work at the moment but I am making the corrections as I go along. If you would like to take a preview of the new DrawbridgeAhead.com website you can enter this IP address into your browser address bar - http://98.131.99.82 - or you can click on the IP address link to go there.
As I mentioned previously, as soon as I work out the technical web design features I will switch the DNS information for DrawbridgeAhead.com over to the new website. In the meantime, feel free to check out the new DrawbridgeAhead.com and let me know what you think!
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