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Previous: Hand shredder | Main | Next: Series of directional signs
February 4, 2006 12:03 AM
Broken: Acela domain redirection
Michael McWatters points out:
If you go to http://acela.com, you arrive at this friendly but useless page. The user is required to enter ‘www’ in the url field of their browser even though a simple redirect on this page would have done the same thing.
Not necessarily broken, but definitely not convenient. This also may be costing the train company bookings.
WWW is incredibly useless and pointless...until we get around to abolishing it altogether, though, just type in "acela" and hit ctrl-enter. If you're using Mozilla (and why not?) or Internet Explorer (why, dear lord?), it'll automatically add the www. and the .com for you.
perhaps, someone owns the acela.com domain and the www.acela.com domain. I've gone to two absolutely different pages for just not putting in the www. Some sites dont have a www in their address.
bleh, took the time to click the link, tab says amtrack at the http://acela.com one and acela is for amtrack...
doesn't http:// imply that it is a webpage as opposed to an ftp protocol? "www." is useless. altough i have seen companies use "www." for public webpages and skip the "www." for a private extranet for their employees.
The same happened to Vodafone (yes, the huge mobile network operator) in the Czech Republic a couple of days ago. After buying and rebranding one of the local operators, http://www.vodafone.cz worked fine right from the start, but http://vodafone.cz did not. Now it's already corrected, but for a couple of days, you had to type www.
Definitely broken. The domain with and without "www" needs to be registered to point to the same server. Generally hosting providers will do this for you but if you're hosting a site on your own server, you need to be smart enough to know to set this up in your server's settings file.
BTW, not all sites start with "www" (i.e. mail.website.com) so Browser that automatically adds www to a domain name would cause huge problems.
Maurs, I think you're referring to this article on BBspot, which is a joke:
ICANN to Ban Use of "WWW"
I sent this to TIB months ago, and forgot about it. When I saw it posted here, I thought, "Wow, they still haven't fixed it." It's such a simple correction, you'd think a company that makes its money from reservations would want to fix it.
So, I sent the link to someone I know who's not particularly Web savvy, but still a user of sites like this. She clicked on the link in my email, and said, "hmmm, their site is down," without my prompting. It never occurred to her to enter 'www'. Definitely still broken.
If they can't direct you in webland, would it be safe to say you shouldn't use them for real-life travel either??
Well, I at least know that the Hello, World thingamajiggerydoodah is a common thing for the very first program in a certain language... um... It's a teaching tool of some sort. I think. In fact, I'll do it in Python, the only non-LOGO or BASIC language simple enough for me to comprehend.
print "Hello, World!"
I can program!
Edit: It's ''usually'' (yes, I know Wiki formatting doesn't work here) Hello, World! But this site seems to say just:
Hello world.
But still, I can program! And check this out:
print "Haldo, World!"
Tada! Instant Peasant's Quest references!
OK, I forgot to check the remember personal info box, but just so you know, that comment was by nick'd, not nickd. Actually, regard us as the same person.
"Actually, regard us as the same person."
Schizophrenia on the TIB comment board. It was bound to happen.
The "www" prefix is a holdover from the days of the Internet before the widespread use of the web. It was a convention from the days when the servers being used on the Internet were often limited resources and possibly devoted to doing only one thing, and with no generally available directory or search service available. One could then guess the name of the FTP server for an organisation by prepending "FTP", or the gopher server by prepending "gopher" etc.
In today's Internet, with web portion is ubiquitous and dominant to the point where people beleive that the web and the Internet are the same thing.
So yes, not having the redirect in place for people who don't type "www" is broken.
It's so easy to configure the server "foo.com" to accept "www.foo.com" (or vice-versa) I'm always amazed at the laziness shown when nobody bothers to do that.
Regarding dropping the "www." part: A name identifies a server. If company foo.com has several servers on the internet dedicated to different purposes, then they must have seperate names, e.g. "www.foo.com", "mail.foo.com", etc. Nowadays servers often perform a couple of those jobs, but it still makes a lot of sense to use seperate names for the different jobs. This lets you move one of those jobs to a different physical machine, and reconfigure the servers, rather than forcing all your users to learn new names (which would be quite broken).
Dragon-- not sure if I understand you; if someone owns the acela.com domain then they own all the possible subdomains (such as www.acela.com, simontrew.acela.com, tib.accela.com, etc).
They can, of course, redirect (or serve) those subdomains however they choose-- so yes, www.acela.com can be different from acela.com. I believe that IE and Mozilla will try what you actually typed first, then guess at common things you might have meant-- you can often leave off the '.com' too, and the 'co.uk' (perhaps this just on localized versions?)
I think Wind2.com is even better(Accounting software site.. they just merged with Deltek) www.wind2.com gets you to correct site, but wind2.com gets you to
"Did you want www.wind2.com?
Temperatures in Server Room as of Fri Mar 18 14:34:01 MST 2005
AC Temp :
RackTemp:
BattStat "
besides the point that there are not temperatures and the date is almost a year ago being broken, if they wanted a way to check server room temperatures remotely there are other ways..
A lot of .gov.uk suffer from a similar problem: you have to enter the "www" or else you get a blank page.
Opera adds the ".com" automatically, but not the "www" as far as I can tell...
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Previous: Hand shredder | Main | Next: Series of directional signs
haha wonder who wrote the welcoming message.
Posted by: gmangw at February 4, 2006 12:40 AM