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How do I get the text in the adress field in the browser to change when the user surfs on and outside of the page?


This is somewhat of a newbie question I'm sure and I hope the community will excuse me for not knowing this (or not knowing the appropriate search terms to resolve my question).

So, this is the deal: I'm running a small webpage with a small amount of visitors. I've written the whole page in HTML and CSS myself and I host it in my private DropBox (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3394117/Hemsida/Psykofil/Index.html).

I've bought the domain name "www.psykofil.org" from Loopia (www.loopia.se) and I've directed this domain to the index.html file referenced to above.

Now, this is what I want to happen: I have three different places you can go to on the page (you choose where to ge through a menu on the left). When one of these links is clicked, it takes the user to another .html-file. What I would like to happen here is that this is seen in the adress field so when he or she clicks on "x", it should say www.psykofil.org/x on top. Also, when he or she navigates away from the webpage through a hyperlink I would like the adress field to update to show the new location. Right now, no matter what the user does, it always says www.psykofil.org in the adress field.

I probably should mention that my options (freely translated from swedish) when I go to the configuration of my domain name at Loopia is the following:

  • DNS
  • Parking
  • Forwarding (the one I'm currently using)
  • Send to an external URL
  • (Unavailable because I don't have a web hotel with Loopia) Point to another domain in the account.
  • (Unavailable because I don't have a web hotel with Loopia) Own homefolder for webpage.

Solution

  • That's because your page is inside a <frameset>, so the address bar will never update.

    You say "I've directed this domain to the index.html file referenced to above." It sounds like you've set up 'domain forwarding.' Framesets are often the 'trick' hosts use to keep the same URL - embedding the pages you're 'forwarding' to in a frameset. It's called "domain masking." See http://www.hostingmultipledomainnames.com/domainforwarding.htm for a description of how it works.

    If you upload your actual html files to your site root, that should do the trick. If you're not sure how to do that and you're a new webmaster, you may want to be in touch with your web host's support. Otherwise, if you want to have that domain, but keep your files in your dropbox account, your options I believe get complicated (things like reverse proxies).

    UPDATED: Typically, when people create a website, they do three thing: register a domain, buy a web hosting account, and then associate their domain with their hosting account. You've done the first part, and have found a clever way of managing the second part, but you haven't done the third part.

    The process is like this:

    1. You register your domain. I.e., you pay $10-30 a year for the exclusive right to a given domain name. Registering the domain means that when people type 'http://mysite.com' into their browser, your domain will come up. However, it's just a placeholder - there isn't any real content there. All your files and images need to be uploaded to a server in order for people to see them.

    2. You purchase a web hosting account. Or in your case, you upload your files to a publicly-accessible server, which has the advantage of being free. You then upload all your content.

    3. This is the part you're missing. You now need to associate your domain name with your hosting account. This typically happens without your intervention when you purchase both your domain name and your web hosting account through one company.

      However, if you acquire them separately, you need to do two things:

      a. Log in to your domain registrar and point the domain name to your server for your web hosting account. This is a signal to the Internet - hey, when you type in the domain name 'http://ssss.com', go to this server.

      b. Log in to your web hosting account and "park" the domain at your account. This may be hard to understand at first, but basically, just telling the Internet to go to this or that server when typing in your domain name isn't very useful. If that's all we needed to do, I could just register http://my-amazon.com and point my domain to Amazon.com. Then people could surf Amazon.com as http://myamazon.com and I could get rich from selling this now incredibly popular domain.

      But that doesn't work. In order for me to actually browse the web hosting account through my domain name, I need to "add" the domain name to my hosting account. Dropbox doesn't let you do that. It's a file-sharing system, which you've cleverly used as a web host. However, you'll never be able to log into Dropbox and park your domain there, because that's not what they do.

      Summary: You can think of this process like a pass in basketball. You can throw the ball by sending the user to a server, but the server has to catch it. In order to catch the ball, the server needs to know it's coming.

      Your domain registrar is 'faking' this process by adding one page to its own server, which links to "http://dl.dropbox.com/yourpage/etc/etc/Index.html". This way, your domain registrar doesn't have to worry about hosting all your content and the headaches of technical support and server space.

      The downside is, you don't have a webhost that allows you to park a domain at the moment. The upside is you're saving about $60-100 per year (it might be more or less in Sweden), which is what a basic "shared" hosting account would cost.

      You can decide if having distinct webpages (http://psykofil.org/contact.html" etc), is worth it for you, or whether you're fine for now with the very low-cost solution that isn't perfect but at least allows people to access your site. What you've come up with is actually pretty cool, but it does have some limitations.

      Finally: If you do want to go ahead an buy server space so you can host your site, it will be less of a headache to buy it through Loopla, if the price and service are good. Typically, you are given the option when making the purchase of linking your account to your already-registered domain name. Then all you need to do is use an FTP program like Filezilla to upload your content to your account, and you're done.