Making Connections

Reading through these pieces, I think I'm starting to get the more "technical" side of the internet and how webpages are linked to the larger scheme of things. Combined with the piece we read about the architecture of the Internet, I think I'm beginning to understand a bit more about how everything is connected. I'll admit it, I'd never had any idea what an IP address was before reading through this. I mean, I knew that I had one (well, my computer did) and that it was important, but now I get that it's almost like a mailing address in a way. It lets the servers know where to send the information (hopefully I got that right).

Although the pieces were definitely very useful, there was a lot of information to take in at once. One thing that I thought was awesome was the explanation of why URLs look the way they do. Who knew that all of the slashes, dashes, and periods were so important? I guess it makes sense, as if you forgot to put one characters in while you're searching for a site, the site won't show up. Another thing that helped me out was reading about the document tree. I think this really helps me to organize how things move/how all of these pieces are put together in the big picture. Everything follows paths between the different parts, and the pieces of the IP address, URLs, etc. are like road signs that indicate which path is the way to go.

On the other hand, the web metrics piece was confusing, but what I understood was really interesting! What I'm getting from this is that the most pages could be more efficient than they are, so why aren't they? It seems like if things were more compressed and consolidated on each page, that the whole system would speed up and be overall more efficient.