On today's episode we start a month long journey into exploring some technical jargon, and today we're going to look at domain names and how they work, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 348. Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, I'm excited to be here with you today because we are going to talk about domain names, and something as relatively simple as a domain name, they're kind of complex, and it's a little bit difficult to kind of explain. So, we're going to dive in and we're going to talk all about that.

I do have a couple announcements. It's been kind of a slow news week when it comes to WordPress, but the things that I do want to share with you today is the call for volunteers is now open for WordCamp US. That's happening December 1st through the 3rd, 2017 in Nashville, Tennessee. If you live in a close proximity to Nashville or you just want to join hundreds of thousands of other WordPress enthusiasts in the beginning of December to kick off the holiday season, I highly recommend signing up to be a volunteer. They're not going to take everybody obviously, but they have an application process that is open until August 31st.

They'll finalize all the volunteers by the end of the month in September of 2017, and it's just a great way to get involved with the community. One way that you can just volunteer your time, you can help with registration, help with keeping order, and making sure the event goes smoothly. I was an organizer for WordCamp Europe a couple of years ago, and it was a lot of fun. It was really neat to be behind the scenes and seeing a lot of what it takes to run a WordCamp. So, if you're interested in that, go ahead and check that out. The other announcement is the only other really big thing that I could find was WordCamp Minneapolis is happening this weekend.

So, if you live in that neck of the woods, I definitely recommend checking that out, and lastly, there's been some updates to the Gutenberg plugin we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks. It's up to version .6 or 0.6 that is, and that basically means that there's still a lot of work to be done before it can even be thought of being added to WordPress core. That's the ultimate goal. It's a new editor, it's a new way to edit your posts and add content to a WordPress site on a page or a post, and so I recommend if you're interested in seeing what the future looks like, what that's going to be, and what that's going to look like in the future for WordPress, you can go ahead and just install the Gutenberg plugin and start playing with it on your website. If you haven't been following the WordPress development in recent years, the release I feature as a plugin is what they call this, and it basically allows it for a lot more people to install instead of trying to figure out to install the bleeding edge of WordPress and trying to keep it updated and all that jazz, they just create these plugins, and then once the feature is ready to go out of the plugin, they roll the entire code of the plugin into WordPress itself, and then it doesn't delay the release of WordPress. If they've got 20 other features they want to push, they can do that before they get to the Gutenberg, as an example.

So, that's the reason why this beta thing is – we're talking about it, and why it's kind of a big deal because it is going to be the future of the WordPress Editor, and they're just working on it in a plugin so that we can test it and play with it before it becomes a big deal and live inside of WordPress core. So, those are just a couple announcements this week. In the Is There a Plugin for that Section, we've got more than 50,000 plugins and this is a brand new one, and it just adds to that total of 50,0000, and this one is called Dobby, and WP Dobby, and this is a friendly admin elf who takes care of all your unwanted admin notifications.

So, this is a free plugin that's open source, and it's on the WordPress repository. It's got less than ten installs. It was just created just a couple days ago. I saw the article over on WP Tavern, and what it does is it takes all of those annoying pesky admin notifications that could take up your entire screen, and just takes those and rolls them all up into one little notification bar, and there's a lot of comments over there on WP Tavern just talking about the better way to solve this is not have every plugin author ask for ratings and reviews and donate to my plugin and all these other things that are really unnecessary to ask for in an admin notification, but if you want to get rid of them and you want to try this plugin, it's called Dobby and you can find it in the WordPress repository.

You can see the link to it in the show notes for Episode No. 348. And lastly before we get to the meat of the show, I just want to share a couple yourwebsitengineer.com updates. I have made some changes over there. One of the big things was Is There a Plugin for that Section of the show. Every week I'd like to say there's more than 50,000, there's more than 52,000, there's more than 48,000, you know, whatever that number is, I like to keep that updated on every page of my website, and I tried to do a find and replace for a bunch of text because it's like a whole little snippet of text, and it just was not working very well mainly because I have punctuation and there's different pieces of code that I couldn't find and replace via the sequel search very easily.

So, what I ended up doing in the past week is I manually went through about 120 posts, and I just copied and pasted all that text and changed it into a short code, and now that it's a short code, every time that we update, so maybe in a week or so when we're at 52,000 plugins, I can go in, I can change one file in a custom plugin that I've created with the short codes, and I can just change the 50,000 to 52,000, upload that to the server and now it's changed on every page across my website. It's pretty slick and I'm glad that I finally had some time this weekend to work on it and get that set up. The other thing that I worked on this weekend was I had some issues with my iTunes feed. It wasn't pulling in the length of the show, and it wasn't pulling in the description, and all that information was just missing from iTunes.

So, I've got it about 50 percent working, and I'm just continuing to work on that along with a bunch of other things. I call it my garbage pickup, just things that I've seen for a while that have been on my list. I just spent some time this weekend, and just kind of knocked through some of those, and then lastly, if you're not on my email newsletter list, I recommend signing up, and there's a bunch of buttons all over yourwebsiteengineer.com, and eventually there'll be one at yourwebsiteengineer.com/newsletter, but basically every Friday I'm going to start sending out short little tips or snippets or things that you can do to improve your website each week at a time. So, those are going to be some of my best tips that I have.

Some of these things that are too short for a podcast episode, but they'd be great content for an email, then definitely sign up for that and you'll be seeing those in the upcoming week. So, those will come out on Friday mornings and just continue – I just want to give value, I want to share all these little things that I've been learning, especially when I'm in the WordPress space every day working support for WooCommerce. There's just a bunch of things, it's like, wow, I didn't know that or I didn't know that. Every day it's like half a dozen things that it's like, wow, this is really cool, I can't believe that I've been using WordPress since 2009, and I just am finally learning this today. So, I'm going to share those types of tips with you in those newsletters.

Okay, moving right along, I want to talk about some technical jargon this month, in the month of August, and we're going to dive in and talk about some of these technical things, mainly so we can understand them better, but also in case you're not the technical one for your own website and you hire out to a developer or you hire somebody to do some of the work for you, if you know what these technical words mean, then you're able to easily communicate those with the people that are actually doing work on your website. So, today we're going to dive in, we're going to talk about domain names, and it sounds like domain names are pretty simple, like oh, it's what you type into the address bar, and that's how you see a website. It's a little bit more intense than that, or it's a little bit more in depth than that.

So, let's go ahead and dive in and talk a little bit about what it is. So, in the early days of the internet, which was 20, 30, 40 years ago, however long the internet's been around, there was a challenge that presented itself in what kind of system could we identify different computers on the web and allow them to communicate with each other. It's like in the days before the phone, they had to come up with some sort of system of how people could communicate with each other from one place to another, and that's where they created phone numbers and directories that would connect people from the phone number, and each person had their own unique phone number.

And so the same way with people, we had to find a way, or by we, I mean the people that were creating the system years ago, had to figure out a way to identify each computer and locate it in order to make sure it receives the information intended to and it was kind of like a phonebook, and we created this system. There was a system that was created called DNS. It’s called domain name system and its made up of thousands of computers across the world which are referred as servers and they host websites, and we’re gonna get more technical next week talking about all the little features of DNS, but I wanted to dive into a little simpler of a topic today in talking about domains.

So, each computer is assigned their own IP address, and the IP address is a form of string of numbers, kind of like a phone number, you know, a phone number in the United States is like three digits and then dash and then three digits and then a dash and then four digits if you count the area code. It’s very similar, but each of these computers have their own what’s called an IP address, and so the IP address is four sets of numbers and they can be up to three digits each. So, it can be like 111.222.333.444. That’s like what an IP address would look like. So, we could just set up every computer, every server has it’s own IP address, and then our website’s on that IP address, and so we can say like instead of saying, go to yourwebsiteengineer.com, you would have to say, go to 111.222.333.444. Now, that’s kind of an easy one to remember, but imagine if it was like 50.63.201.97. How hard would that be and how hard would it be to put it on all our promo materials, and how many people would actually remember, hey, that’s what the domain name is, it’s 50.63.201.97. So, it’s nonsensical, it doesn’t make any sense. You’d have to have a whole list of your bookmarks to just remember where all these things are. So, that’s why domains were created.

A domain is connected to a specific IP address of your website. It serves as an online address of your website, and so the domain of yourwebsiteengineer.com is an example of a website. It’s what you type in the browser every time you want to see my latest post or my latest podcast episode. If you go to apple.com, that’s Apple's domain name, and the easiest way to explain what domain names are and what they are not, is to look at the anatomy of a URL. So, a URL and a domain name are not the same thing. We use them interchangeably, and I know that I do a lot. I ask for a customer’s URL or I ask them for a domain name like I’m asking for kind of the same thing, but it’s not. There’s a couple different things.

Okay, let’s breakdown the domain name at yourwebsiteengineer.com/podcast/348. Let’s just kind of talk about that. That’s the short link that you can use to get to the podcast episode, the notes for today. The https:// represents a transfer protocol. It directs how data from the webpage will be transferred to your browser, and if there’s the s part on there, that means it’s a secure protocol which adds that extra layer of security on information that’s being transferred from its server and to you and back and forth. So, that’s going from – if you type that in, that’s basically saying that anything that’s transferred from my server over a flywheel to your computer that is connected in a secure manner, and if you would fill out a form, that information goes back to flywheel, that’s being transferred in a secure form as well.

The yourwebsiteengineer.com is the domain name. That’s what we’re talking about today, the domain name, and the domain name consists of two parts; the second level domain and the top level domain. So, the second level domain is the yourwebsiteengineer part, and the top level domain is the .com part. So, there’s more – I mean, we always hear about top level domains, we hear about registrars having hundreds of top level domains like XYZ and .com and .org and .biz and .edu, all these things, but we don’t really ever refer to the domain part, you know, the unique part that we’ve registered, we don’t really talk about that as the second level domain, but that’s what they’re referred to as.

Anything after that .com, so remember it’s yourwebsiteengineer.com/podcast/348, whatever, then everything after there is used to identify the location of specific content within a site. So, you’re basically looking at a category, maybe you’re looking at a specific post, the string of numbers, everything that comes after that is just looking for the specific blog post or the specific content for your website. Make sense? So, a domain name and a URL are different. A domain name is just that short second level and top level text, so the .com, .biz, .org, whatever, and then the name that you picked out at your registrar, and the URL is the whole thing. It’s the https or http://, then your domain name, and then any other information and that will get you to specific places on your server. So, that’s like the differences between the two.

So, let’s talk about what domains can be used for, and then we’ll talk a little bit about the differences between a domain name and a website. Okay, got it, let’s talk about now what domains are used for or the three different uses of a domain name, and then we’ll talk a little bit about the differences between a domain name and a website, and then we’ll be done. Domain names can be used for one of three things, and the main one, the one that we think about the most is it’s our online home on the web. You type in a domain name, you register a domain, and that’s where somebody can type in and they can go specifically to your website to see where your content is and what your website looks like.

The other thing that you can use a domain name for, and this one’s kind of a little more rare, not a lot of people use this. A lot of big companies do, but it’s a branded short link for social sharing. So, there’s, I think, its you.tb, or, you know, the short one for YouTube or I think time.com has one that’s ti.me. They register these really short URLs so they don’t take up as many characters in Twitter. I don’t think that really matters anymore, like Twitter doesn’t have a limit on a URL. They’re all counted as the same amount of characters these days, but that was something that people were using back in the day. They could say ti.me/12345, and that was a short URL, and then they could put more information in the tweet and they could save space in their 140 characters.

So, that’s the second reason you can use domains for, and then third one is for a branded email address. This kind of goes along with the online home on the web, like if you have a domain name, you can use that to build that custom email address. So, dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com is a custom email address, it’s a branded email address and it’s better than sending somebody for my business to go – say go to dustinyourwebsiteengineer @gmail.com, like that makes a lot more sense. So, those are the three reasons or the three ways that you can use domain names, and then I just want to dive in just real quick there.

This is a video that the audio works perfectly, but it describes the differences between a domain and a website and I think this is pretty clear, but this is a video on GoDaddy’s help page, and I think it does a really great job of kind of highlighting the differences, and just note that it is a GoDaddy video, so when it does say register your server at GoDaddy, that’s because it’s a video that’s pro GoDaddy, you know, they’re trying to promote their own services. So, let’s go ahead and listen to this real quick and then I’ll wrap up the show.

Hi there. In this video you’ll learn the difference between a domain and a website. While domains and websites are closely connected, they are two very different things. After registering a domain, you need to do something with it, put it to work for you. Your domain can be used for a website, for an email account, or for both. You can, however, register a domain and choose not to use it for a website or an email account, but you can’t have a website or an email account without a domain. When used for a website, your domain name is what people type into their browser to find your site. This is why they are sometimes referred to as web addresses. So, godaddy.com is the domain used for GoDaddy's website.

Registering a domain, however, doesn’t automatically create a website. It only means that you’ve registered the domain. So, for example, if you decided to start your own business, and you thought of a great name for it, you might copyright the name to protect it, however, simply giving your business a name is only one of many steps that go into building your business. In the same manner, when you register a domain, and want to use it for a website, you’ll need to first build the website and then find a host for it, so it can be visible on the web. What’s a host? Website hosts are companies that house, serve, and maintain files for one or more websites.

Think of a website hosting company like a shopping center that contains several individual stores. If you want to open a store at the shopping center, you can lease space and set up shop. Just like a shopping center, website hosting companies enable you to lease space on their webservers where you can store your website files and make them available for visitors to view. Because you’ve registered your domain, you can use it at any web hosting company you want. Remember your store in the shopping center? Suppose you decided to move your store and lease space at a different shopping center. If you packed up your products and moved to a new location, you would still be able to use the same name for your store.

The same is true for your domain regardless of where you decide to host your website's files; your domain remains yours for the duration of your registration. GoDaddy is both a domain registrar and a website hosting company, and we also have the tools to help you build your website. This means you can register your domain name, build a website for it, and get it on the web all in one place. Do you already have a domain name? Don’t just let it sit there, do something with it.

The main thing that I wanted to point out from this audio was that a domain is different than your website. A domain is that pointer, and you can point that domain to different servers, whether it be WordPress.com servers, whether it be flywheel servers, whether it be A2 Hosting, you can point your domain name to a different server based on the platform or if you want to change hosting providers or whatever. We’ll talk about how we can do this next week when we talk about and we explore DNS. So, that’s a wrap. I hope it wasn’t too technical, and we’re just going to keep diving into this technical jargon. Next week we’re going to talk about how those domains work, how we can set up email, how we can set up subdomains, all part of the DNS system and we’ll talk about that next week. Until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.