potential meme: try to explain something difficult that you're familiar with in simple terms

[buster]

In my campaign to get everyone to start more official websites about their passions, professions, and interests, I've had a couple conversations in the last week about how websites work.  I remember when I bought my first domain in 2000 (ianomalous.com) it took me a long time to wrap my head around how websites worked, and since I'm not really that

Comments

[silverfae9]

This makes me think of our IT department's description of how VPN works: "An analogy might be to send an elephant, undetected, to someone in Patagonia. At the sending end, a machine would mail a combination, and then break the elephant into uniform chunks, label each chunk, and then place each chunk into a locked trunk. The machine would ship each of the trunks along the most rapid routes. In Patagonia, another machine would receive the trunks, each secured with a combination lock. It would open each trunk with the combination, read the label, and follow the instructions to reassemble the elephant."

I understand VPN a lot more now than I would have trying to figure it out on my own. Although I'm sort of grossed out by the image of leaky elephant boxes.

[buster]

If you had leaky elephant boxes, it would ruin the whole Patagonia mission. And the elephant too, I guess.

Gross.

[tarvie]

Explaining things I'm familiar with in simple terms is MY JOB! I love it! Name a historical topic, and I'll tell you about it. Wait! HEY!!!!! That's going to be my method for studying for that big test I was telling you about! Since I have to know everything about every kind of history, I'll just turn my friends into walking flash cards!

[meggie_irene]

Westward Expansion

[tarvie]

In 1893, a famous professor named Frederick Jackson Turner said that the American frontier had disappeared. He was right, if you ask me. There was no more new land to discover, and the American government had taken charge of the whole continent. Poor natives. Here are the reasons why people in the East flooded to the West

[joshc]

for those who aren't expecting to have popular websites, I've found that nearlyfreespeech.net is great because you only pay for the bandwidth that is used.

(TextWrangler is also pretty good and free for simple editing, and it connects directly via FTP.)

[nerdhaus]

Filezilla is a great free, open-source FTP client for the PC. Plus it supports SSH.

[ext_89675]

Thanks for the kind words! I might do these in a slightly different order, however. :)

-E