So, the http prefix is gone in the latest Firefox 7 nightly builds. As is the trailing slash at the end of the web address. This is how the Ghacks homepage looks like when opened in the latest Firefox nightly.

The highlighting of the domain name has been in previous builds before. The only protocol that is currently removed from the display is the http protocol. Other protocols like the previously mentioned https and ftp protocols are still displays in the address bar.

A https website is now displayed in the following way in the address bar. The https part of the url is displayed in light grey now which means it is mostly visualized by the colored certificate verification area in front of the address now.

This is slightly different from Google’s approach on https websites. Users who open secure sites in Google Chrome see a colored lock and the https procotol in the address bar. Google unlike Firefox and Opera does not change the color of the subdomain (like www.). Only the directories are shown in a light grey color.

The Opera web browser handles it differently as well. The browser hides all protocols by default, but displays them when the user left-clicks on the address bar. Opera users can furthermore right-click on the icon in front of the url to show the full web address all the time.

A secure site in Opera looks like this:

Internet Explorer 9 finally uses yet another color and display scheme for web addresses. It is the only browser that displays all protocols all the time. The standard http protocol, the subdomains and the directories are shown in a light grey color to emphasize the domain name.

Four browsers, four different ways to display website addresses. Which is your favorite and why?

Instead of creating a separate HTML page for each post we make, we enter our posts into a database. Each post is then assigned an id. We simply create one page, say posts.php and the code for that page contains a query, plus all the necessary HTML for displaying a post. This query will pull one specific post from the database and put the correct pieces where they should go in the template.  We can tell the script which one to pick by passing it a variable in the url. If the value of this variable is 135 for example, the post that will be pulled will be the one with this id.

You can see right away how valuable this is, you can build truly dynamic pages with this method. Your data is better organized in a database, and you can change the way you display it by simply modifying the HTML code, no need to recreate any content whatsoever. So how is this done on a code level? Let’s take a look!

You need to use a PHP file obviously, and after the extension you need to write the names and the values of the variables you want to pass in the following format: http://url.com/page.php?variable=value&variable=value. Notice that initially we use a question mark to separate the variable name passed from the extension, but after each subsequent variable passed we use an ampersand.

You can easily retrieve these variables in the code, referencing them with $_GET['variable']. For example, let’s say the url you use is the following: http://scriptastique.com/post.php?post_id=345. In this case inside the PHP file the value of $_GET['post_id'] is 345.

Using the ‘get’ method you can pass strings, not just integers, so you could pass the name of the referring url, the name of a user, whatever you need. You should be aware though, that using the get method is unsafe if you want to send sensitive data. For example, you wouldn’t want to pass a user’s password from one page to another using the get method for many reasons, but mainly because it is displayed in the url bar.

For other things like telling a script which post you want to show, or which category you want the description for it’s fine, and a very comfortable way of organizing a huge site into just a few files, in fact, I think this is one of the best features of PHP!

If you liked this article, perhaps you’d like to take a look at Scriptastique, which is a blog (and upcoming tutorial site) aimed at professional and aspiring coders. We just started, but there are daily posts and the tutorials (along with screencasts) are on the way!

But first things first. To shorten an url one would simply head over to the Shrinkomatic website and paste the url in the form on the main page. The service creates a unique short url in the form shrinkomatic.com/xyz which will redirect to the original url. This is definitively not the shortest url for an url shortening service but any name that is easy to remember should be fine for most users because that’s what url shortening is all about.

If you sign up for an account you can manage all the urls that have been created with the service. The list does contain a very nice and maintainable overview of the created urls. It also provides access to statistics detailing how many times the link was accessed (url trackin).

The unique feature are special urls for websites. Special urls are located at their own subdirectory of the website. While this does not necessarily different to creating a single link to a website it does provide the site owner with additional statistics.

The site owner will see all links that point to his website by all users of the service. That’s an excellent way of keeping track of the links if the service is used a lot.

Daniel has some great plans for the service. Users will be able to export their links to txt or csv and also share their links with others. He has more in the pipeline but some features are to unique to be spilled yet.

You can read about new announcements at the Shrinkomatic blog or visit Shrinkomatic directly to shrink some urls.

Shinkomatic has been discontinued. Alternatives are Tiny url or bit.ly.

URL Protocol View displays all registered URL protocols on the system, along with a description and the path to the application that handles it. It also lists if the protocol is currently enabled on the host system.

The Nirsoft application provides an option to disable specific protocols on the system which can be useful to secure the system further. Does not make much sense to leave protocols enabled that are never used.

The software is portable as usual and can create a html report of the registered protocols and is compatible to all Microsoft operating systems from Windows 98 to Windows Vista. The website lists a strange Windows bug (which I have no tried myself). If you disable the mailto plugin and click on a mailto link afterward Windows will display an error message and spawn Internet Explorer windows until the system runs out of resources to spawn additional ones. Sounds like lots of fun.

You might be wondering why someone would want to use a different domain name to search the Internet. As we all know search terms are added to the url of the result page which means that anyone who has access to that data can analyze it and see what you have been searching for.

We have for instance heard of Internet Service Providers who sell this data to companies for marketing purposes. AOL released search results in the past to the public for instance which turned out to be a major privacy invasion for several of its users because it was possible to find out the real name by analyzing the search terms.

The alternate websites do add those search terms as well but it is unlikely that they will be monitored as well. If you want to be on the safe side you could use a proxy server instead and point it to Google.com

Here is the list of alternate official Google.com urls:

• http://msm.byu.edu/
• http://138008.org.ru/
• http://americanlandmarkfence.com/
• http://intranet.falmouth.ac.uk/
• http://leslein.com/
• http://netease.google.com/
• http://taakra.com/
• http://fd2k.dyndns.org/
• http://aim.playlinc.com/
• http://0038.za.net
• http://cpl.playlinc.com
• http://gamedaily.playlinc.com/
• http://go.ogle.org/
• http://googleffffffff8f01a7ed.sbi2testsite1.com/
• http://lunaticus.dnip.net/
• http://verizon.playlinc.com
• http://yvonneschroeder.com
• http://zapchu.ppntop50.com/

Here are Google Groups Alternative urls:

• http://groups.secureearn.com/
• http://groups.lanostrafamiglia.org/
• groups.dz18.com

You might be wondering how you can check that these urls are indeed hosted on a Google server. I used a tool called Reverse IP DNS Domain Check Tool from Seo logs for it. Just enter an url or IP and the tool displays all other domains that are hosted on the same server.

Inspiration taken from Digital Inspiration

You can right-click the link with Auto Copy installed and choose to open it in a new tab. Auto Copy opens the complete link which is simply put a great time safer. This is of course just one feature of Auto Copy. Another one which is especially helpful for webmasters that run blogs is that it “auto copies” marked text to the clipboard and lets you paste it again by using the middle mouse button.

Auto Copy offers some additional features such as accessing previous clipboard entries, paste marked text to the search bar or location bar and search for an entry directly. This is one of the few extensions that every webmaster should have installed.

Url Fixer is auto correcting urls that have obvious errors like a unknown extension (.cor instead of .com) but also takes a look at http and https and fixes those if an error occured. It does not however work with links that you click on websites which would be really awesome to say the least.

Url Fixer will also correct country code extensions such as .de for Germany or .co.uk for the United Kingdom. Definitely a must have add-on for Firefox.