Apache is a freely available, and highly popular, open-source web server.

Originally, Apache was designed for Unix. Now versions are available for most operating systems including Windows, OSX and Linux. There are also numerous add-ons and tailored versions of the server using the Apache module API. The name Apache comes from its origins as a series of “patch files.”

Read Webmonkey’s Apache for Beginners article for more details about Apache.

Information and downloads can be found at the Apache Software Foundation website.

The dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) is an addressing protocol for TCP/IP networks.

IP addresses are leased to individual computers on the network from a DHCP server. DHCP allows users to move to different locations on a network without having to bother a network administrator (and they hate being bothered) to manually assign a new IP address. DHCP is useful in homes with several computers sharing a single high-speed internet connection.

If anyone who isn’t a network engineer mentions “hits” to you, they’re probably trying to pull the cyberwool over your eyes. Hits are the individual requests a server answers in order to render a single web page completely. The page document itself, the various images on the page, any other media files embedded there – each of these items represents a separate hit. In other words, the more GIFs used in a page, the higher the hit count – so while hits may be a good indication of poor page design, they won’t tell you much about traffic.

The conversation between browsers and servers takes place according to the hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP.

Written by Tim Berners-Lee, it was first implemented on the web in 1991 as HTTP 0.9. Currently, web browsers and servers support version 1.1 of HTTP. It supports persistent connections, meaning that once a browser connects to a web server, it can receive multiple files through the same connection.

Microsoft’s internet information server, or IIS, is one of the most widely used commercial web server applications on the market. It runs on the Windows operating system and it incorporates all of the tools required by high-traffic commercial websites, such as security, extensions, logging, database interfaces and all of the necessary protocols.

The domain name system (DNS) is an internet service that translates domain names (like wired.com) into IP addresses (like 208.77.188.166).

We use domain names because people can remember words better than numbers, but web servers still need the IP numbers to access the page. Every time you use a domain name, a DNS server must translate the name into the corresponding IP address.

The mail protocol most people are most familiar with is POP, which has long been the industry standard for serving and retrieving email. A client, which is the sort of desktop mail program with which everyone’s familiar, connects to the POP server and says, “Do you have any messages for me?” If the answer is yes, the client gets a list of the messages, downloads them, and optionally either deletes them from the server or leaves them in place. That’s pretty much the entire capability of POP.

IMAP is an alternative to POP that offers many advantages. Notably, it keeps centralized copies of messages on the server, where they can be accessed from anywhere, rather than fragmented and hidden away in various non-synchronized, non-centralized desktop mailboxes. The mail client interacts with the centralized messages, so your mailboxes look the same at any computer you access them from. The read/unread/replied status of each message is tracked on the server too.

Since IMAP requires long-term storage of messages on the server, email providers have long preferred POP and its quick, space-saving turnaround, which passes the expense of long-term storage on to the user. In fact, almost no popular consumer email provider offers IMAP. Running your own server, though, you can take advantage of IMAP’s benefits. The majority of desktop email clients — Outlook, Eudora, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, et al. — are already ready for IMAP. If you prefer a web-based interface, you can set that up too.

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A pageview – a single screen of content – refers to the sum total of what a user sees in a browser window. Before frames came along, pageviews were a hell of a lot easier to explain and to track:the page you saw was one simple page of content. But frame-based pages are comprised of a whole mess of documents. The Webmonkey frontdoor brings together three different pages:the frameset itself, the content page in the top frame, and the ad called up in the bottom frame. Yet in the language of pageviews, these three pages add up to a single pageview.

The path tool in Photoshop enables the selecting, identifying, and saving of parts of an image more precisely than the Lasso tool. Using the path tool, you can create an adjustable line connected by dots around a particular area. Once you’ve completed a circle, the path tool will select that area, allowing you to name and save it. The path can then be manipulated just as you’d manipulate a layer.