Trouble Browsing Pages


Some folks have reported to us that they are having trouble accessing the pages on The Writer's Gallery.

After some research and a helping hand from one of our readers, we have come to the conclusion that there are several things you can do.

First of all, the problems tend to stem from proxy servers or browsers that do not follow the standards for access. Many of our links use what is known as an indirect reference to a page. This looks like this...

  /short/fabiano/xyx.html
A UNIX user might understand this to mean a directory. But in the parlance of HTML and web servers, this is a reference to a file that is further referenced as part of the "Root" directory of the web page. This serves as a security arrangement, and usually causes no problems when accessing a file via the
  http://www.writersg.com/fabiano/xyz.html
method.

However some browsers have a difficult time. Usually the problem is with a proxy server. For instance, AOL has had this problem for sometime (don't know if they have fixed it yet). The reason we assumed was that the proxy server would use FTP to fetch the file, instead of using HTTP. However, if the proxy were implemented correctly it would attempt to get:

  ftp://www.writersg.com/fabiano/xyz.html
and that should work fine.

In any case, what is happening is that somewhere along the line, our standard indirect references are causing fits for some of our readers.

We will strive to add the "http://www.writersg.com/" on all of the links, however, as you can imagine, this will take some time. In the meantime the suggested mechanism is to fill this in yourself (add

  http://www.writersg.com/
on the front of the link's reference, making
  /short/fabiano/xyz.html
into:
  http://www.writersg.com/short/fabiano/xyz.html


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