27th November 2001

The Web. It's big. Thank you! I'll be here all week; don't forget to tip your waitress. Can't remember how to spell her name? Ah, neither can I. Has that ever happened to you? There's this site that you can never remember the spelling for. Or, it only has an IP address and doesn't resolve to a domain name. That's simple enough to fix on your (local) machine. There's a "HOSTS" file sitting somewhere in your Windows folder hierarchy. Go ahead and open it up in Notepad (or your favorite text editor). The first non-remarked line reads: "127.0.0.1 localhost" (sans quotes). This tells your system that the IP address (127.0.0.1) is also known as localhost. Let's say you know of a Web site that's difficult to spell (or recall at a moment's notice). Give it a new name! On a fresh line, enter the site's IP address and how you'd like it to be referenced from that point onward. How do you uncover a site's IP address? One way is to drop to a command prompt and PING it. Once you have that information, you can create a friendlier name for it. For example, you could resolve OBOEEXTRAVAGANZA.ORG (who's IP address is 255.255.255.0) to OBOEX.COM by adding: "255.255.255.0 OBOEX.COM" (sans quotes) to the HOSTS file. You can always place a pound [#] at the beginning of the line (or delete the reference entirely) if you run into trouble.