You own a blog and you write for it, but do you know how it works. Or rather how the entire web works? What are servers, clients, hosts, HTML, CSS, Javascript? Here I tried to present a brief overview of the web technologies. I would feel happy, if you get benefited from this post. Understanding all these technologies will help you to maintain your site properly and you will know whom to contact when it creates problems.

Understanding Client, Server and Host

When a visitor opens your blog, the machine or in particular the browser he opens to access it is client. When the visitor reads a particular post of yours then the browser sends the server(the machine where your blog data is stored) a request to send data.

The server then prepares the content and sends the content to the browser. So if for any specific reason the content is not coming to browser or the page is timing out or you are getting error, you know for sure the problem is with the server. Basically in the hosted server there runs a software which is called web server (IIS for windows, Apache for Linux). This software controls all. In the server end there also runs a programming language ( PHP, ASP etc), and the web server after reading the extension of the requested file name, handles the control to the scripting language. This language then applies logic, identifies the visitor and creates the content which will in turn be sent to the browser.

Understanding Three Layers of Web

When the visitor reads your blog, they get it wrapped up in nice font, color, graphics, background color and well structured and formatted text. Who controls this graphical aspect of your blog or what can change the appearance of your blog? To understand it, you need to know what are HTML, CSS and Javascript. You can well understand it if you can think of three nature of your posts. One is the content, one is the presentation and the last one is the behavior of your blog. In a simple way,

• The top of all these is content and the content needs to be presented in a structured manner, like heading will go top, text will come next. There can be links which can have their own places. This is controlled by HTML or what we call Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML uses some tag like body, table and the browser understands these tags. After reading tags browser comprehends the meaning and then give the content the shape it requires.
• Once you have a structured content, you need to provide it some cool looks. Like heading will be in red color and text will be in black. All links will be in blue. The background of sidebar menu will have a cool image. This is the presentation or appearance of your content and CSS handles that.
• Now once you have a good wrapper for your content, you might need to add some behavior to it. Like you may want to pop up a thank you message or want to display warning message when anybody does not fill up the email address in the subscription form. This can be done using Javascript.

At any point of time your aim should be to keep three layers separated, because why you would like to spare content when you just want to change presentation or behavior.

Server Creates All, Client Controls It

The fact is that, all these are created by server and when the client or browser receives data it presents it and controls it. To understand this you need to know the three layers of server side technology. These three layers are called Model View Controller or Data-Business-Presentation layer.

If you remember, in the beginning of this article I wrote that the web server gives controls to the server side scripting language who in turns prepares content. This is indeed true. You can well understand that mother of all these is the data or article text which you typed. This data is stored in a space in the server. If there is not well defined mechanism to save and retrieve dat, then obviously both the saving and retrieval part will be time consuming there by making your blog slow to load. So there is another software called database(MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle etc) which does it. Now there we need a script which will build data save and retrieval logic and will interact with the database.

• This script layer of server side program ( Wordpress is such a program or software) creates an interface between the next business layer and database and we call it data layer. If your blog is getting database error then the culprit is this data layer.
• Now we need another script layer which will build logic to display the content. Like what content to fetch when anybody clicks on archive. Or how many posts from the archived posts to be shown as most recent posts. This is called business layer. If your program is not showing error but displaying data incorrectly then the bug is in business layer.
• The third layer is presentation layer. This is actually the entire layer sent to client end. The business layer requests data as per logic to data layer which then interacts with database and sends the content. The business layer then fills up the designated spaces of presentation layer with data and the entire presentation layer is then sent to browser. the browser from that point onwards takes the control.

I am not sure if this very brief of the vast technology will be able to help you. If not I am coming up with detailed discussion on each section. If yes, then still I am coming up with the proposed but I will know that my this effort has created a ground to place the vivid article.