address bar URL format

[thegitksan]

Hi all. Here's an interesting challenge. I am trying to force the URL displayed in any visitor's browser to display without the 'WWW' leading.

My new domain name is 'athyrium.ca', and I'd like it to display as 'http://athyrium.ca', instead of the more common display of 'http://www.athyrium.ca'.

My web hosts (doteasy.com) provided a clue, something to do with framesets and a 'cloaked page', but in order to maintain lower costs, their system is not really set up for a lot of coding help.

So, any takers? I know it can be done - I've seen it at lots of web sites already, so there must be a solution.

Regards,
thegitksan

[Roy Sinclair]

There's no way you can alter the contents of the address bar from javascript short of navigating to another web page.

This may be more a function of your web server accepting the address without the leading WWW. When I ping your address with or without the WWW I get the same IP address.

To not show it for people who enter it you'd have to redirect them to the page sans the WWW.

This of course begs the question of why it this even remotely important .

[thegitksan]

Thanks for the reply. I suspected as much, after a lot of digging around, that it is probably a server-based setting, and therefore out of my control.

And sorry, it actually WAS important to me, otherwise I'd have never asked the question. I'm not a web programmer by trade - I'm a GIS mapper, which is a technical profession easily as complex as web programming is. I'm hardly a dummy, but it DOES take time to learn new things and so the question was not a stupid question.

Thanks for describing how you checked the site with ping. I hadn't thought of that. Now I have another method.

Regards,
Russell

[brothercake]

You could probably acheive this using mod_rewrite in apache. Check out http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html or ask in the general server-side forum

[thegitksan]

Yes, again, this confirms whatI have been suspecting. thanks for confirming it for me, that some setting within the server would be where I'd look.

Couldn't sleep last night and so I went digging again, and after doing a lot of search variants along the line of 'url format', 'location bar format', 'url address' etc. etc., I did suddenly get a bazillion results popping out for mod_rewrites.

Which, when I looked a little deeper, seemed promising. I've got my own Linux PC here at home, my 2nd machine, with apache installed but not configured. Perhaps this will be a good place for me to dig a little more, in the docs for Apache.
Might also try to re-create the problem - if I can do that, I'll know what caused it.

Perhaps between your suggestion for where to look, my own search results (Copernic Pro, an excellent meta-crawler), and my Linux box, I can find the solution and then request my host run the re-write.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys, I do appreciate your taking the time. And please forgive my earlier "snippy" retort. I'm arrogant enough in my own profession, lord knows, so a little well-earned arrogance in somebody else doesn't bother me very long.

Thanks again!
Regards,
Russell