Evaluating web sites to figure out who is producing the content

Who produced the information at these particular sites:

http://www.fred.net/nhhs/project/tjslaves.htm
http://www.ipl.org/ref/POTUS/tjefferson.html
http://http1.brunel.ac.uk/~iain/wwwstart/html/home.html

First: look for clues on the page itself

Is there a link at the top or bottom of the page? Is there a logo that will take you to the homepage of that site? Is there a link that says About or Home or FAQ or Copyright or Contact Us? Those kinds of links often tell you who is producing the content.

Next go "one level up"

Often times the page itself does not have any links. In that case you have to be more adventerous in finding out who produced the site. You delete one thing at a time from the end of the URL, hitting enter to try going "one level up" at a time.

So, using the first URL as an example:

Original:           http://www.fred.net/nhhs/project/tjslaves.htm
One level up:   http://www.fred.net/nhhs/project/

We would delete "tjslaves.htm" from the end of the URL and hit the "enter" or "return" key to tell our browser to load that new page. This tells our web browser to go to the "top" of the directory named "project" and load the default page for that directory.

In fact, there we find that student's from Mr. Cassuto's ninth grade government class have contributed to the following projects, and there is a link under "fictional short stories" to the project we just saw.

What if we wanted to know where Mr. Cassuto teaches? We'd go another level "up" the URL:

One level up:   http://www.fred.net/nhhs/project/
Another level:  http://www.fred.net/nhhs/

Here we find that Mr. Cassuto is part of North Hagerstown High School (which if we poke around we find out is in Maryland).

The difference between addresses with a tilde and those without

When you see an address with a tilde, that implicity says "go to this user's home directory." So, deleting the URL all the way up to the first slash after the part with the tilde with allow you to go directly to the home page for that user.

An example of this is found in the third URL,
http://http1.brunel.ac.uk/~iain/wwwstart/html/home.html

To find out who's site this HTML guidebook is part of, we would go all the way up to the top of the web site:
http://http1.brunel.ac.uk/~iain/