A: Right-click your desktop. Select New|Shortcut. For the command line, type in the following:
C:\*\EXPLORER.EXE /select,/e,/n,C:\
Replace "*" with "WINDOWS" for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP machines.
Replace "*" with "WINNT" for Windows NT and Windows 2000 machines.
Note that on machines that have been upgraded from one type of Windows to another, the above may not be correct. If one doesn't work, try the other.
A: AOL's EMail system doesn't follow the same standards adhered to by the rest of the world. When an AOL person clicks their "Add a Link to This EMail" button or whatever, the link is pasted into the EMail, but some other coding goes along with it. This other coding sometimes confuses non-AOL EMail programs, causing the link not to be recognized as such.
There are two possible fixes. First, the AOL person can cut and paste the link in manually, thereby avoiding adding the offending code, or the recipient can copy and past the URL manually into his browser to go wherever the URL is pointing to.
Generally speaking, the first is preferable, because most people see the codes and their minds shut down, assuming it's incomprehensible gibberish. More importantly, if the AOL person does this, the EMail will be universally acceptable, both to other AOL recipients and to non-AOL people. Also, some URLs are very long and convoluted, and are a bit of a pain to figure out. Especially after they've been forwarded on a few times.
If you have one of these messages from an AOL person who can't or won't climb down off their high horse and join the rest of the Internet, then you can usually extract the pure URL from the message yourself, copy it, and paste it into your browser. Consider the following:
<A HREF="http://www.domain.com/path/page.html">Click here: Sample Page</A>
In this example, everything between the quote marks, but not including the quote marks, is the URL. Everything else is AOL gibberish. If you hilighted the URL (http://www.domain.com/path/page.html), you could then hit Ctrl+C to copy it into the Windows clipboard. After opening or switching to your browser, you could go to the Address Bar, Location Box, or whatever your browser calls it that shows the location you're currently viewing (Internet Explorer users can hit Ctrl+L as a shortcut). Delete anything that's there, then you can paste it in by hitting Ctrl+V. Finally, hit ENTER, and your browser should take you there.
A: Uniform Resource Locator. It's that thing that tells your browser where to go in the Internet to find what you're looking for. Normally it comes in four pieces:
1. The Protocol. This tells your computer how the data will be sent and received. The most commonly used are "HTTP" and "FTP" ("HyperText Transfer Protocol" and "File Transfer Protocol" respectively).
2. The Domain. This is (usually) the computer (server) you're contacting and will be receiving data from. The ones you'll see most often start with "www.", followed by some sort of indication of the company or organization running the server, followed by the type of organization running the server (".com" for Commercial companies, ".edu" for Educational estabilshments like schools, ".gov" for Governmental bodies, and so on).
3. The Path. This tells the computer where (on the server) the requested file is. Like paths on your PC, it may be many "levels" deep. Where a Windows PC uses a backslash (\) to show the path, Internet servers use a forward slash. This is because the original Internet computers were mostly Unix based, and Unix uses the forward slash. Rumor has it that the only reason the backslash was ever used was to avoid lawsuits back when MS-DOS was still in it's infancy.
4. The File. Like a file on your computer, this is the file your computer is requesting from the server. If you're on the Web, it usually ends in ".html", which means it's a HyperText Markup Language file. This is the language one writes Web pages in.
5. (Optional) Parameters, Switches, and Whatnot. Anything after the filename is additional information that the Web page will need to do whatever it is supposed to do. It may include things like area codes, search strings, identification codes, passwords, or whatever.