You have to find a website. You've forgotten the address. Using a search tool will take too long.

You take a shot at using the typical naming convention: www.name.com (or edu or org, etc.) Bingo.

Often this takes you where you want to go. But not always.

The University Computer Center now offers the capability for users to find University websites more easily by name through a process known as multi-homing. For web accounts that reside on the VM enterprise (mainframe) server, users can now establish website aliases that allow shorter and/or more direct names for departmental home pages.

For example: the site for University Communications has http://vm.uconn.edu/~wwwnews/ as its URL. With multi-homing, http://www.news.uconn.edu can be used as an alias. The old address still works, but we now publicize a new, shorter and clearer name for our website.

Again, this is only for those with accounts in the mainframe.

This new availability was announced during an October 21 meeting of campus webmasters.

Also at that meeting, John Hammond, from the computer center, noted that the center will recapture "vm.uconn.edu" for its homepage next May. He explained that this would require anyone using multi-homing to change all links that include the host prefix "vm.uconn.edu" on their webpages.

To help, an "exec" program has been created that will do that type of housecleaning for you. After the meeting, Hammond developed a fix so that changes to links carrying the "vm.uconn.edu" prefix do not have to be made. Webmasters were notified via email of this update - and also encouraged to continue using the exec program to standardize website links.

There are two options for an alias: a name that includes the full department name (such as "www.journalism.uconn.edu" or "journalism.uconn.edu" or the department abbreviation (such as "www.jour.uconn.edu" or "jour.uconn.edu") from the official university course catalog.

Any department representative who was unable to attend the meeting and also did not receive e-mail notification, may contact Haleh Ghaemolsabahi of the computer center at (860) 486-0221.