after going through the book and playing with thephile, i am now wondering how blogging to email services dynamically setup your mailbox,blogging website,domain i.e if you sign up on maybe www.xanga.com, your blog can be accessed through john.yoursite.com or xanga.com/john and if you sign up with hotmail.com your email can be accessed [email protected]. Also how do blogging sites like xanga.com provide their users with website editing capabilities.

Any links to tutorials or Guidiance to where to start looking would be appreciated

rrr

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rrr

You can set up your own domain by registering it thru one of the private companies that let you register domains. You can point your domain to one of your own servers, or to a server owned by a hosting company.

Email servers use a special feature of the Domain Name Service called an "MX" record to identify the mailservers at a given domain. A big domain (like hotmail.com) will have a number of mailservers to provide fail-over in case one of them dies.

Any incoming mail addressed to a user at a domain will use the "MX" records for that domain to identify the correct SMTP server to receive the email.

Website editting is generally provided by using IE (via JavaScript commands) to edit the HTML as rich text:
http://www.codeproject.com/jscript/htmlarea.asp

Eric