append works, but not appendto

append works, but not appendto

Ok, I'm a newb to this, did about 2 hours worth the research and can't figure this out for the life of me.  Basically I have a URL that I'm trying to write out to the screen so I can use it for debugging.  When I was using appendTo it doesn't work, I think it's giving me some error " Uncaught Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: ://somehost:8080/yada..."  But the append works fine and appends it and shows it on the screen perfectly fine.  I thought appendTo and append were supposed to be the same?  What am I missing?

Source:
<html>
<head>
  <script>
        var url = 'http://somehost:8080/yada/JSON/test?jsoncallback=?';
$('#testing').append(url);
$(url).appendTo('#testing2');
  <script>
</head>
<body>

<p id="testing/>
<p id="testing2"/>
</body>
</html>