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Class Five: The Internet (continued)

I. Bookmarks and Favorites; History

Once you've found a web site you consider useful, you probably won't want to have to follow a whole trail of links every time you want to get back to it. Rather than having to write down the URL of every site you want to remember, you can just bookmark them or add them to your favorites. ("Favorites" is the Internet Explorer name, but many people still refer to the concept "generically" by the original, neutral-sounding Netscape term "bookmarks"; after all, I may need to go back many times to the IRS web site, but I would hardly call it one of my "favorite" places. One of the annoying things about Microsoft software is their penchant for cutesy names - at least they don't call it "My Favorites" [yet].)

To add a page you are visiting to your favorites list, just click on Favorites - Add to Favorites on the menu bar. If you want it in a subfolder, just click on the folder name in the little "Explorer" window in the dialogue box. You can also change the name - some web pages have useful names like "Untitled" or just a long URL with lots of CGI code.

To go back to a page you have bookmarked, just click on the Favorites icon on the toolbar. In the newer versions, instead of a drop down menu, you get a left pane. This is one of the best features in Internet Explorer. IE also puts your favorites list on the Start Menu, so you can launch the browser right to the page you want. To edit the favorites list, go to Favorites, Organize Favorites; or just use the left pane as you would Windows Explorer.

Favorites are saved as individual links (the same as shortcuts) in the Windows/Favorites folder, in Windows 9x, or in Documents and Settings/profilename/Local Settings/Favorites in 2000 (and I think in XP); Don't forget to include these files in your backups!

What if you forgot to bookmark a recently visited site? No problem. The browser keeps a History List for a preset time (which you can specify in Tools - Options. The History button is right on the Toolbar (the sundial icon), and displays the history as a left pane, with folders for days of the current week and weeks ago, then subfolders for web sites. Just click on the page you want and the browser will go to it. You can right click on a history item to add it to your favorites. The History folder is found in the same parent directory as the Favorites folder, in case you want to back it up.

II. Saving and Downloading

Receiving a file on your computer is called downloading; sending a file to another computer is called uploading.

What many people don't understand is that anything you can see or hear on your computer - a web page, a picture, background music, or whatever - has already been downloaded. In most cases, it will be in a browser cache. I explained the purpose of caches in the first class; they speed things up by keeping recent data from somewhere that's slow to access (here, the Internet) somewhere that's faster to access (here, your hard disk.)

Thus, unless you've changed the default settings in your Preferences, when you hit the Back button on your browser, the browser doesn't go out and download the previous page again; it just loads it from the cache. You'll notice that it goes back much more quickly than it went to the page in the first place, especially if the page had a lot of graphics. Thus, if you want a new copy of the page (because it changes often or because it didn't download properly the first time) you have to use the Refresh button.

If you want to save a copy of a web page that you're currently looking at, just go to File, Save As. A dialogue box, similar to the Save As box in any other program, will come up asking you where to save the file on your disk. Browse to the folder you want to save it in, change the name if you want to, and click OK. The file will save almost instantly - because the computer is just copying the file from the cache to another folder on your hard disk.

To save a picture, just right click and choose Save Picture As; the rest of the steps are the same.

If you find a page which has links to many pages or images - e.g. a table of contents or an index to clip art - you can save them without going to each one, by right clicking on the link and choosing Save Target As. Just be sure that the link goes to what you want, and not just to another table of contents or index at a lower level.

When you save a target, the same dialogue box comes up; the only difference is that the download will take time: since you haven't looked at the page/image, it needs to be downloaded rather than just copied from the cache. The time will be the same as if you had opened it and then saved it, so you don't save any connect time by using Save Target As, but you may save your own time, since you can download many files at the same time while you're doing something else. (At least you can in Windows 9x; one of the frustrations of Windows 2000 is that it will not let you save more than two files at a time.)

If you need to save a really large number of files from one site, or files at multiple levels, you may want to get a program designed specifically for this. They are called offline browsers (although they are not actually browsers, but require either Netscape or Internet Explorer to look at the downloaded pages.) I have tried two shareware programs, WebMirror and WebZip, but I can't recommend either one: both have many bugs.

Besides the things you can see in your browser, there are other files you can download from the Internet: freeware, shareware, and even some commercial programs; zipped collections of fonts, or clipart; documents in Word processing formats or Adobe's Portable Document Format; music and video; and a whole number of other things. Because these files are intended to be downloaded rather than viewed in a browser, you generally only have to click on them for the Save As box to come up, rather than going to the Save As command in your menu; otherwise, the process works exactly the same way. Choose a location on your disk, hit OK, and they download.

III. Cached Files

As I said before, everything you can see on your browser ends up in your cache. (With a few exceptions: some music and video files, and a very few images, have tags which prevent them from being cached, to protect their copyright.) You can access these files from Windows Explorer.

In Internet Explorer, the cache is divided into several subfiles, which are located in the same parent directory as the Favorites and History folders, in the Temporary Internet Files folder. You can open these in a graphics viewing program; however, to open them from Windows Explorer, you must copy them to another folder first, otherwise they try to open the original site when you click on them, rather than opening the image.

IV. Multimedia Plug-ins and Active-X controls

In addition to the file types which are natively supported by your browsers - HTML, jpg and gif images, etc., there are many other types of multimedia, such as streaming audio and video, virtual reality, etc. on the Web, which can be viewed with additional programs which can be downloaded and used from within your browser.

Microsoft calls these Active-X controls, and they download automatically (unless you have set your preferences to prevent this) when you try to view a file which requires them; Netscape's are called plug-ins, and most of them also download automatically, but some require you to go to another website and download them manually. Not all types of multimedia have both Active-X controls and plug-ins, so some kinds of content require one or the other browser. Plug-ins go in a plug-ins folder in the Netscape folder; Active-X controls go in the Windows folder in a subfolder called Downloaded Programs.

While some plug-ins have to be purchased, most of them, and all the Active-X controls, are free. The companies make their profits selling the software to produce the content, and the more people have the free software to view them, the more developers will buy the software to produce them.

Some programs have both a standalone component and a browser plug-in component, so that their type of content can be viewed either on the Web from a browser or on your computer independently. Examples of this are Adobe Acrobat Reader and Real Player. (The last class will discuss types of media files and what programs will play them.)

V. Portals, Search Engines, and Directories

There are millions of sites on the Internet. Where do you start? Some sites are designed to be doorways to the Internet. They are called Portals. The competition among portals is tremendous; they are among the most profitable sites on the Web, because they get the highest traffic and can charge the highest advertising rates. Examples of portals are Yahoo.com, Msn.com, and Netscape's Netcenter.com. Yahoo.com, the most successful of all, evolved from a directory site into a portal. Microsoft and Netcenter have the advantage that they are the default home pages for all Internet Explorer and Netscape users. Other portals target particular demographic groups: Disney's Go.com targets families, Snap.com targets college students and Yuppies, etc.

The idea of a portal is that a user starts out at the portal site everytime he or she connects to the net. The portal is a page with links to a search engine, web directory, phone and e-mail address directories, and popular news, weather, sports and stock reports; it will offer web-based e-mail, map and travel services, and of course, lots of advertisements.

A portal may be a good place to start for someone new to the Net, but as you become more experienced and know where you want to go you will probably find these all-in-one sites more of a pain than a benefit. You can change your homepage in Tools - Options to any page you like -- including a blank page, so you don't have to waste time going to any other site before whatever site you are going online for. You will still sometimes want to use the services offered by the portals; just bookmark the individual services' pages. What are these services about?

Directories such as the original Yahoo are sites which visit, index, and classify other websites, and offer searchable lists of sites by keywords. They are also called web guides. Search Engines are sites such as the original Alta Vista which produce a searchable index of websites mechanically, using spiders. Actually, most search sites today use a combination of the two approaches. Probably the most comprehensive search site at present is Google (www.google.com), which has indexed more than two billion pages. There are also meta-search pages such as Mother and Dogpile which send a query to several search sites at once.

If you are searching for information on a general topic, a directory will give you (ideally) a well-chosen list of relevant sites; a search engine will give you a much larger list, most of which will not be really relevant to what you are searching for. On the other hand, if you are searching for very specific or unusual information, a directory may have nothing available, while a search engine may find a good number of useful places.

You can also use the Search button in your browser to go directly to one or more directories and search engines, depending on how you have set up your preferences.

There are also specialized search engines/directories. Some can search specifically for images and multimedia on webpages; others, called Local Area Search Engines, search only a particular type of website, for instance websites dealing with Mathematics or Mediaeval Studies, and can be much more comprehensive within that area.

VI. Web-based E-mail

Available free on many of the portals, web-based e-mail is an e-mail account which you access through the web rather than with an e-mail server. Your messages are stored on a web page, and you view them with your browser rather than your e-mail program.

The advantages of web-based e-mail are that you can access your e-mail from anywhere you can find web access, without reconfiguring the software or making a long-distance call to your home ISP, and that you can keep the same e-mail address if you change ISP's. The disadvantages are that there is usually a smaller limit on the size of e-mails or attachments you can receive, and on the amount of e-mail you can have before it starts to bounce back with Mailbox Full messages; it is inherently less secure; it may be slower to access or download (and the popular web mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail seem to have server problems continually); and as the names fill up, you may end up with an address like johndoe986734@hotmail.com rather than johndoe@somtel.com.

VI. Updating and Downloading Freeware and Low Cost Software

Freeware refers to programs which are free, but they are still copyrighted, so there may be limitations on what you can do with them, such as for non-commercial use only, or for single users only, and of course you aren't allowed to reverse engineer them and reuse the code. Public domain software - of which there is very little- is software which is uncopyrighted, and you can do anything you want with. Shareware is software which can be downloaded and used for a specified period of time, usually thirty days, or in some cases a specified number of uses, to evaluate it, after which you are supposed to register it, usually for a fee. Prices may range from $5 or $10 to as expensive as commercial programs; probably the typical registration fee is from $20 to $40. Some shareware times-out and stops working after the thirty days, unless you register; others have only a partial set of features, or are otherwise "crippled"; and some work fine forever and rely on your own honesty. Demos are usually "crippled" or time-limited versions of commercial programs; the distinction between those and shareware is usually the higher price and prestige of the complete program. Betas are programs which are still being tested; many are available on the Internet but you should be careful of using them, as they will (naturally) be buggier than production releases, and make sure you have your disk backed up before you do. Some betas will time-out after a certain date.

Eventually, all your software will become outdated and need to be renewed. There are two levels of improvements to software, upgrades and updates. An upgrade is a substantial improvement of a program, which will usually add many new features, a new interface, or the like. Usually upgrades will increase the first digit after the decimal point in the version number; major upgrades will increase the number itself: e.g. Netscape 4.0, 4.5, 4.6 are (free) upgrades; Netscape 6.0 was a major upgrade. (Some developers are not altogether honest about reflecting the actual importance this way, and may increase the number for a very small improvement, or even skip numbers (there was no Netscape 5.0 - although judging by Netscape 6, there should have been), to make it seem that there product is more up-to-date than competing products because it has a higher version number. Since Windows 95, many programs have taken to using the date, as Windows 2000, Office 2000, Wordperfect Office 2000, and so on.) Upgrades generally cost a good percentage of the price of the new program. (Of course, this doesn't matter if the program is free to begin with.) Updates, on the other hand, are generally minor; they will fix bugs or other minor "issues", perhaps allow the program to interact with later versions of some other programs, or make other small improvements. Updates are generally free, and can usually be downloaded from the company's website. They typically have a version number with a second digit after the decimal, or a letter: e.g. Netscape 4.08, 4.61; Graphic Workshop 1.03d; etc. The problem is, especially if you have a large number of programs, how to find out whether your software needs to have an update, and where to find it. There are programs available which can search your disk and then compare it to a database on their website, and give you a list of links you just click on to download and install the latest version. (The database is downloaded, your list is not uploaded, so the sites cannot acquire information on what you have on your hard disk.) Some are commercial, such as McAfree's Oil Change, which charges $30.00 a year, in addition to the cost of the Oil Change program itself. However, one program, which I find to be even better than Oil Change (because it has more of the freeware and shareware programs which I use, as opposed to the commercial programs Oil Change focuses on) is free. It is called Catch-Up, and is located on the cnet web site. This is also the site where you go to actually do the downloads.