I have had Internet access since 1987, although it was only newsgroups and e-mail at that time. My way of using the Internet might seem boring because it uses mostly Microsoft products, which may sound like heresy to some people who love knocking that company. There are many reasons for this stance, one being that I work in a software and hardware development environment that uses Microsoft products to a large extent. Similarly, at home I haven't found a need to go looking for non-Microsoft products. As I am the Reviews Editor of this magazine, I rarely have to buy my software, but most of my Internet software happens to be free for everyone. My main use of the Internet is e-mail and I enjoy using Microsoft Outlook 98, a free e-mail program. I subscribe to a dozen mailing lists and am involved with this group and with other organisations. My daily e-mail volume is about 100 messages, most of which are not addressed to me personally for my action. When I go away for a long weekend, I may find over 400 messages waiting for me. I prefer to apply Outlook's filters to route incoming mail into various predesignated folders, leaving relatively little in my Inbox. If I had multiple ISP accounts, I could have collected mail from all of them with one phone call. I used Outlook Express (its e-mail component) before Outlook 98 and was reasonably content with it because Outlook 97 had nothing for me. (Outlook 97 comes with Office 97.) Outlook 98 is the only Internet tool on my PC that is set to dial the ISP (when I click the Send and Receive button). All the others are "told" that they live on a local area network (LAN), which stops them from trying to dial a connection, given that one is already up. It follows that the last program I close before ending an Internet session is Outlook 98, as that brings up the dialogue box that asks me if I want to hang up. My next popular activity is Web browsing. Nearly always I am searching DejaNews for a solution to some problem or AltaVista for some web site. I use the advanced search features at both sites and I have taken the trouble to learn how to construct a search term. This reduces the number of hits to some manageable number less than 2,309,507. My browser of choice is Microsoft Internet Explorer 5a, which comes with Outlook Express 5. Participating in newsgroups is another of my
activities. As the newsgroups are full of time-wasters who fill up their favourite haunts with dozens of
daily posts, I use Outlook Express 5's filters extensively. This current version seems to have adopted many
of Forte Agent's clever features, such as watched threads, ignored threads, and so on. It is easier to make
filter rules now and I don't need to create numerous rules for identical actions. For example, I have just
one rule where I can add various names or e-mail addresses of people whose posts are not displayed to me.
Another rule looks for words in the Subject line whose presence suggests an off-topic message or the sign of
unwanted advertising material. Newsgroups have never looked so civilised since filters were incorporated. When posting to newsgroups, I use a different e-mail address to my normal one so as to deflect a lot of unsolicited junk mail. It happens to be a real address, which is managed by the ancient UUCP-based Waffle program (which was used to power Melb PC's proof-of-concept Mail and News site back in 1994). I check that account about once a month and find that it gets a small amount of genuine e-mail. To read such mail I use a program called Helldiver. I maintain several Web sites, including most of the pages of our own site. My preferred authoring tool is Microsoft Notepad, although I will use FrontPage 97 (or FrontPage Express) if speed is of the essence. I use FrontPage 97 at work, and appreciate that it simplifies Web site tasks for many people, but my own interactive pages use Perl- and Javascript-based CGI. I use Ipswitch WS_FTP LE for such pages; it is a file transfer program that is free for certain uses, although this version seems to have disappeared from the home site of that company. I also help to administer a few Internet sites, including our own, and use the standard Windows Telnet program to reach some of those Unix machines. I use WSPing32 to perform name-server lookups, pings, and traceroutes, being routine housekeeping tasks. To look up a user's name, I use the Tfinger program. Now, some of these programs are not necessarily the best in their class; they are simply what I have found and used from force of habit. I also use the
Web features of Microsoft Excel to construct matrices of information that include links to their respective
sources. For example, for competitive analyses of my employer's competitors, I mention the product and a link
to the specific page. I also mention the company and a link to its main page. I also monitor a friend's site
and its visibility at different search engines and directories, so that I can guide the webmaster to try
various techniques to increase such visibility. This is also documented in Excel. Some of my tools live on remote computers. My favourite search helper is Informant, a project of Dartmouth University (http://informant.dartmouth.edu). It monitors a few keywords and specific sites and sends me a notification when new sites are found or when monitored pages are updated. Other tools are software update sites such as hosted by Microsoft and Symantec. Now anyone with a Web browser can keep their software up-to-date thanks to various techniques employed by such companies. Isn't the Internet such a useful resource? I hope you find it as exciting as I do. About the author |
