The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Two tips for intermediate internauts
Carol Daniels
 cad@melbpc.org.au

Where are all these those visitors coming from?

As if keeping track of the links on your own web site isn't hard enough, you will also want to know who is linking to you. It's a way of measuring the success of your site. When you move your web site or change your directory structure, you can also use the information to let those that are linking to you know about the changes. A less pleasant (but very useful) way to use the technique, is to discover if other sites are appropriating your content. Even if you have content you allow others to use freely, you generally want them to take a copy of your material, not link to your host.

So how do you do it? There are a number of ways, but one of the quickest and easiest is via AltaVista.

Point your browser at http://www.altavista.com/

In the search box enter the following search string
 link:YourURL -host:YourDomainName
Where you replace "YourURL" with the appropriate actual information. For example (Figure 1):
 link:www.melbpc.org.au -host:melbpc.org.au
This specifies a search for pages that contain links to Melb PC's web site, but excludes those which are on Melb PC's site (that is to say, internal between Melb PC's own pages). The results of the example search are shown in Figure 2.


Figure 1.  (click on image for full size)


Figure 2. (click on image for full size)

A search for
 link:melbpc.org.au -host:melbpc.org.au
 is less specific and finds pages with any link to our domain name, (including mailto links). For our example search, there were about ten times more pages with any link with our domain name, as there were links to files on our web. Since many of these are pages with a mailto link to a Melb PC Internet subscriber, it's an interesting way to get a glimpse of he kinds of things that interest our members. We are, as you might already imagine, a very diverse lot!

What's plugged in?

I'm a sucker for the latest plugins, if you are too, you may also find yourself wondering which plugins you do (or don't)have, and whether or not they are enabled.

Netscape Communicator has several cool commands to display information about your browser's set up, and one of the most useful is about:plugins, which will display information about all the plugins you have installed, including version number, file type and whether or not they are enabled.

How do you get this useful information? Simple.

Launch your browser, click on File, then select Work Offline

Now, in your browser's address bar, type in the following:
 about:plugins
 and you should see something like Figure 3.

Three more commands which you invoke as above, are

  • about:cache
  • about:memory-cache
  • about:image-cache
w hich report on the status of your disk cache (Figure 4), memory cache (Figure 5) and which images are in the cache (Figure 6), respectively.


Figure 3. (click on image for full size)

Figure 4 (click on image for full size)


Figure 5 . (click on image for full size)


Figure 6 . (click on image for full size)

Reprinted from the May 1999 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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