Connecting to Cyberspace - (via Macintosh)

Outline
Netscape tips Options Warning: call home! Where are my downloads? Why won't this open? What are Netscape's drawbacks?	Real tools Mail, with boxes. And copies. Newsgroups Find and retrieve files. Lots all at once. And have records to look back on. Managing one's own web page files	The Future, today Centralized configuration (Internet Config) My hyperlinked stickies (ICeTEe extension)

- That site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 2.0. Download Netscape Now!

Using different versions of Netscape (simultaneously?! yes!)

The Options menu is a good place to start. I like to have an idea of what my choices are and know where to go back to if things work out funny later on. First, to get as big a window as possible I drag the title bar to top left and resize box to bottom right corner of my screen. (Why Netscape can't remember window size and location from session to session is beyond me.) I pull down the menu several times to check or uncheck the basics: I leave the Toolbar and Buttons off. I occasionally turn on Show Location, and always Auto Load Images. If I get too impatient, I hit Command-period (on my Mac) to stop the loading at the time. This also works fine for cancelling a net connection that just doesn't seem to be happening.

Now open the Preferences box, with some time set aside and probably a pencil handy. And please let me know if you can fill me in on things I'm missing, unclear on, or just plain wrong about here!

• Windows: Fill in your own home page as per the net administrator, and check in from time to time. I almost got shut out of the net because of a login script change I didn't know about! Now I check.
• Links: I like them underlined, and marked for 30 days.
• Fonts: Times 12 is the most readable info I can squeeze onto my monitor, and the Italics don't disappear. I sure wish I could select Palatino to print with though. My fixed font is Mishawaka, extracted from Eudora with the Font/DA mover and stuck into a new suitcase so I could drop it into my system folder. I like to be able to tell a zero from an oh, and one from el.
• Colors: Let document override, otherwise I use a custom combo. With all the nifty new pages out there, some with black backgrounds, I'd miss some nice effects (or maybe even all the text) otherwise.
• Background: I prefer a somewhat lighter-than-the-default gray. Click the box and fiddle with it.
• Mail and News: Fill in the boxes according to local net specs. I tried some others one night when my news server was down and found they won't let me in.
• Cache and Network: Mine is sized at 6MB, set to check source once a day. Updates on demand (for local viewing while writing, for instance) are effected by choosing "Reload" from the View menu. The cache folder -- ooh! I just checked it and it's got 1,122 items for a total of 6,218,001 bytes taking up 9MB on disk! The math (why a 6MB maximum is distended to 9MB) escapes me, but I'm not desperate for that space at this moment so I'll leave it alone. There's a button here to dump the cache but it presumably takes less time to load a previously viewed item if it's cached from before. I dragged something from it and dropped it on my Netscape alias and it opened up a little icon-GIF I saw somewhere a few weeks ago.
  The network stuff I'm not sure of and the defaults are still shown there.
• Images and Security: Probably wasting a little time, I enjoy watching while images load. Security functions are all unchecked - I trust my fellow netsurfers, and my dispute rights with credit card companies in the rare event that any discrepancy does pop up.
• Applications and Directories: This is where you find the first few helper applications indicated, and once one is secured (and deposited in your Internet folder, perhaps) here is where the link is made to give Netscape the added power of Telnetting and so on. I haven't set these up yet.
• Directories: This is where downloads show up. I found this out after my first episode of searching high and low for the files I'd found and grabbed from cyberspace. I think the default was inside the Netscape folder. I have it set up so that it points to a folder in easy reach on my desktop, and everything netwise that I use (except aol) is set up to drop files there.
• Helpers: This is where Netscape derives alot of borrowed power. I like that the list seems quite extensive, and that it gives me clues about what it would like to see as a translation/display resource. This is where file mapping preferences are set up for Netscape. I'd like to see it support InternetConfig, though - a joint effort to avoid duplication of this type of information. I fear, however, that it is going the opposite direction and trying to become NetscapeWorks, another massive cumbersome lump of code demanding a huge block of memory and doing everything, but not very well.
• Proxies: Much as I hate to admit, I'm clueless on this one. But I haven't yet gone over the information at Netscape Handbook: Menu Items and I bet I'd find some answers there.
• MORE!: There is a quick-and-dirty page of tips I put together at Resortguide, where I'm the Webster.

Once these initial parameters are set, exploring the menus will show many other great features. One of the less obvious goodies (took me a while, anyway) include the menu that pops up when you hold down the mouse button just about anywhere. Choices include copying (to the clipboard), saving as a bookmark, or actually downloading nifty graphic stuff you might see on a page. See a nice bar, or bullet - just hold that mouse button down when you click on it, choose the right selection from the menu that eventually appears, and that little sucker shows up in the folder you picked out above.

Another really useful feature that I still breeze right by and miss is the popup menu at the bottom of the Save As... dialog box that by default will simply copy the text from a page (BORing!) but can with no additional effort save the page as source code! This item needs to be navigated to where you will be able to find it from within the dialog before you hit the return key or OK button. Double-clicking on it or opening it in a word processor will reveal the secret of the web - it's all text, but with markup tags inserted to tell the browser how to interpret or display things, and where to find the pictures it needs. So, close it up again and open it in the browser instead. Use the File -> Open File menu choice or be lazy like me. I keep a small alias of each thing I use alot in an open folder on my desktop and drag things over and drop them on what I want to open it. (This is particularly handy when working with a source file, since lots of things will open it, each in their own way.) If you have made some changes to the file and they don't show up in the browser, you may need to Reload (in View menu) the page since the browser prefers to look in it's cache files first.

Opening a source file in the browser window is called "local" viewing. The links to remote (from the original document) sites will still work, like most of my Xrefs file or all the remote places in the Virtual Voyager link list, or all your own bookmarks listed on a page (Bookmarks -> View Bookmarks and find the button to Export them.) Some things will not work well, like the rest of the page for the Virtual Voyager, and need to be turned off or cut out using a word processor first.

What are Netscape's drawbacks?

Netscape* has many very fine features; this itself is one of it's problems. Many of Netscape's enhancements are simply not kosher- they do not conform to the W3O standards. I discuss this in greater detail in the section on building web pages. Before I discovered that glitch, however, I was already not entirely happy with my webtrotting. If I was downloading a file and tried to do anything else while I was waiting, Netscape made the assumption not that I was bored and trying to do some multitasking, but that I wanted to abort the download. It was* kind enough to ask, but unwilling to cooperate. FTP lists in the browser window are very pretty, but take up entirely too much space. I'm not happy scrolling through that many pages of text. I fear the results of trying to print out such a format. I had used Anarchie for FTPs and downloads before, and do again, unless it's something really quick. I also find it irritating to not be able to find any record of where I got the files, or of mail I have sent, or where I've been. The Go menu's history is wiped clean upon quitting the application. I don't always know if I want a bookmark at the right time, and those things just tend to accumulate unmanagably as it is. I finally figured out what the little blue up/down arrows in the View Bookmarks window do (move a selected bookmark up/down the list) but I'd like to opt to see a long list of everywhere I've ever been if necessary. I'd like to see Netscape use the services of more helper applications, or at least offer the option. I have found that cooperation offers more power than total independence does. It allows for more flexibility, allowing users to tailor their access suite to their own needs and with specific versions of favorite tools. Sometimes upgrades remove our favorite features, while adding more cumbersome stuff we don't want. The bigger the package, the less likely it is to please everyone.

Tools for Using the Internet

Eudora has been around quite a while, I hear, and is available in a number of versions for various platforms. The version I use is, of course, the latest freeware version for Macintosh. The multiple mailboxes that can be set up (with lower heirarchies within them) plus an in, out, and trash box that needs to be emptied quite deliberately, make it a joy to use. The preference options are vast, and the creation of a signature file as well as an icon in the message composing window to turn it off as necessary are great features.

Newswatcher is the newsreader brought to you by the maker of Disinfectant, and at the same price. John Norstadt has made a wonderful tool here, and updates it to keep up with the latest changes. It now uses InternetConfig settings, helping to avoid long nights of setting up preferences and helpers. Exploring the menus will reveal most of it's nifty features.

Anarchie is one of the greatest things I've ever seen. I use it to find files in cyberspace, and to get index lists (file descriptions) from some of the massive archive sites so I can spend a few days deciding just what I really want to download and try out. It will do any number of tasks simultaneously. You can double-click three files and a list, and as it begins retrieving them you can move to another directory level and begin exploring there. The log file is also double-clickable, taking you back to a directory you visited some time in the past. It is also handy to select a line and copy it: only the actual address is copied, suitable for pasting into a destination box for itself, another tool, or a web page text that might be under construction. If I used Anarchie to get something, I know I can make it really simple for you to get it too.

Fetch is the predecessor to Anarchie, more or less. It doesn't offer the powerful search features or multitasking, and for a while I thought it was only necessary to provide Anarchie's preference setup. (That was before InternetConfig showed up.) Today I know that I can't get my web page online without it. Well, at least not easily, or like I want it set up. Fetch simply presents the UNIX interface as a Macintosh interface. I have it set up to access my web page directory, and send docoments into it as raw data, with the file types appropriately (for nonMacs) indicated by suffixes like .html, .gif, .jpeg, or .map. I can set up folders ("new directories" in Unix-speak) by selecting that option from the menu, or delete files or folders selected in the directory window. I can also click the file named "." and go up a level, and then down into someone else's directory to see how they've got things organized.

InternetConfig is a great application that does nothing itself. I run it when I need to change the way all my other internet tools interact, and it just sits there the rest of the time just taking up a little space on the hard drive and orchestrating the way everyone else (that's willing to cooperate) works. Helpers, file-mapping, important addresses that are provided by my net access company, and all that stuff go in here now instead of into similar dialogs in each of the many applications I use to surf the net.

ICeTEe is a system extension that resulted from a brainstorming session of some pretty heavy-duty names in mac-netdom. See the docs file that comes with it. Installed, it acts as a hyperlinker - any text version of an internet address reference that uses the normal Mac text engine (this excludes some high-end word processors) can be command-clicked and the result is as if it were clicked in a web page. The appropriate application(s) are fired up, connected to the net, and the task is done. In other words, if a Sticky Note or text page has an http:// reference in it, command-clicking on it will start (my web browser) Netscape and connect to that destination. I can now use bookmark lists that are just SimpleText documents.

April 28, 1996 mslavin@shore.intercom.net

RSVP Any and all feedback is encouraged and will be answered! Thanks AnneOB ;-)
Many thanks to ICNet for providing this opportunity for me to join the growing www community.