Leveraging the Web

Webmail POP3 Access

Many on-line services, such as Yahoo!, let me access my e-mail by reading my POP3 account (I use Netscape Communicator) via a web site. This means that wherever I am I can check my e-mail, even if I don't have my own computer with me. Later I can download it from the POP3 server into Netscape if I choose. I can set the reply-to address to match my preferred ISP account.

Free Permanent E-mail

There are plenty of places to get free email these days. I use AltaVista.net, for which you can sign up at http://www.altavista.digital.com, because I use AltaVista a lot, and because Hotmail's got a reputation as "spam central" so a lot of people filter out Hotmail addresses. I never actually check e-mail here... instead it's forwarded to my ISP address. There are a couple of advantages:

1. If you change ISPs you don't have to tell everybody... your address doesn't change.

2. If your ISP doesn't have Webmail like BellSouth, that's OK... AltaVista provides that service. So, you can tell Altavista to stop forwarding mail while you're on the road (so you can check it from an Internet cafe or a client or friend's computer).

Free Websites

Sites like GeoCities offer free websites. The catch is that you have to put ad banners on your pages. Big whoop. If your ISP doesn't offer web space, then this is a steal! Even if your ISP DOES offer you space, it's usually limited (MindSpring gives me 10 meg). The way to leverage this is to go ahead and get the free site anyway, and put your graphics and files out on the free space from Geocities and link to them. Warning: This is against GeoCities' rules if you're JUST their space as additional storage. So, here's what I'm doing... My plain-jane pages (the ones you're looking at) are stored at BellSouth, and it's not optimized for any particular browser. But the page at GeoCities is where I'll be trying out some new stuff like Java and some of the better CGI scripts. That site MAY be optimized for either Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer, or whatever. The point is, I don't want to violate the spirit of the agreement with Geocities, since they're offering services that my ISP doesn't. I DO intend to share space between the sites, though. There are enough free web hosting services out there that the average schmuck may never need to pay for even a HUGE virtual site!

Favorite Links on Personal Website

By putting my links on a single page on my website, I'm assured that my favorite sites are always easily accessible, even if I can't remember the URLs.

Why not just use the "favorites" or "bookmarks" in my browser? Well, I DO. It's just that I'm not always at MY browser, so by periodically updating my links.htm page, I've got my favorites wherever I go. Actually, you don't have to go to the trouble I do... All you really have to do is go to your user directory for Netscape and copy your bookmarks.htm* file to your website. If you're not using Netscape then sorry, bud, you've got some work to do creating this on your own. Then I recommend you go to www.netscape.com and get yourself a really nice browser.

I use one very slick trick on my links page... there's an index at the top of the page that links to the various categetories I've set up. It's the same concept as folders, but I'm using internal references instead of many pages. It's easier to maintain this way.

Free Web Calendar

Yahoo! offers a great service for free! It's a calendar and scheduling tool, similar to what you'd find in Lotus Notes. You see appointment views by month, or all appointments for a day. Of course the difference is that you can see your appointments from anyplace you can access the Web! It even can mail you reminders (to multiple e-mail addresses if you choose), and you can include web links in the reminders.

Here are some nifty ways you can leverage this site:

1. Yahoo! Calendar can download into MicroSoft Outlook or into a Palm Pilot. Special software is required in either case, but since the software's available at Yahoo!, that's not much of a hardship.

2. If your cell phone or alpha pager can receive e-mail like mine, then you can be paged when the appointment is due. Just remember that it sometimes takes time for the messages to be routed, so allow for that when scheduling the reminder! My tests show that I'm getting the pages nearly instantaneously.

3. The calendar also links to shared calendars on Yahoo!, so that you can look up community and shared events and add them to your schedule with the press of a button!

You can view my calendar, if you like.

DejaNews

DejaNews offers Usenet Group access via the Web. If you're not familiar with it, Usenet -- a collection of "bulletin boards" -- is the single most useful part of the Internet, though it's the least well known to newbies. And unlike most of the Web, it's interactive. Although DejaNews is a bit slow, it has a leg up on standard news readers for these very important reasons:

1. It's almost entirely spam free, so you don't waste time downloading and reading a bunch of get-rich-quick schemes and ads for sex sites.

2. It keeps EVERYTHING, even though the news servers themselves don't! I've found stuff on DejaNews that I posted back when I was running a BBS with newsgroup access, before there WAS a World Wide Web!

3. It's available even when you don't have a news server available. For instance, at work there's no News proxy, but we have access to the Web. With Deja News I get access ANYWAY.

4. Did I mention it was nearly spam free?

5. A new service of DejaNews is to allow you to create your own discussion groups without having to set up an expensive news server.

Leverage this site by using it to search the entire history (!!) of the discussion groups on the Internet if you can't find a FAQ or HOWTO file using AltaVista. It can be faster than re-posting the question and is guaranteed to limit the heat you'd get for posting the same question that's been answered a dozen times before.

DejaNews also offers free web-based e-mail a la AltaVista.

AltaVista Search Engine

This site is SO USEFUL! www.AltaVista.com is my favorite search engine, mainly because when I want something, assuming I phrased my query properly, I almost ALWAYS get a hit... usually thousands! Unlike most, AltaVista indexes every word of every page on the web. AltaVista will also accept form input so you can add a search engine to your own website.

Unlike most other search engines, AltaVista lets you filter results based on language. And unlike anybody else, the AltaVista site will translate a web page for you! Granted, the auto- generated translations generally suck, but they're better than none at all in most cases. Even though I can muddle through a few European languages, I'm terrible in every one... the Babelfish translator fills in the blanks caused by my limited vocabularies. Here's an example:

Translate to:  French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

BTW, if you're running 32-bit Windows, you can download the AltaVista search engine and translator to use on your personal computer. I found it to be a bit of a space hog, but hey, if you've got a bunch of monster servers and you want to be able to search them fast, this is definitely the way to go! Of course, AltaVista also serves up free e-mail.

ListBot

The concept behind a list server is simple. The server keeps a list of e-mail addresses. Any mail then sent to the server gets copied to everybody on the list. That way, discussions can occur with reasonable concurrency and without having to check a discussion group like DejaNews. This is good when you want to be intrusive and don't want to depend on someone "checking in" to get the message.

ListBot allows you to set up your own free discussion groups and manage them via the web. It's got all the features you might need (discussion, announcement, and moderated groups; and the ability to collect demographics and statistics from the discussion; as well as the ability to archive discussions.)