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KSFO's Web Wanderer

The Links for January 15, 2000

Free Website Promotion - John from San Bruno

I met John at the live, remote broadcast last week. He turned me on to selfpromotion.com.

SelfPromotion has excellent advise on registering your site on search engines. You'll notice it starts with Preparing Your Site - to have a site effectively be listed and found, some homework is necessary. This site explains what is needed.

The site lets you submit your site to the top search engines and the top 100 indexes.

There's an online tutorial to show you the ropes.

It's a great site, built in reaction to the "submit your site" spam mail that makes the rounds (I get a LOT of this!).

Webmasters need to bookmark and use this site. Thanks, John!

Art and Culture - Dudley

Dudley says "This is an interconnected guide to The Arts (performing, visual, literature, music, design and film). Check it out."

The page opens with some quick links to topics. I'm a big Buster Keaton fan, and by clicking on his name found a brief introduction, links to 3 good Buster Keaton sites, and a link for a book and video. Not bad!

The search - "Search for an Artist or a Movement" isn't very good for the uninitiated. What do I know about movements? Nada. Still - by reading and browsing this site, I can get an education.

The Calendar is quite good - click on "Web" and you'll find upcoming web events in several areas.

Worth a look. Thanks, Dudley!

EarthRISE: Photos of Earth - Thom from Orangevale

Thom from Orangevale found EarthRISE. EarthRISE is a site which hosts a ton of photos of earth.

The photographs are taken by astronauts out the windows of the space shuttle. This is an online collection of over 100,000 photos taken from the shuttle.

You can search, but the results are less than user-friendly. Be prepared to step through lots of pages if your result ends with an "S", for example. You can't jump there - you start with the A's and step through. Dumb. Still - I found everything I was looking for.

It's an interesting site - well worth a visit. Thanks, Thom!

Speedguide.net: PC Performance Tips - Taxi Mike and Ranman

(Taxi Mike emailed this site he found with Ranman. What follows are his comments)

I'm sure that many of you may have experimented with utilities that increase the throughput of analog modems by tweaking certain registry settings (MaxMTU, RWIN, TTL, etc.). Microsoft included some of these tweaks with W98.

When my buddy, Ranman, got DSL I started looking around for some similar tweaks for Cable/DSL modems. I came across this site, and I found some "Generic Registry Patches" for W9X. I was there when Randy reimaged his HDD (ref. Q247326...Thanks MS) and repeated before and after tests of the Mtupatch98 and can attest to the results. Note, this is a non-scientific, anecdotal account and if you do this you may hose your computer if you're not careful. Enough warning? OK. I'm gonna let Randy tell "the rest of the story" and what you should and should NOT do. Man, this sounds like Gates and that other guy demoing USB...sheesh :)

Before applying the DSL tweak I was getting average throughput from my DSL line somewhere between 28-31 Kbps (kilo bytes a second). After applying the DSL tweak my throughput now averages about 80-85Kbs which is about a 150% increase in speed. This is on a regular basis and doesn't not seem to fluctuate, however if you are downloading multiple files it seems to share (seemingly it is getting the max throughput) so the speed doesn't increase on the second which is usually the case with multiple files. This tweak works best with Win98, but also works well with NT and 95. Again with registry tweaks always back up your registry. We have not tested the Cable Modem patch so we are not sure how well it works but the DSL definitely is very impressive.

Taxi Mike and Ranman

Best Net Tools and Resources - Andantino

Andantino found this page on Web Search News. Here they offer their "Best of the Net for 1999 - Web Search. Andantino says "It it really should be called best tools and resources. See if you agree."

I took a look. I knew about Google, but the other offerings were unknown to me. And they all look VERY cool. Killer cool. So cool, I'll probably be featuring ALL of them on future shows.

There's a program which transforms your bookmarked favorites to a personal, mini search tool. There's an analyzer that "analyzes the content of any Web page, and instantly transforms it into a rich resource with dozens or even hundreds of links to sources of additional information. " Bizarre stuff - worth detailed reviews.

If you want a peek ahead at stuff I'll probably cover later, check the reviews on this site. Or - hang in there, I'll get 'em covered.

Very, very cool, Andantino. Thanks!

Free For All!

"Free For All" picks are hot, FREE items or services. It can be software, online services, you name it - but it's got to be free, with no strings attached.

Webshots - Marc from Kelseyville

Marc from Kelseyville says "Here's a great program I've been using for about a year. It recently became FREE. Includes 1000's of great wall-papers and screen savers."

WebShots is software which includes more than 2,000 full-screen color images in categories such as sports, scenics, wildlife, travel, 3D, and more. You can use the photos as your desktop wallpaper or as your screensaver via the Webshots Desktop software. The software includes an automatic Web connection that downloads new photos each day.

You can also add your own photos, and make them available to others by uploading them to Webshots Community. The stats when I checked Webshots Community said: 180,999 Photos with 1,785 new in 24 hours.

Webshots works with Windows 95,98,NT, and 2000.

The Font Thing - B. Weed

We heard from B. Weed again! He found the font thing. He wrote this review:

Windows 98 is supposed to run fine with as many as eight hundred fonts installed--though four hundred is probably all you should have at any one time--but you have to keep in mind that the more fonts you have installed, the more system resources you are using, so the fewer fonts installed the better.

The Font Thing scans for all fonts on your system and displays previews of them. You can view all of the installed fonts as well as any others you may have stashed elsewhere. For example, I transferred over a thousand fonts from a CorelDraw CD to my hard drive in a folder--named Font Library--and when I need a particular font, I use The Font Thing to scan that folder, including any sub-folders, for all of the fonts in my collection.

Clicking a font displays a preview, and right-clicking gives me numerous options, such as Add To Collection or Install. If you select Install, that's it. It's installed. Do that to multiple files, and they'll all be installed.

If you don't believe me, just switch over to your Fonts folder and you'll find them. Uninstalling fonts is just as simple. Just select the font, and click Un-Install. All that happens is the font is deleted from your Fonts folder. Keep a backup of your font collection and you shouldn't have any problems.

You do back things up, don't you?

I mentioned Collections. This is one of the coolest things about the program. You can create as many different collections as you like. I have one for Art, one for Handwriting, etc. In these collections I have assembled similar type fonts that can ALL be installed or uninstalled with one click.

This is the kind of thing that desktop publishers use to make their job a lot easier. Now you can do the same at home, for free!

The one drawback I could find was that it only supports True Type fonts. Fine with me. Also, it's beta software, but I've not noticed any bugs, and I've been messing around with it for days. I suspect the final release will be shareware so you'd better grab this Thing quickly...while the grabbin's good.

Brightmail: Free Spam Filtering - nerdly nullman

nerdly nullman turned me on to Brightmail.

Many folks, myself included, get a ton of junk mail. I don't believe I'll get rich quick. I won't shed pounds easily. I don't want a cable TV descrambler. If you feel the same way, Brightmail can help.

Free Brightmail is a free spam-fighting service for home and small business e-mail users. When you register with Brightmail, your e-mail passes through their spam filters which remove spam. (Filtered spam is held in your Brightmail inbox where you can view it if you wish.)

What's So Good About Brightmail? * You'll receive only legitimate e-mail with almost no spam. * Convenient and easy—works with your existing e-mail program. * No e-mail is ever lost—review your caught spam at any time. * It's free!

Brightmail will work with most ISP e-mail accounts and some corporate e-mail accounts. Registration with Brightmail is simple and free.

You can have multiple address filtered—you'll need to set up a separate account for each.

If you use a Cable Modem you may be able to use this service by setting up "netmail" in member services. I don't know if a similar web-based mail server is available to ADSL subscribers.

After you sign up, you can download software to change your e-mail settings, or simply change them yourself. The software failed to make all the changes on my system, but I have a very complex setup with multiple e-mail accounts, and several e-mail programs.

The modifications are simple. Change your POP mail server to mail.brightmail.com and change the login name to your e-mail address with a "%" instead of an "@" sign. Illustrated instructions for popular e-mail programs are available

Very cool, nerdly. Thanks!!

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