KSFO's Web Wanderer

The Links for October 19, 2002

Yahoo News - Charles in San Francisco

Charles in San Francisco says: "This service is remarkable. Someone at YAHOO! has been developing this news collection system recently and YAHOO! now provides this on a immediate basis."

The headline categories are: You can select 3 headlines, 5 headlines, or a summary.

You can simply search News Stories, News Photos, Audio/Video, Full Coverage, The New York Times, or all of Yahoo!

Charles is right. It updates often. When I checked, the top story was 13 minutes old.

It's well worth a look. Check it out.

Thanks, Charles!

Windows Reinstall - John of San Lorenzo

John says: "This site covers all versions of windows and has tons of good info"

The site covers:

There are 8 different install guides for Win98, depending on whether or not you have a boot disk, a recovery disk, want graphics or text, etc.

The site also has a great Tips and Tricks area, sorted by operating system.

Also handy - links to a couple of drivers sites.

Well worth a bookmark. Thanks, John!

elgooG (Google Backwards) - Vladimir

Here's a goofy site, with a "mirror image" of Google. Not a mirrored site - everything here is backwards, as if viewed in a mirror.

You have to type in the words backwards to do a search, and the results are reversed as well.

Good to load on your system, and call your IT guys for help.

Thanks, Vlad!

Scary - Paesano

Scary is one of the best sites for kids I've seen. There is a TON of content here - plenty for kids to explore for hours. It'll take several trips to get through everything.

The graphics are all kid-safe scary stuff. Perfect for Halloween.

Given the amount of graphics and content, it's surprising that it runs OK for modems. Broadband is preferred, but not necessary. 56K is OK.

Treat your kids to this site this Halloween.

Thanks, Paesano!

Brains4Zombies - DoctorWho

I'm starting to worry about DoctorWho in the chat. He sent me a strange parody website. It has the look and feel of Amazon, but offers "brains for zombies."

Funny stuff. Worth a look from any Amazon user.

Thanks, DoctorWho.

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.

(This week is something special. Jack from Goshen talks about all the freebies he used to create his web page. Jack wrote the following, with very minor formatting edits by me.)

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While working on my personal web page (which the Web Wanderer was kind enough to use as a web sight several weeks ago) I have come across several useful free tools for web site development.

The first was to find a Free host for my personal site. Many ISP's provide a limited amount of space for free so I went to mine 1st. When I ran out of space I went to Angelfire for additional free space.

Since HTML and web development was like a foreign language to me I resorted to Free Site Templates, to get the basic design down. This site has over 400 sample templates to choose from. My final layout bearly resembles the original template anymore but it gave me a basis and helped understand HTML a little better.

After tweaking and adjusting the code it was necessary to use an HTML Validator to check the changes for errors. CSE HTML Validator Lite is a free trimmed down version that did the trick for me. This was extremely useful for checking code errors and also allowed for easy find and replace commands for changing text. I believe the pro version will actually fix the code errors for you in addition to other features.

This on line validator also checked for Broken Links, HTML Syntax, Spelling, Load Time, and Meta Tags. The load time was useful because when you use graphics it would suggest changes to make the graphic a smaller file and load quicker. It showed several different samples with gradually less color and resolution to choose from.

In order to put my pages on the web I needed to upload them to my ISP's server. I found WS_FTP LE an easy to use free version. http://download.com.com/3000-2160-1572132.html?tag=lst-0-1 Sites like Angelfire have their own built in upload system.

I wanted to track the number of visitors I had on my Home page so I got a free counter with many styles and colors to choose from.

I used PowerCounter to get statistics about my web visitors. It features a world map and shows hits from each country which is visually pretty neat. and also shows where hits were referred from.

Many web sites include guestbooks for visitors to make comments and suggestions in. The first free guestbook I used went off line and is no longer available but I found a much better replacement. Bravenet is a site where you can click for samples of their guestbooks. The guestbook allows you to change the look and post questions that signers can answer. I just discovered this Bravenet site and it appears they have many other web site tools available. A new one that seems interesting is a 'Guestmap' for visitors to post a 'push pin' designating where they are from. I'm going to look into that one a little more. (BTW, several O'Donnell on Computer listeners were kind enough to sign my original Guestbook. I really would appreciate if they would return and sign my new book.)

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This page, and all contents, are Copyright (C) 2002 by Michael A. Solinas.