KSFO's Web Wanderer

The Links for November 27, 1999

This was sent to me by Liz, a co-worker.

Hopefully, you all had a great Thanksgiving. It's a time for family and reflection, and giving thanks for all we have.

Here's a site in line with the season. When on the web, you can donate food to the poor. For free.

The Hunger Site has several corporate sponsors. Click on "Donate Free Food", and you donate "3 cups of rice, wheat, maize or other staple food to a hungry person, adding to over 100 tons weekly."

After clicking, you get the sponsors page. Two sponsors I noticed were Web Wanderer picks in the past - "Blue Mountain Arts" which features cool free electronic greeting cards, and "Iprint" - where I get my Web Wanderer business cards made.

Please donate some food today. Thanks Liz!

Popular Science: 1999 Best of What's New - Wine Country Larry

Wine Country Larry (larryl in the chat) found this technology site.

He says: "I think that most of us are interested, obsessed?, with technology so I am nominating this site. Popular Science has been a great source of general technology news over the years and their yearly 'Best of What's New' is a great example. While you, or me for that matter, may not agree with all the choices the editors made it is always interesting to see what the non-geeks think were the 'best' of the last year."

There's a lot of cool stuff here - Audio & Video, Auto Tech, Space & Aviation, Cars, Computers & Software, Electronics, Home Tech, Photography, Recreation, and Sci Tech.

Between now and December 31, you can vote for your favorite product or technology. Your vote, and the votes from other web surfers, get tallied for "The Popular Science Readers' Choice Award."

Browse the site, check out the hot new products, and vote for your favorite. Thanks, Larry!

TV in the 50's - Thom from Orangevale

Thom from Orangevale found this great site for older couch potatoes.

"TV in the 50's" is just what the site name implies. It highlights TV viewing from the 1950s.

Pretty much all the shows you'd expect to see are listed here. "TV in the 50's" is part of the "Fiftiesweb" web site, which I featured back in August, 1997. The site is guaranteed to be "Boomer enhanced and therefore guaranteed to have NO SMALL PRINT." Easier on older eyes.

I'm part of the "TV Generation." I'm now 40, so I remember TV from the 60's pretty well - the 50's are before my time. Still - this site was a nice memorable voyage - I saw several of these shows in re-runs as a kid.

When you're in a nostalgic holiday mood, this is a fun site. Check it out. Thanks, Thom!

Idea Wizards - Solinas

Idea Wizards is a web site dealing with marketing on the Internet.

From the author: "I created it because so many of my subscribers were asking me about how they could market their OWN websites! I realized that there was a real hunger for knowledge about this subject. So I set out to create a site that would answer some of the questions people were asking."

The site is quite good. There's real life success stories, information on affiliate programs, and Internet advertising. If you're interested in making money from your web site, give this site a visit.

Check it out.

Don't Spread that Hoax! - Daniel from Prunedale

Daniel from Prunedale sent in this good Hoax site.

There's a bunch of information here on standard email hoaxes - sympathy chain letters, urban legends, virus hoaxes, business and government, etc.

Although the information is pretty good, the site design is about the worst I've seen. You'll find yourself on web pages, click a link, and you land in what looks like an FTP file directory - you've hit the end of the HTML road, and have landed in a directory.

Still - don't let that sway you - check out the site. Thanks, Daniel.

Wordsmyth - Napa Chuck

Napa Chuck sounds a lot like me. He can't spell either.

He says: "I was wondering the other day if there was a good on-line dictionary. I am not the best speller don't want to pull out a book each time I want to look up a word. Besides, you know how it is, you don't know how to spell a word and you are suppose to somehow figure it out!! Frustrating. Anyway, I found a great dictionary. This is a dictionary and thesaurus and will look up words phonetically. Really cool."

This is exactly the dictionary site I need. There's search options - exact ("dog"), broad ("dog" returns "guide dog", among others), and spelled-like ("dawg" returns "dog").

Broad does other cool tricks - Periods or asterisks are wild cards. Typing "str..." will yield all 6 letter words starting with "str". "pil**w" will return pillow. The use here for crossword puzzles should be obvious.

Very handy - well worth a bookmark. Thanks, Napa Chuck!

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.

XRat Mpeg Player - Stephen and nerdly

Both Stephen and nerdly found this free Mpeg player.

XRat is another freebie mpeg player, which supports mpeg version 1, 2 layer 1, 2 and 3. It uses less CPU time than Winamp. It's faster and easy to use. A really good player and absolutely free!

You can drag and drop files onto the XRat player, and they will be added to the playlist. Nerdly found out that this doesn't work when XRat is set to "Always On Top" mode, though.

Give it a look and a play. The price is right. Thanks, Stephen and nerdly.

WebTracker: Free hit counter - Solinas

I've been a Webtracker user for some time, and featured it on this report a LONG time ago. I thought it was worth another mention.

I use Webtracker on my main page. It's a freeware hit counter, and it takes some interesting statistics - How many days the counter has been in operation, the number of hits per day, and total number of hits. There's other information as well - how many hits are from return visitors (based on persistent cookie information), what browsers people are using, and what operating systems.

It's easy to use, and free. If you have a web site, add this counter.

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