- Browser Tips 'n Tricks Pg. 1 -

Technically, the information in your address book is unsorted, listed in the order in which you created it. However, this doesn't mean you can't view it in any sorted order you want. Netscape can quickly and easily sort the entries in your address book at your request. You can click the column header in the address book list to sort the entries based on that column. Clicking it again reverses the sort order (ascending or descending). A small arrow appears next to the column name, indicating that it is the Sorted By column and showing the direction of the current sort. You can also access these options through the View menu. Click View, Sort and your preferred sorting method. Netscape should save your preferences for the next time you start it.

If you visit a Web site and start hearing background music or some audio that you'd rather escape, you don't have to turn off your computer's speaker. Try just pressing the Esc key, which often cuts the audio. The exception is Flash movies, which keep playing the soundtrack no matter how hard you try to Esc.

BACK button: Click this to return to the previous page.

FORWARD button: Click this to go to the next page in a series of pages you have already visited.

RELOAD or REFRESH button: Click this to update the current page if all the latest or expected information did not appear. This is helpful if you see old information on a page that is updated frequently or if graphics appear incorrectly.

HOME button: Click this to go to your home page (the first page you see when you open your browser). This can be set to your specifications. Sometimes I think computers were made for "control freaks" … well, for some people it certainly fits the bill.

SEARCH button: Click this to open the Search bar, where you can choose a search service and search the Internet.

BOOKMARKS (in Netscape) or FAVORITES (in Internet Explorer): Click this to open the Favorites bar, where you can store links (shortcuts) to your most frequently visited Web sites or documents.

You'll find your Bookmarks stored in a file called bookmark.htm in your user folder on the hard drive. The default path is c:\program files\netscape\users\your name (insert your own name for the last component). Copy this file to a floppy disk and transfer it to your other computer, making sure to place it in the proper folder there.

You'll find your address book file, usually called pab.na2 (pab stands for Personal Address Book), located in the same folder as your Bookmarks. Remember that the address book might be too large to fit on a standard floppy. If such is the case, you can e-mail it to yourself as an attachment and download it onto your second computer, or copy it to some other, large-capacity removable media you have on your system, such as a CD-RW or Zip drive.

Bookmarks aren't quite in your face enough for that site or two or three that you visit over and over. Getting back to those sites is easier if you create a custom Browser Button that gives you one-click action. In Netscape Navigator:

1. Go to the site.
2. Bookmark the site.
3. Choose Communicator, Bookmarks, Edit Bookmarks.
4. Highlight that new bookmark for the site.
5. Choose File, Add Selection to Toolbar.

Now that site has its own button on your Personal Toolbar.

1. From the File menu of your browser, select Open Page.

2. Click on Choose File button.

3. Highlight the bookmark.htm file when found. Click Open.

4. From the File menu, select Print and you will print your bookmarks with descriptions if you have annotated them.

Start Navigator, click File, Open Page (or press Ctrl-O). In the Open page window, click Choose File. Locate your bookmark.htm file. The default location is C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\[your name]

Select bookmark.htm and click Open. Now click Edit, Preferences. Select Navigator in the left side of the window. Click the Use Current Page button in the Home Page options area. Now your Bookmarks are your home page. You can get back to them anytime by clicking the Home button on your toolbar.

Here's a shortcut for bookmarking a page -- or for you Internet Explorer fans, for adding it to your favorites list:

1. Right-click a blank part of the Web page.
   
2. From the pop-up menu, choose Add to Favorites, Add Page to Favorites, or Add Bookmark (each browser version offers a different line).

Regarding favorites, the Organize Favorites window in Internet Explorer is a bit cumbersome to work with when you delete a shortcut. For example, Windows 98 takes an annoying pause before performing the action. If you want to do any serious tinkering with your Favorites folder, you're much better off doing so in a Windows Explorer window. Just open the Windows Explorer (you can go to Start, Programs, Windows Explorer) and then … C:\Windows\Favorites.

You can also simply drag the Web page icon (that appears before the page's URL in the Address bar) to the Bookmarks button or Favorites button on the Standard Buttons toolbar and move it along to the exact subfolder where you want it to appear. Or you can wait until later and decide in what subfolder you want to see it.

BOOKMARKS - PRINTING THEM FROM NETSCAPE

Open Bookmarks, click to select the first entry, cursor to the last entry and Shift + Click to select all. CTRL + C copies these to the clipboard. Then open your mail program (CTRL + M is the quickest way), and paste these in an outgoing message addressed to yourself. The resulting incoming message can be printed or otherwise saved.

George Boole was a shoemaker and amateur mathematician in England, way back in the mid-1800s. His system of symbols and operations, called Boolean Algebra turns out to be ideal for representing many digital computer concepts, including Internet searches. The most popular Boolean operation is probably the one called AND. If you search for two words by typing AND between the two words (with spaces) on the search line, your list of found pages will include only those that contain both words, not just one or the other.

The more of them you put into your search, the more specific that search will be. For example: searching for:

• lions produces a list of all pages that mention the word lions.
  
• lions AND tigers produces a list of all pages that mention both lions and tigers, but not pages that mention only lions or only tigers.
  
• lions AND tigers AND bears (oh my!) lists only pages that mention all three animals, and not pages that mention only one or two of them.

The OR operator doesn't make a search more exclusive that way, but instead opens up the search. If you're not finding enough pages in your search and want a wider reach, try adding another word to your search phrase and put OR in between. For example, searching for:

• lions produces a list of all pages that mention lions.
  
• lions OR tigers produces a list of all the pages that mention lions, plus all the pages that mention tigers, and that list will of course include all the pages that mention both.

You can keep using more terms with an OR before each (keep the blank space too) if you want more pages listed.

Like the Boolean AND operation, the Boolean NOT operation can refine your search results list, helping to eliminate pages that aren't going to interest you. Most searchers think only of what they want to see in a list, not of what they don't want. At least, that is, until they see the huge list of search results. What good is a list of 10,000 pages? You want a shorter, more relevant list, most likely. Using the NOT operator can help.

Start with your keyword of what you do want, let's say, animals. Then type NOT with words you don't want to see. When you add NOT and then a keyword to the search phrase, your search list throws out any pages that contain that keyword. For example, searching on:

• animals produces a complete list of all pages that mention the word animals, which is probably a lengthy list.

• anmals NOT lions starts with that long animals list, and then eliminates all pages that refer to lions.

• animals NOT lions NOT tigers cuts back yet more, eliminating all reference to pages with lions and tigers mentioned.

• animals NOT lions NOT tigers NOT bears produces … well, you figure it out.

We know that AND is a flexible Boolean operation. When you search for A AND B, your list of results contains every page that contains both A and B, no matter where those As and Bs appear within the pages. The Boolean NEAR is pickier. It insists that the words be, well, near each other. That proximity should mean that they have more to do with one another, rather than being just coincidentally contained somewhere within a massive Web page. Most search sites default to a NEAR distance of 10 or 20 words

Note these shorthand symbols:

AND is the same as & is the same as +
OR is the same as |
NOT is the same as ! is the same as -
NEAR is the same as ~

Combining Operators: There's no limit on how you can use Boolean operators to expand or focus your search phrases. You can just keep adding them until you find what you want, and don't find what you don't want. For example, you could run this entire search:

lions AND tigers AND bears OR "dorothy and toto" NOT "wicked witch"

Not so Boolean but equally important is the Parenthetical Grouping Order

When you put items of a search phrase within parentheses or quotation marks, you are telling the search engine that you want to find only those pages that contain all of the items of the search phrase in the order shown within parentheses or quotation marks. So, for example, searching for:

lions and tigers produces a list of all pages that mention both lions and tigers.

"lions and tigers" or (lions and tigers) produces a list of all pages that contain the phrase lions and tigers in that order.

That list of results in the second bullet doesn't include any pages that mention only lions or pages that mention only tigers. Nor does it list any pages that mention tigers and lions. (Note the different order of the words in the phrase.)

That search would help you discover almost any Wizard of Oz pages that don't mention the wicked witch

And as I said, you can substitute symbols as well. Try these: Instead of quotations separating your search terms, s substitute parentheses ( ). The ampersand (&) or plus sign (+) can be used instead of "AND". The | symbol substitutes for "OR" and the ~ symbol is the same as "NEAR". Use the symbol ! or - instead of "NOT". The real trick is in trying to remember all these.

So have fun and use AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, quotation marks and parentheses to make your searching more specific, with fewer but more useful results.

1. You are clicking too many times on an item on a web page. When you click (once) on a link to get to a new web page, your browser shows you it is working. For example, Netscape tells you it is working by showing stars and comets flying through the icon on the upper right hand corner of the screen. If there are stars and comets flying, don't click again unless you click the STOP button first. If you keep clicking on an item, it can overwhelm your browser and eventually freeze it up.

2. You are using an inappropriate version of your browser. The amount of RAM on the machine you are using has a big impact on your browser's running smoothly which includes freezing problems. Running a high version on a machine with too little RAM will cause freezing problems.

3. You don't have much hard disk space on the computer you are using. Having a small amount of disk space left on a computer can cause a variety of problems. Your browser's freezing is one of them. If you don't have much room left on your hard drive (less than 15 MB for swap space) you have several choices:
   1. Delete stuff that you don't need any longer;
      
   2. Move some of the files off of the hard drive and onto floppies for storage;
      
   3. Condense some of the files using a software program;
      
   4. Get an external device that will add storage capacity (e.g. hard drive or zip drive);
      
   5. Get a new, larger hard drive.

4. The browser's cache is set too high. The cache is something that holds web pages in memory so they can be more quickly accessed. If this is set too high, it uses up RAM and hard drive space and could cause your browser to freeze. Also, having this set high will cause it to take a long time to close down and rebuilding your desktop will take longer as well. In Netscape, to check or change the cache setting, choose Edit from the Menu bar. Pull down to Preferences and then click on the Plus Sign ("+") in front of "Advanced". Click on the "Cache" tab. Note the memory allotted. Type in a new number to change the amount of memory allotted to the caches. When finished, click OK.

You can run more than one copy of your Internet browser at the same time. If you find a Web site that you are interested in and would like to refer back to, just go to that site, then minimize it. Start another copy of your browser so you can keep on surfing. Then switch between the two by using the taskbar at the bottom of your screen.

Because your Internet Explorer keeps copies of pages recently visited in its cache on disk, anyone sitting down at the computer after you can see much of what you've been doing online. Unless, that is, you clear the cache:

1. Open Tools, Options.
2. Click the General tab.
3. Click the Delete Files button (in the Temporary Internet Files section).
4. Click OK.

Your Web browser keeps a "cache" on disk, a folder containing the pages you've recently visited. It can refer to this cache for fast loading of pages when and if you return to the same addresses again. But there's a dark side to this caching: other people can see what you've done and where you've gone by poking into the cache. If you want privacy, periodically clear that cache. In Netscape Navigator:

1. Open Edit, Preferences.
2. Click Advanced and then click Cache.
3. Click Clear Disk Cache and Clear Memory Cache.
4. Click OK.

For more privacy -- at the expense of some speed -- you can set the cache size to 0, so it won't hold anything. Here we go:

1. Open Edit, Preferences.

2. Choose Advanced.

3. Under the Advanced area, choose Cache.

4. Click to Clear the Disk Cache.

5. Enter 0 for the Kbytes of Disk Cache.

6. Click OK.

You can also set the Memory Cache to 0, for perfect privacy, but it will already and automatically disappear each time you quit the Netscape program.

All Web browsers use cache files and history files to save the contents of the most recent Web sites you've visited. You can control how big these files become by using the "Preference" or "Option" menu of the browser to change the default settings.

Go to: Start, Settings, Control panel, Internet options Delete files, Check "Delete all offline content" and click OK.

THEN, under Temp Internet files, Click settings, View files, Edit, Select all, File, Delete

Then do the same with View objects.

Cookies are those little notes that Web sites leave behind on your hard drive, typically either to help you sign on more easily the next time -- with the site recognizing and customizing to you -- or to snoop on what you're viewing and where you go online. Many cookies do both. The best way to see your cookies is this:

1. Double Click on "My Computer", then double click on your C-drive.
   
2. Double Click on the "Windows" folder, then on the "Cookies" folder.
   
3. If you really want to get rid of all your cookies, click on "Edit" and "Select all" (I prefer the Ctrl + A for selecting all). After "all" have been selected, press the "Delete" key.

Now, before you rush to do this, keep in mind that some of these cookies hold useful information that you will have to re-enter when you visit some of these Web sites again. Of course, you can build up you cookie file "selectively" and then make it a "read only" file … kinda sneaky, eh? Oh yeah.

Cookies are those little notes that Web sites leave behind on your hard drive, typically either to help you sign on more easily the next time -- with the site recognizing and customizing to you -- or to snoop on what you're viewing and where you go online. Many cookies do both. If you want to look at, or get rid of your cookies, you'll find them as a text file in the Communicator folder, simply titled Cookies. To get rid of them, do this:

Go to C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\(name)\cookies … select the cookies you want deleted and delete.

Now, before you rush to do this, keep in mind that some of these cookies hold useful information that you will have to re-enter when you visit some of these Web sites again. Of course, you can build up you cookie file "selectively" and then make it a "read only" file … kinda sneaky, right?.

Cookies is the term used for little chunks of data that web servers can store on your hard drive. Cookies record information about your visit to a particular site, and can ONLY be read back later by the site that created them. They are often used to make your web surfing more personal and convenient, but some people fear that cookie abuse could lead to loss of privacy.

Cookies Are Good For You

More and more sites are using cookies to enhance your web experience and enable some pretty cool features. The ever popular Yahoo site uses cookies to help you customize the site to suit your liking. If you specify that you want baseball scores, political headlines and a handful of quotes from your stock portfolio, Yahoo will record those preferences in a cookie. Then each time you return, the Yahoo server will read that cookie and customize the site accordingly. It's kind of like going to a restaurant where the waiter remembers your name and knows you like blue cheese dressing and extra croutons on your salad.

Some sites require that you create a userid and password to login before you can access certain content, but it can be a nuisance to remember and enter this information each time you return. Another good use for cookies is to remember your default settings at certain search engines. Sites like Google.com and Raging.com allow you to set preferences for language, number of results, output formatting and color schemes. By storing this data as a cookie, you only have to enter it once.

And if you do any online shopping, cookies make it possible to use a shopping cart where you can place your selections before checking out. You can even logoff half way through a shopping expedition and pick up later right where you left off. Some stores will even store your billing address in a cookie so you don't have to re-type when you place another order.

What's in a Cookie?

All of this reading and writing of cookies normally takes place without the user knowing that it's going on behind the scenes. Let's take the mystery out of cookies by finding out where they live and what's inside of them. Cookies are stored in a variety of places on your hard disk, depending on your browser and operating system. I place a shortcut to the Cookie folder in my Start menu giving me easy access to it. I leave it to you to find those folders

Once you locate your cookies file, take a look inside with a text editor such as Notepad (being careful not to modify the file) and you'll probably be surprised at the number of entries squirreled away by sites you've never heard of. That's because many popular sites have banner ads that are served up by other companies.

A typical cookies file contains the name of the site that wrote the entry, an expiration date, and some additional data pertaining to your visit to a site. Other crumbs of data that may be stored in cookies include your domain name (the part to the RIGHT of the "@" sign in your e-mail address -- NOT your username), the date and time of your visit, the type of computer, operating system and browser you have, and a history of the pages you visit at a specific site. Big deal, huh?

Cookies Are Safe

It's important to remember that a cookie cannot store any personal data such as your name, e-mail address or phone number UNLESS YOU EXPLICITLY PROVIDE THAT INFORMATION on a form at the site creating the cookie. Further, the safety features built into the cookies technology DO NOT ALLOW a Web site operator to access other files on your hard disk, or to look at cookies that were created by other sites. (Of course this assumes you are using an up-to-date version of your browser. Check the Netscape or Microsoft Web site if you're not sure.)

Remember these important facts about cookies:

- Cookies are designed to save you time and make surfing easier
- Cookies cannot access personal data or files from your hard drive
- Cookies can only be read by the Web site that created them

Can Cookies Be Bad For You?

None of the information stored in a cookies file is really shocking in and of itself, but it's the ability to track the specific sites and pages you visit that worries some people. Some are envisioning more frightening scenarios involving cookies and privacy. Could you face the prospect of being denied a job because you visited a Web site advocating the legalization of drug, or a congressional bill? Get hit with an insurance rate hike after visiting an AIDS patient information site? Or find the Feds at your door after browsing through online bomb making information?

Such prospects seem highly unlikely to yours truly, but privacy advocates like Jeff Chester of the Center for Media Education see danger ahead. "We have to keep online marketers out of the cookie jar," says Chester. "Such Orwellian practices to stealthily track every move made online and share that information with other companies should be prohibited."

Others are quick to point out that online services like America Online and Compuserve have the ability to track the actions of subscribers at a finer level, and know much more about their subscribers than cookies could ever reveal to Web site operators. Armed with your name, home address, credit card number, and the ability to record every word you write in the the "Cheatin' Hearts" chat room, one would think the potential for abuse is much higher, but there is no anecdotal evidence that it has ever happened, either on AOL or a cookies-enabled Web site.

Another interesting side note: I've NEVER received a cookie from any government or military Web site. I'm pretty sure there is an official policy of the US government which forbids or discourages it. I think this is an over-reaction which ultimately makes those sites LESS usable, but it does give the conspiracy theorists one less thing to whine about.

Tossing Your Cookies

If you're convinced that cookies pose a threat to your privacy, and you're willing to live without the convenience they provide, there are a variety of ways to block, delete and even totally prevent cookies. Both Netscape and Explorer give users the option to control cookies in a variety of ways (see above two tips for specifics or continue reading).

With Netscape Communicator, select Edit/Preferences/Advanced and you'll have the option to accept, refuse or get a cookie warning. A fourth option "Accept only cookies that get sent back to originating server" may be a good compromise because it eliminates cookies from third-party ad serving firms. With MS Internet Explorer, you can do much the same thing by selecting Tools/Internet Options/Security/Custom Level. Note that with either browser, checking the "Warn before accepting cookies" box does give you the option to accept cookies only from sites you trust, but gets really annoying after a while.

Another idea is to make your cookies file read-only. This will prevent any new cookies from being written to your hard disk, while allowing cookies to function normally during a single browser session. So you could still use online shopping sites, but you'd miss out on the ability to use customization features at sites like Yahoo. Deleting your cookies file(s) after closing your browser would have pretty much the same effect.

If you're really serious about online privacy, visit the Anonymizer Web site (www.anonymizer.com) and find out how to make all your web viewing totally anonymous and frustrate the cookie senders. You can also download a variety of free or inexpensive shareware programs such as Cookie Monster, Cookie Cutter and Cookie Crusher that give you total control over cookies.

1. Put the cursor at the top of the message you wish to send and scroll down the left side until all the message is highlighted.
   
2. Right click and click on copy.
   
3. Go to new message and left click.
   
4. Drop down to where the message will go and right click on paste.
5. Then click send.

There's a lot more to streamlining your browser's navigation than just bookmarking your most frequently accessed Web sites. Exploring all of your browser's preferences and setting them to work for you is a worthwhile endeavor. The seconds saved each time you launch your browser and navigate from site to site can quickly add up to valuable minutes, especially if surfing the Web is your most frequent PC activity.

You have more control over your browser's Web interface than you probably think; features range from security to colors to digital IDs. Your browser settings can affect response times, the ability to track sites you have visited, and even the languages displayed on Web pages. Some settings produce obvious results, such as designating the Web page you want displayed when you first start up the browser, and others have less visible implications, such as setting the cache size for storing Internet files and adding security features for online shopping. Whether you have been using a browser for months or just installed a new one or an update, it's a good idea to review your browser settings periodically.