Mr Stucke’s Guide to a Better Internet

As we seem to have a solid little community starting to develop here on the Web I thought I’d write a little page with some of my tips for a better Internet

Disclaimer: Don’t go installing software and changing your computers settings unless you know what you’re doing and you have permission of the owner of the machine!

Top Tips:

1) Get Firefox:

The new Internet Explorer 7 is an improvement but if you are struggling away on the Web with anything older then you really should install Mozilla Firefox. A replacement for Internet Explorer, Firefox is quicker, more secure, and far more powerful than IE.

2) Get Email:

To some of you email seems a little ‘old fashioned’ I know! Whilst texting, Messenger, Bebo and MySpace seem like the means of communication du jour, a reliable web-based email address is really useful – even if just for signing up to sites like this. There are a thousand choices out there but three main competitors:

1. Hotmail: The one most of you seem to have thanks to your Messenger addictions, however as I have found out with my class lately there is one major drawback, if you don’t sign in for 30 days all your mail is deleted and the address effectively dies until you next sign in. Personally, I hate it!
2. Yahoo Mail: 1Gb of storage and no silly sign-in requirements like Hotmail, a good choice.
3. GMail: Google’s answer to email, with pretty much unlimited storage and excellent search functions. Only problem is that at the moment it is ‘invite only’, fortunately I have 100 invites and if anyone wants one then just leave a reply here and I’ll send you one.

3) Share your Photos with :

There are loads for places that you can share photos, but my favourite by far is flickr. This site is owned by Yahoo and is really easy to register on, especially if you already have a Yahoo Mail account.

When you have registered you can upload your photos here, you can choose whether to make them public or private and you can assign ‘tags’ to them. These tags are simply words that describe your photo. Why not go here and type in your name and select ‘tags only’, all the pictures that anyone has uploaded and tagged with your name will appear!

4) Customise Firefox:

The main advantage of Firefox over IE7 is the wealth of ‘Plug-Ins’ that you can install to make it suit your needs. My top-ten would be:

1. Adblock Plus: Automatically blocks all adverts from web pages making them look cleaner and load quicker.
2. Adblock Filterset: Keeps Adblock updated so that it never misses and advert.
3. IE Tab: Some web pages (including our own school site ) are not written to the proper web-standards and may not work properly in Firefox, this extension allows you to open a link from within Firefox using Internet Explorer. Just right-click the link and select the option.
4. FoxyTunes: Do you listen to Music while surfing the Web? Now you can control your favourite media player without ever leaving the browser and more…
5. Mouse Gestures: Control the web by holding the right mouse button down and drawing shapes.
6. Forecast Fox: Have a weather forecast permanently in your browser! (Right click and search for ‘Manchester, UK’ to set it up for our area)
7. Download Statusbar: Often downloading files? This adds a little bar at the bottom showing the progress of all your downloads.
8. del.icio.us: IF you start using this (see below) then this add in is vital.
9. GooglePedia: Every time you search Google, the related Wikipedia article will appear alongside your search results.
10. Greasemonkey: A bit advanced this one, it lets you change the appearance of websites by installing tiny ‘user-scripts‘

5) Listen to Free Music at :

Type a favourite song or artist into the box and the program will make you a radio station of music that it thinks you will like based on what you type in! To sign up properly for this it asks for your US Zip Code, so just trick it by typing any ZIP Code in! (You could pretend to be the President – The White House zip code is 20500!!)

6) Read PDF files:

Quite a lot of documents on the Web are in the Adobe PDF format, rather than installing the clunky Acrobat Reader, try installing the FoxIt Reader instead.

7) Save Bookmarks:

Save bookmarks, access them anywhere and share them with the world on del.icio.us .

To use this properly you need Firefox and the del.icio.us plugin mentioned above. Now instead of bookmarking your favourites in the browser that you are using at the time, you save them, and tag them (just like the pictures in flickr) to del.icio.us. I will write (or find) a more detailed guide soon, but for now why not see all of my bookmarks.

8 ) Subscribe to Feeds :

Across the web you will notice these little orange icons, these are links to rss feeds. These send a message to what is known as a ‘feed reader’ every time that a website is updated. This means that you don’t need to keep checking your favourite sites for updates, you just check your reader and it will automatically have details of all your favourite sites’ new posts and stories!

This website has two feeds located on the bottom right hand side of the screen.

For an excellent summary of how to get started with rss feeds, check out this article from the BBC. My favourite reader is from Google.

Happy Surfing! Mr Stucke