Notes from Web Search Garage.

3. Online Tools and Gadgets: Browsers & More

• HTML files are basically text files formatted in a certain way.
• HTML has given way to DHTML, XML, Flash, and many other ways to display information.
• They have become more complicated with the addition of Java Script, Java, ActiveX, and other technologies

• Internet Explorer – Internet Explorer has one very good thing about it and one very bad thing. The very good thing is that it’s overwhelmingly the most powerful browser on the web, and therefore most web sites are designed to work well with it. Unfortunately, the popularity that’s the good thing is also the bad thing. Internet Explorer has had several security holes exposed throughout the years; some of them are severe enough that they can cause an intruder to be able to take over your entire computer.
• Netscape – Back in the day (1996 or so), Netscape was a standalone company, its browser was incredibly popular, and most web surfers were surfing via the big N.

• Mozilla – Mozilla is an open-source browser developed by a team of people. It’s free.
• Opera – Opera is a browser company that’s the David to Internet Explorer’s Goliath. It was one of the first browsers that had multiple window capability, handy when you’re constantly jumping from page to page.

• If you want to make sure that your browser is compatible with as many sites as possible and you’re using a fairly new computer, you want to use Internet Explorer.
• If you’re computer isn’t quite as new and you still want compatibility, or you don’t want to use Internet Explorer for whatever reason, try Netscape.
• If you have an older computer and you want to use a graphical browser with low system requirements, look into Opera.
• If you’re the geeky type who likes tinkering with system settings and you want to support the open-source community, give Mozilla a whirl.

• Tweak your browser settings so you can surf a little safer.
• Turn Off Scripting – Look at the listings for Active X Controls and Plug-Ins. Turn all these entries to the Disable option, or at least Prompt.
• Turn Off Java – Java is rarely necessary to a web site and turning it off usually speeds up browsing a little bit.
• Turn Off Auto-Password Reminders – Turn off the options to auto-remember passwords so that nobody who uses your browser after you can log in to your web sites.
• Turn Off Pop-Ups – Pop-ups are not the problem that they used to be but they’re still used on some sites.

• Turn Off Some Plugins – When you disable ActiveX and Java, you’re both helping with the security issues and you’re speeding up your browser a little bit. With Java disabled, Java programs don’t start up, and with ActiveX disabled, you often don’t see Flash movies.
• Try Turning Off Images
• Using a couple of programs external to your browser can also speed up your surfing experience.
• Check your firewall; it can speed up your surfing too! Some firewalls, like Symantec’s Norton Internet Security, have an ad block feature that strips ads of many ad networks from web pages.

• A plugin is a bit of software that integrates with your browser to allow it to display certain kinds of content. A helper application is a software program that allows you to display content that you might download via your browser, like a Power Point display you might get from a web site.

• Portable Document Format (PDF) – Bought to you by Adobe, this format is the standard for any government form and online paper presentations.
• Microsoft Word – Sometimes people will put papers in Microsoft Word instead of Acrobat because they don’t have Adobe Acrobat or because Microsoft Word is the standard in their office.
• Windows Media Player – A lot of people use Microsoft formats.
• Apple Quicktime – Don’t be fooled by the Apple in Apple Quicktime; it runs very nicely in Windows.
• Real (Real Audio and Real Video) – This was one of the first streaming media players available and it’ still used by an awful lot of sites.
• Macromedia Shockwave and Macromedia Flash – Shockwave is used for really interactive stuff and Flash is used for movies, games, and ads.

• Microsoft Excel (XLS) – Google indexes Microsoft Excel content, making it possible that you might find an Excel file and need to read it.
• Microsoft Power Point – Like Excel, Google indexes Power Point documents, and unlike, say, Word, Power Point documents transformed into HTML can be really hard to read.

• Netscape’s Plugin Directory – If you’re running Netscape, this is probably the granddaddy of plugin sites. From here, the Netscape users can see what plugins they’ve got installed, get information on implementing plugins on their own sites, and browse a selection of available plugins divided by categories, including audio/video and presentations.
• Download.com – You’ll find at this writing over 60 plugins, which you can list by date added, number of downloads, and name.
• Tucows – Tucows is another general-download site, but they’ve got an internet section.

• Search toolbars are compatible mostly with Internet Explorer.
• Search toolbars integrate with your browser and allow you to search particular resources from your browser without having to visit a website.

• The Official Google Search Toolbar – You’ll need Internet Explorer to install and use it. This search allows you to search the web, search just the site you’re browsing (those parts of it which have been indexed by Google, anyway), vote on whether or not you like a page, view a site’s Page Rank, get Google-provided information about a page (cache, similar pages, backward links, etc.), and move up one level on the site you’re looking at.
• The Googlebar Project (Mozilla or Netscape) – If you’ve used the “official” version of Google’s toolbar with Internet Explorer, then Googlebar will look really familiar. It can provide all the information that the official version can with the exception of Page Rank.
• What do you do if you don’t use Internet Explorer or Mozilla/Netsacpe? Make you use Opera or something else…

• The Google Search Tool isn’t tied in to the browser; it runs as a desktop application.
• Of course Google isn’t the only search engine option in town; Teoma and Ask Jeeves are also offering their own toolbars. You’ll need Internet Explorer for these.

• Once the Teoma toolbar has been installed, it’ll appear as a toolbar under your location bar.
• The query box works as you’d expect. Enter a search query in the query box and you’ll get a Teoma page full of results. Hit the Highlight key in the toolbar and instantly all the query terms on the page are highlighted.
• Clicking on the Teoma button at the left of the toolbar gives you the option to add one more button, check dictionary, as well as the ability to change highlight colors, change the button style, and visit the Teoma homepage.

• It’s for Internet Explorer only.
• The Ask Jeeves toolbar offers far more than the Teoma toolbar.
• By clicking on the Ask Jeeves logo on the right, you can add several buttons, including search AJ Kids, search dictionary, search stocks, and the weather.
• You may be used to just visiting a search engine to do your searches, but search toolbars can give you plenty of search oomph without ever leading your browser.

• A Cautionary Word for Toolbar Users – And that word is: privacy. Before you install any toolbar, make sure you read and understand the privacy statement. Since it hooks into your browser, a non-private toolbar can do nasty things.
• The simplest core search is for a keyword and the word toolbar. Use very general keywords.
• Search toolbars aren’t the only tools that integrate directly into the browser. There’s also bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are like bookmarks, but they’re a little more powerful.

• Bookmarklets (also known as favelets) are not plain HTML links like a regular bookmark. Instead, they’re small bits of Java Script code that you access from your browser just as you’d access a bookmark. There’s a limit to how much Java Script bookmarklets can contain, but they can still do all kinds of useful things: search, translate, give page information, resize windows, and even more.

• Because bookmarklets are made of Java Script, you’ll obviously have to have Java Script enabled in your browser for them to work.
• If you use Internet Explorer, you’ll find that most of the bookmarklets you come across will work. If you use Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, however (especially the older versions), you’ll find that some of the bookmarklets don’t work at all.

• Internet Explorer – To add a bookmarklet to Explorer, click on the link and drag it to the favorites folder of your choice.
• Mozilla – Either right-click the link and choose “Bookmark This Link” or click-and-drag the link to your personal toolbar.
• Opera – Right-click the link and choose “Add Link to Bookmarks,” as you would normally save a bookmark.
• Bookmarklets can give you a lot of search shortcuts without your having to use a toolbar or Internet Explorer. In addition, you can do some very specific search tasks with some bookmarklets that you might not find on a search toolbar.

• Bookmarklets – Bookmarklets.com is probably the most famous bookmarklet site on the web. You can find plenty of cool bookmarklets here, but start by going through the whole Search Tools section.
• Favelets – If you do a lot of HTML authoring, you’ll like this collection. This collection of bookmarklets isn’t particularly search-oriented, but do give the translation bookmarklets a try.
• Jesse’s Bookmarklets Site – This is an unusual collection of bookmarklets. There are bookmarklets on this site good for both gathering and searching data.
• Milly’s Bookmarklets – This brief list of bookmarklets mostly focuses on specialized searches in Google.
• World Tim Zone Bookmarklets – This one-page selection of bookmarklets covers seven categories, including Navigation, Search Engines, Religion and Christianity (find a saint, Bible lookup), and World Lookup (dictionary thesaurus, acronyms, and more).
• Bookmarklets for Opera – This site provides bookmarklets specifically for the Opera browser. Options here include searching, code validation, and navigation.
• Bookmarklets – Another collection of bookmarklets. It has some interesting and unusual bookmarklets, like checking a site’s server uptime, counting the number of images on a page, and splitting frames into separate new windows. These bookmrklets are not as search-oriented.
• Search toolbars are useful and they’re integrated into your browser. Bookmarklets are useful but they too are integrated into your browser as “bookmarks on steroids.”

• A tool is something you have to download and install on your computer (like a program that sits on your desktop, a search toolbar, or a bookmarklet you put into your browser. Tools are good things.
• Maybe you just need a small item to do one thing. Sometimes, you can find a web page on the internet that has the very thing you’re looking for. Those items are called “gadgets” because they don’t require downloading, they’re usually light, and they perform one task.
• Browser Sniffer – It’ll tell you plenty of information about what kind of browser you’re using, hopefully enough that you can troubleshoot any display problems when you’re trying to visit a site.
• Word Frequency Counter – This gadget is very handy if you’re using a web site that contains a lot of specialized and unfamiliar vocabulary. What you do here is paste in a chunk of text, and the tool provides you with one of three reports: you can get the most frequently used words listed first, the least frequently used words first, or the words in alphabetical order.

• There are many different types of calculators online, covering everything from cooking to scientific units.
• Calculator.com – This is a searchable subject index of calculators. Categories include agriculture, brewing, and photography.
• Martindale’s Reference Desk: Calculator Center – There are over 17,000 calculators on this site.
• OnlineConversion.com – There are over 5,000 units and 50,000 conversions available. There are some calculators here, but there are also plenty of conversions for speed, weight, cooling, and time.
• Convert-me.com – Not only is this site pretty, it also has plenty of explanations and help for using their converters, through it doesn’t cover as wide a range as some of the other resources covered here.
• efunda Cool Calculators – Warning: Most of these calculators are engineering-related. And while the site is friendly and breezy, it’s friendly and breezy in an engineering sort of way.
• Mega Converter 2 – The left side of the page is a remote control-like interface that allows you to choose from several different types of converters (including a Roman numeral converter, pressure, and wind chill). The right side of the page contains a frame with the converter.

• Internet Clocks, Counters, and Countdowns – Some of these are just entertaining but some of them can help you look at things from a different angle.
• Form Resources – Form Resources provides access to what looks like hundreds of different forms. There are many categories here, though only a few of them are calculators and converters.
• Client-side software is software that installs on your computer; you don’t access it through the web or via e-mail.

• If you do a lot of research and you like to track your search results over time, you may want to try client-side search software.
• Copernic is probably the most famous search software, though there are others.

• The internet isn’t just the web. Sometimes you need to use FTP as well. FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol”, and as you may have guessed is a way to download files from the internet.
• Cute FTP offers a couple of ways to add new FTP sites to your list.
• Cute FTP is very friendly and the interface is easy to understand.
• Check out Cute ZIP, a snappy zip program, and Cute HTML, a text-editor-type HTML editor.

• Ultra Edit is a good text editor.
• Ultra Edit makes it easy to format writing. There’s a search/replace function, obviously, and a word count, but there’s also a column mode (which selects columns instead of lines (handy when you’re pulling specific information from a delimited text file). There’s a case change command that lets you quickly change input that’s all uppercase, lowercase, capitalized, or inverted cases.
• There are several levels of Undo and a Revert to Saved command that’s helpful. There is also a powerful macro function.
• Text Pipe is the most complicated program in the book. If you do a lot of text file manipulation, you want this program.

• Bookmark Managers – Bookmark managers allow you to do a certain level of sorting that you can’t do within browsers, and some bookmark managers offer bookmark monitoring.
• Spyware Checkers – Spyware sounds pretty ominous, and in some cases, it really can be. Spyware, when installed on your computer, communicates with another computer providing more information about your web site than you know about or agreed to. A variation of spyware, adware, sends you a lot of unsolicited ads and in some cases covers existing banners on web sites with their own banners. Spyware checkers scan your computer for known spyware applications and remove them. There have been cases when a product advertised as a spyware remover was in fact spyware itself.
• Anti-Spam Software – Some e-mail programs have built-in spam filters, while sometimes your ISP will offer a spam-filtering program. If you don’t have either of those options, you may wish to consider a spam-filtering program to keep your e-mail more about research and less about any number of a dozen scams.

• Download.com – This is CNET’s repository of lots and lots of software. The internet category will hook you up with the latest browsers as well as pop-up blockers and spyware detectors (look in the “online privacy” section).
• Tucows.com – When you visit this site, you’ll first have to choose your operating system and then choose the internet category to get listings of software in over a hundred categories.
• CWSApps – It’s got a ton of software in a variety of internet categories (check out “Internet Agents” for a listing of search software).
• Version Tracker – Everything changes on the internet constantly and nothing changes faster than version numbers. Version Tracker keeps tabs on the latest versions on a variety of software.

Questions

1. Who are the big two? Who are the other two?
2. True or False: Is Mozilla open source?
3. If you have an older computer and you want to use a compatible web browser, which should you choose?
4. Name some ways of optimizing your web browser for speed. How about for security?
5. What is a plugin and what does it do?
6. What are toolbars?
7. What is a bookmarklet and what makes it different from a regular bookmark?