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Chapter 1: Email and Spam Annoyances

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Let us all praise email. It's the great instant communicator. And, of course, the source of instant annoyances.

No other software is so spectacularly useful and so spectacularly annoying. How annoying? One word: spam.

Of course, there are a lot more email annoyances beyond spam. Like why, when you travel, you sometimes can't send email, no matter how hard you try. Like not being able to access your corporate account. Like getting notices that mail you've sent can't be delivered—even though you never sent it.

There are so many annoying things about email, in fact, that I've had to break up this chapter into several parts. It starts off with general email annoyances. Then it covers that plague of the Internet, spam. After that, it delves into email software that Windows users love to hate, Outlook and Outlook Express. It also shows you how to fix annoyances in that old email standby, Eudora, and dips into the future with a look at Google's Gmail, which has its own set of annoyances. America Online users, don't worry; AOL's email and other annoyances get their very own chapter later on in this book.

The Annoyance:

It's hard enough to keep track of all the email I handle with my email program, but I also have web-based accounts with Hotmail and Yahoo! This means I have to check three different places for all my email. This is progress?

The Fix:

Two free downloads—YahooPOPs! and Hotmail Popper—let you use just about any email program to access your Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail accounts. You'll be able to download and send email with your favorite email app, almost transparently.

YahooPOPs!

A while back, you could fetch your Yahoo! mail for free via a POP3 mail server, using an email program such as Outlook or Eudora. No longer. These days you have to pay $20 a year for the privilege. (Although, to be fair, you get other useful features, such as automatic forwarding of your Yahoo! mail, more storage space, and more.) However, the clever (and free) YahooPOPs! (

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GENERAL EMAIL ANNOYANCES

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The Annoyance:

It's hard enough to keep track of all the email I handle with my email program, but I also have web-based accounts with Hotmail and Yahoo! This means I have to check three different places for all my email. This is progress?

The Fix:

Two free downloads—YahooPOPs! and Hotmail Popper—let you use just about any email program to access your Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail accounts. You'll be able to download and send email with your favorite email app, almost transparently.

YahooPOPs!

A while back, you could fetch your Yahoo! mail for free via a POP3 mail server, using an email program such as Outlook or Eudora. No longer. These days you have to pay $20 a year for the privilege. (Although, to be fair, you get other useful features, such as automatic forwarding of your Yahoo! mail, more storage space, and more.) However, the clever (and free) YahooPOPs! (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/yahoopops/yahoopops-win-0.6.exe?download) lets you treat Yahoo! Mail like any other POP3 mail server. YahooPOPs! serves as a go-between, retrieving the mail and then letting your email program grab it.

Install YahooPOPs!, and it idles in the Windows System Tray. You can configure it with a variety of options, directing it to automatically download messages to your email client, leave mail on the server, or download only a certain number of emails per session (see Figure 1-1). Setup is easy—simply create a new mail account in your email software. Call the incoming and outgoing mail servers "localhost," and use your Yahoo! username and password. Once YahooPOPs! is up and running, you can use your email program to check your Yahoo! Mail account.

Figure 1-1: Configuring YahooPOPs! to retrieve email from your Yahoo! mail account is a checkbox affair.

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SPAM

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The Annoyance:

Like everyone else in the world, my mailbox is filled to the brim with more obscene offers, get-rich-quick scams, and other digitrash than I thought existed on the planet. It's so overwhelming that I don't even know where to begin to fight it. I know that there's anti-spam software out there, but which is the best?

The Fix:

There's no one "best" piece of spam-fighting software. Truth be told, most of the major anti-spam apps do a good job. The key is to choose a competent anti-spam program and use it to the max. Before buying, look for these features:

Trainable spam filters

Anti-spam software typically lets you mark email as spam. The spam filter should learn as you use it, catching not only email you've identified as spam, but similar emails as well.

Customizable spam filters

You should be able to customize the program's spam filters—for example, by telling it to nab any email that contains certain phrases.

Outlook 2003 includes a reasonably good built-in spam-killer, unlike earlier versions of the program. To turn it on, choose Tools → Options and click the Preferences tab. Then click Junk E-mail. Make sure the "No Automatic Filtering" box is unchecked, or else you'll turn off Outlook's spam-killer. Choose Low if you want to catch only the most obvious spam, and High if you want to be more aggressive—(and can live with it flagging some legitimate mail as spam).

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OUTLOOK 2003 AND OUTLOOK EXPRESS 6

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The Annoyance:

I'll admit that I'm paranoid. I worry that anyone can read the Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express 6 email that I've received or am about to send, so I log off my computer every time I leave my desk. Isn't there an easier way to protect my email privacy?

The Fix:

Outlook and Outlook Express both let you password-protect your inbox, out-box, and all mail folders. In Outlook, choose File → Data File Management. Select the folder you want to protect, then choose Settings → Change Password. Choose a password, verify it, and click OK, and then click OK again. From now on, only someone who knows the password can read your mail. By the way, the folder you're password-protecting isn't a single folder—it's an entire collection of folders, such as all your archived mail, or all your personal mail folders (inbox, sent mail, outbox, and so on).

In Outlook Express, choose File → Identities → Manage Identities and select the Identity that you want to protect. Then click the Properties button, check the "Require a password" box, and enter and confirm your password. Click OK, and then click Close. A password will now be required to access all folders.

The Annoyance:

One of Outlook 2003's best features is its Unread Mail folder, which shows me all the unread mail in all of my mail folders. Unfortunately, two weeks ago Outlook went on the fritz. Now when I delete unread mail in other folders, it still shows up in my Unread Mail folder. And when I try to delete mail in the Unread Mail folder, it doesn't get deleted; it just sits there. What can I do about this?

The Fix:

The Unread Mail folder will at times mysteriously exhibit this behavior. There's an easy fix: delete the folder. Right-click the Unread Mail folder and choose Delete "Unread Mail" (Figure 1-13). Then right-click Search Folders, select New Search Folder

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GMAIL

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The Annoyance:

I use Yahoo! Mail, and I'm constantly running out of storage space—the free 250 MB isn't enough. I get the feeling they're "encouraging" me to upgrade to the Plus service, for $20 per year. (Granted, that does buy you 2 GB of space.) Is there a better (and cheaper) alternative?

The Fix:

Get 4 times the space with Google's free email service, called Gmail (Figure 1-18). You get an astounding 1 GB of free storage, so it'll be a long, long time before you have to delete a piece of email. Sign up at http://gmail.google.com.

The service offers a lot of extras besides a ton of storage space. For example, you can search through your mail using Google's search technology, so even though you might have a lot of mail, finding what you want is easy. Also, there's a nice set of tools for creating folders (which Google calls "labels") and for creating rules for automatically handling mail (for example, routing messages to the appropriate folders based on the sender or on words in the text).

Figure 1-18: You can import your entire folder structure from your old copy of Outlook Express, or only the folders you select.

The Annoyance:

I've signed up for half a dozen email newsletters using my Gmail account, but I haven't received a single one yet. What's with Gmail—is it losing more mail than the U.S. Postal Service?

The Fix:

The culprit is Gmail's spam filter, which can be a bit aggressive when it comes to newsletters (especially any initial messages that require you click internal links to confirm your free subscription). Click the Spam link in your Gmail account; you'll probably see that Gmail has filtered out all your newsletters as spam. To let future newsletters through, scroll to the bottom of each newsletter, and click the Not Spam button. Each one you marked will be moved to your inbox, and future newsletters should now get through to you.

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EUDORA 6

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The Annoyance:

Eudora 6 has a useful, but sometimes annoying, auto-completion feature. It captures the email address of just about everyone you send and who sends you email including the errors. I've sent email repeatedly to a nonexistent address because the $#@#$ feature captured a typo I entered three weeks ago.

The Fix:

Tell Eudora to stop using its History file to fill in addresses. In Eudora, select Tools → Options, click the Auto-completion icon, uncheck the "History File" box and the "Don't auto-complete, just list matches" box, and click OK (see Figure 1-19). To do away with individual auto-completion entries that are incorrect, open a new message form and type the first letter of a recipient's address. A list of potential matches will pop up. Scroll to the incorrect item, select it, hit the Delete key, and it's gone for good.

Outlook has a similar auto-completion feature. To turn it off, you'll have to dig deep through the menus. Choose Tools → Options, click the Preferences tab, then click the E-mail Options button. Click the Advanced E-mail Options button, and uncheck the "Suggest names while completing To, cc, and bcc fields" box. Click OK, and keep clicking OK until the dialog boxes disappear. You can delete individual auto-complete entries using the same procedure as in Eudora.

Figure 1-19: If Eudora's auto-completion feature is sending you around the bend, turn it off from this screen.

The Annoyance:

I read your advice on how to use keyboard shortcuts to speed up Outlook. But I'm a Eudora user. What keyboard shortcuts will let me give the rodent a rest?

The Fix:

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Chapter 2: Making the Connection Annoyances

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What's more basic—or more annoying—than making a connection to the Internet? This should be the most mundane of tasks, but it can all too often turn into a three-hour soap opera, and even then the annoyance may not be solved.

Connecting to the Internet was annoying enough when you only had to worry about dial-up connections. But now, with cable and DSL broadband access, home routers and networks, and using the Internet to make phone calls via Voice over IP (VoIP), the mere act of making an Internet connection has become the Mother of All Annoyances.

The Annoyance:

I sometimes lose my Internet connection. When I call my ISP's tech support line, they ask me for details such as DNS entries, gateway information, IP addresses, and the like, but they still don't fix the problem. I have better things to do with my time—like watching the Yankees lose to the Red Sox. Again. Isn't there a simpler way to fix a broken connection, without resorting to pointless (and often, useless) tech support?

The Fix:

This quick fix can automatically repair a surprising number of broken connections. First, right-click My Network Places and choose Properties. Then right-click the connection that's broken and choose Repair, as shown in Figure 2-1. This is a great starting point and often solves the problem without further troubleshooting.

Figure 2-1: This instant solution will fix a surprising number of Internet connection snafus.

The Annoyance:

This has to be one of the worst Internet annoyances! Whenever I try to connect to the Internet, XP hangs so badly that I have to reboot. It's like living in 1995—which is the last time I used a PC without an Internet connection.

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GENERAL CONNECTION ANNOYANCES

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The Annoyance:

I sometimes lose my Internet connection. When I call my ISP's tech support line, they ask me for details such as DNS entries, gateway information, IP addresses, and the like, but they still don't fix the problem. I have better things to do with my time—like watching the Yankees lose to the Red Sox. Again. Isn't there a simpler way to fix a broken connection, without resorting to pointless (and often, useless) tech support?

The Fix:

This quick fix can automatically repair a surprising number of broken connections. First, right-click My Network Places and choose Properties. Then right-click the connection that's broken and choose Repair, as shown in Figure 2-1. This is a great starting point and often solves the problem without further troubleshooting.

Figure 2-1: This instant solution will fix a surprising number of Internet connection snafus.

The Annoyance:

This has to be one of the worst Internet annoyances! Whenever I try to connect to the Internet, XP hangs so badly that I have to reboot. It's like living in 1995—which is the last time I used a PC without an Internet connection.

The Fix:

Chances are you've installed the Advanced Networking Pack, which uses the IPv6 protocol, at the behest of your network's system administrator. This newish networking protocol is supposed to lead to more reliable networking, but instead it usually leads to disaster because it doesn't always play nice with other protocols and the Internet. The protocol and related services start by default, and that's what's crashing XP. You'll have to uninstall IPv6 to solve the problem. Here's how:

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BROADBAND: CABLE AND DSL CONNECTIONS

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The Annoyance:

When I installed my cable modem, it was faster than greased lightning. Now it's slow as molasses. It's really slow when it rains. Am I crazy, or can there be some cause and effect here?

Figure 2-4: If you have an always-on broadband service, tell Windows to nix the dial-up option.

The Fix:

It sounds like your outside cable connection is loose or in some way exposed to the elements. That's why, when it rains, your Internet speed heads south. Get your cable company to check the cable connection to your house, as well as the connection from the pole. If no problems are found, have them check for a cable splitter installed in your house. Splitters are sometimes used to separate data and video connections, and if there's a problem with your splitter, you may have problems with your Internet connection.

The Annoyance:

I followed your advice and had the cable company check my connections. The connections were fine, but the connection's still slow as a dog. I forgot to mention that I use a router at home, which my cable company set up for me when they installed my cable modem. Is the router the problem?

The theoretical speed of your cable connection may be as high as 3 megabits per second (Mbps), but don't expect to get that speed on a regular basis. You share that bandwidth with all the people in your local neighborhood "loop." When there are few people online at the same time, you'll get higher connection speeds; when there are a lot online (or some pesky kid is downloading a few hundred MP3 files), the pipe gets smaller. And sometimes, in the blind pursuit of profit, cable companies sign up too many people from the same neighborhood for the same loop, so traffic goes up and performance plummets. If you find your connection dragging its bits all too often, complain to your cable company and ask them to add more loops and thus boost your connection speed.

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ROUTERS AND HOME NETWORKS

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The Annoyance:

I just installed a home network so my wife, my music-loving 14-year-old son, and I can use the Internet at the same time. But for no apparent reason, my cable connection is getting slower and slower. For this I pay $45 a month? Strangely enough, if I turn off my router and then turn it back on again, things speed up for a while, then gradually slow down again.

The Fix:

The key here is your music-loving 14-year-old son. He's probably using file-sharing software such as BitTorrent or Kazaa to download music or movies and share them with others. Not only is he sucking up your network's bandwidth, but file-sharing software can fill up the router's routing tables and slow the entire network to a crawl. When you restart your router, the routing tables are cleared out—hence the temporary speed boost. To solve the problem, first tell your son that he can't use file-sharing software when other people are using the network. Have him queue up all his files for nighttime download, when everyone is asleep.

Want to, um, confirm compliance? Depending on your router, you can probably see all the inbound and outbound traffic between your network and the Internet, on a PC-by-PC basis, by peeking into the router's logs. If you see a single PC with a constant stream of inbound and outbound URLs, it's a sign that file sharing is going on. Here's how to check the logs on a Linksys router:

1. Log into the Linksys administrator's setup screen, at http://192.168.1.1. Leave the username blank and enter the password admin (assuming you haven't changed it).
2. First, check the IP addresses of all your networked computers, so that you can match the traffic log to each PC. Click the DHCP tab, which appears when you log into the router, then the DHCP Client table. A small browser window will pop up, showing you the IP address and hostname of each PC (see Figure 2-6).

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Chapter 3: Wireless Annoyances

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Ah, wireless technology. It's the closest thing we have to magic—extremely annoying magic, that is. No other technology frees us so completely from having to be in a fixed place: with wireless devices you can get high-speed Internet access while you roam through your house, through your office, or even across the country. But no other technology is so thoroughly annoying, either. When you turn on your wirelessly connected PC or laptop, you have to worry about filing cabinets, walls, pesky RF-absorbing coworkers, or someone in the kitchen microwaving a burrito disrupting your signal. And as you'll see in this chapter, there are countless other annoyances you'll face as well.

Although there are other wireless networking standards (notably, Bluetooth and HomeRF), this chapter largely focuses on WiFi networks —that is, wireless networks built around the 802.11 x standard.

The Annoyance:

I just installed a WiFi network, but the connection to my upstairs PC is so slow and flaky, I might as well use the Pony Express to send mail. How can I speed things up?

The Fix:

Flaky is the right word for WiFi connections—they can be affected by a mind-boggling array of objects and phenomena, from cordless phones to filing cabinets. You should also keep in mind that wireless networks rarely deliver data at their rated bandwidth speeds. You're lucky to get half the rated speed, even in the best of conditions.

One of the biggest factors affecting connection speed is the distance between the access point and the wirelessly equipped PC. Compaq, for example, notes that at a distance of 150 feet, the throughput of its wireless access point drops by half, and at 300 feet, it drops even more. And that's understating the case: in real-world conditions, you'll find a much more severe drop-off in speed.

Reducing the distance between your upstairs computer and your access point will go a long way toward boosting network performance, but interference from other devices and the layout of your house or office can dramatically affect network speed as well. Here's what you can do to get more throughput throughout your home:

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HOME WIRELESS NETWORKS AND ROUTERS

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The Annoyance:

I just installed a WiFi network, but the connection to my upstairs PC is so slow and flaky, I might as well use the Pony Express to send mail. How can I speed things up?

The Fix:

Flaky is the right word for WiFi connections—they can be affected by a mind-boggling array of objects and phenomena, from cordless phones to filing cabinets. You should also keep in mind that wireless networks rarely deliver data at their rated bandwidth speeds. You're lucky to get half the rated speed, even in the best of conditions.

One of the biggest factors affecting connection speed is the distance between the access point and the wirelessly equipped PC. Compaq, for example, notes that at a distance of 150 feet, the throughput of its wireless access point drops by half, and at 300 feet, it drops even more. And that's understating the case: in real-world conditions, you'll find a much more severe drop-off in speed.

Reducing the distance between your upstairs computer and your access point will go a long way toward boosting network performance, but interference from other devices and the layout of your house or office can dramatically affect network speed as well. Here's what you can do to get more throughput throughout your home:

• Put your wireless access point in a central location. That way, all of your wirelessly equipped PCs will get reasonable throughput. If you tuck your access point away in a corner of the house, nearby PCs may get high throughput, but for others it may drop significantly.
• Make sure the access point's antennas are not obstructed. Make sure there are no obstructions within two to three inches of the antennas. Transmission may also improve if the antennas are vertically oriented, but every house is different, so experiment.

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CELL PHONES AND THE NET

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The Annoyance:

I want to send a text message to my daughter using my email program. I know that the email address is her phone number, followed by a certain domain, but I can't remember the domain name. We're living in the age of communications—there's got to be some way to do this!

The Fix:

Traditionally (namely, until a few months ago), to send someone a text message, you had to know her cell phone carrier's domain—and they're seldom obvious. To send email to a Cingular user, for example, the domain is mobile.mycingular.net. But technology soldiers on. Thanks to Teleflip, now all you need to send a message to someone's cell phone is that person's cell phone number. Just send an email to cellphonenumber @teleflip.com, where cellphonenumber is the person's cell phone number. The service is free, although the recipient will probably have to pay to receive the message. For more details, go to http://www.teleflip.com.

It soon could become easier to find web sites to browse with your cell phone. Microsoft, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, and five other companies have banded together to promote a top-level Internet domain (such as .com or .net) devoted to web sites designed to be accessed by cell phones. The Internet's oversight body has given initial approval to the use of .mobi, and it might be in use by the time you read this. For more information, go to http://www.mtldinfo.com, the home page of the mobile Top Level Domain initiative, the group that's pushing for the new domain.

The Annoyance:

What's so great about browsing the Web with a cell phone? Almost every site I visit is completely garbled!

The Fix:

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WIFI SECURITY

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The Annoyance:

I have a Linksys wireless router, and the other day, using AirSnare (see "Stop Bandwidth Vampires"), I found someone on my network, stealing bandwidth. When I sent an angry note to the leech, he had the gall to write back, "Then stop broadcasting your SSID, stupid!" What's an SSID, and how do I stop it from being broadcast?

The Fix:

Your SSID is your network's name, and if people know what it is, it's easier for them to find your network and connect to it.

That's only one part of the problem, though. Even if you stop broadcasting your network's name, people may still be able to connect to it. That's because manufacturers generally ship their wireless routers with the same generic SSID—for example, Linksys routers are called "Linksys" by default. So even if you stop broadcasting your SSID, these bandwidth vampires may be able to easily guess your router's name and log on to your network. So you need to first change your SSID's name, then hide it.

Change your SSID name

The steps you'll follow with most vendors' wireless routers should be similar. This is how you'd change the SSID name on a Linksys router:

1. Log into the setup screen by opening your browser and going to http://192.168.1.1. When the login screen appears, leave the username blank, type admin as the password, and press Enter. (If you've changed the username and password, obviously, use those.)
2. On the Setup tab (Figure 3-8), go to the ESSID box and type in a new name for your network, then click the Apply button. (With some Linksys routers, you'll instead need to go to the Wireless tab, locate the "Wireless Network Name (SSID)" box, enter a new name, and then click the Save Settings button.)

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HOTSPOTS

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The Annoyance:

I spend more time in airports and hotel rooms than I do at home. I'd like to access HotSpots wherever I travel, but finding a HotSpot on the road is about as easy as finding a good sushi bar in Saskatchewan.

The Fix:

Before you hit the road, check these online HotSpot finders: http://www.wi-fihotspotlist.com, http://www.wifinder.com, http://www.wifimaps.com, and http://www.jiwire.com. They'll help you find free as well as for-pay HotSpots. If you're looking for only free HotSpots, head to http://www.wififreespot.com.

Tired of having to turn on your laptop whenever you need to find out whether there's a functioning WiFi network nearby? Kensington's nifty little $25 handheld WiFi Finder would seem to offer relief. With a push of a button, it supposedly can find a nearby HotSpot in a flash. Alas, reviewers have not been kind to this widget. In a CNET review (http://reviews.cnet.com/Kensington_WiFi_Finder/4505-3243_7-30468829.html), Jim Aspinwall notes that the device is unreliable, won't detect 802.11g networks, and mistakes Bluetooth for WiFi. In short, think twice before snapping up one of these devices—at least until reliability improves.

You can also combine the power of Google's location search with the JiWire search to locate HotSpots near any zip code, street, or any other location, complete with a map. Go to http://labs.google.com/location, and type jiwire in the "Search terms" box. In the "Street address, city, or zip" box, type in the location and press Enter (or click the Google Search button). You'll get a list of HotSpots near the location, with addresses, directions, related web links, and more (Figure 3-13). With a click, you can summon a map with the locations neatly pinpointed.

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Chapter 4: Web Hosting, Design, and Blog Annoyances

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If you've ever tried to create your own web page or blog, you know the true meaning of the word "annoyance." Hosting services whose tech support departments treat you like a dolt. Wrestling with the incomprehensible vagaries of HTML. Creating your first blog and trying to figure out why no one can read it.

Yes, getting a web site up and running is a journey to Angst City. But you don't need to be an accidental tourist when you get there, because this chapter is here to help. It covers hosting hassles, domain woes, design and HTML help, and advice on how to get your blog up and running. Whether you're building a web site or already have one, help is on the way.

Looking to buy your own domain, or want to find a good hosting service, but annoyances get in the way? I've got solutions for you. Can't get FrontPage to work with your hosting service? Problem solved. Tired of bad links and poorly written HTML bedeviling your site? Help in many forms is just around the corner. Want to post to your blog, but not via the Web? No problem—we'll look at how to do it via email, or even from your cell phone. Can't figure out how to get past an annoying login screen in Movable Type? You'll find out how. Dig in; there are plenty of web hosting and design annoyances to solve.

The Annoyance:

My ISP gives me free web hosting, but the URL I'm stuck with is as long as the Manhattan phone book. How can I get a domain name that people won't get carpal tunnel from typing?

The Fix:

Getting your own domain is a good idea, and not just because of the shorter URL. When you own your own domain, no one can take it from you—it's your own little piece of the Internet, and it's yours for as long as you pay for it.

The first step is to find out what domain names are available. During the height of the Internet boom, there was a domain land grab, with people registering domains they didn't need in the hopes that some large company would buy them for big money. (Some did.) So if you're looking for a domain using a common word (e.g.,

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DOMAIN AND HOSTING HASSLES

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The Annoyance:

My ISP gives me free web hosting, but the URL I'm stuck with is as long as the Manhattan phone book. How can I get a domain name that people won't get carpal tunnel from typing?

The Fix:

Getting your own domain is a good idea, and not just because of the shorter URL. When you own your own domain, no one can take it from you—it's your own little piece of the Internet, and it's yours for as long as you pay for it.

The first step is to find out what domain names are available. During the height of the Internet boom, there was a domain land grab, with people registering domains they didn't need in the hopes that some large company would buy them for big money. (Some did.) So if you're looking for a domain using a common word (e.g., food.com) or you have a common last name, you're probably out of luck. But you might find an available domain name based on a combination of your first, middle, and last names, such as alexawilliams.com or peterlsmith.com.

How do you find out what's available? Turn to an Internet facility called Whois, which searches through a database of all registered domain names and lets you know if the one you want is available. You can run a search with a free Whois utility such as Whois Web Professional 4.2 (http://www.rietta.com/whoisweb/), but it's easier to search via a dedicated Whois web site (such as http://www.whois.net) or a domain-registration site. It doesn't really matter which approach you use—they all access the same servers and report the same results. The advantage of searching via a registrar is that if the domain name you want isn't available, some will suggest dozens of variations that are available. Some registrars can even "backorder" the domain you want and notify you when the domain is back on the market.

Once you find a domain that's available, register it at any registrar. For a guide to registrars, go to

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DESIGN AND MAINTENANCE HELP

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The Annoyance:

I don't have the time to learn HTML tricks, but I'd like to build a web site that's more exciting than a dead fish. Help!

The Fix:

Your best bet is to use a graphical web-site creation program that lets you build pages without writing (or editing) a lick of HTML code. You do everything visually, from pasting in graphics to creating input fields to setting text. The program generates the appropriate HTML, which you then post as your web site.

A good basic, free program is Netscape Composer (http://wp.netscape.com/communicator/composer). The program sports some notable niceties, such as automatically converting graphics to a web-friendly format. However, it doesn't include many advanced features, such as any interactivity—it focuses on straight HTML.

A much more comprehensive, and expensive, program is the $199 FrontPage 2003 (Figure 4-2). It also lets you build web pages visually, but it includes some sophisticated features for e-commerce, building very large web sites, integrating web sites with databases, and more. If you're building relatively simple web pages, it's overkill. But if FrontPage came with your copy of Microsoft Office, using it is worth your while. (For some caveats about FrontPage, see "Why Won't FrontPage Work with My Host?" later in this section.)

Figure 4-2: A program like FrontPage makes it easy to build web pages without knowing much HTML—you can even build online photo galleries, as shown here.

The Annoyance:

Last week, for no apparent reason, my web site got a huge jump in traffic. I have to pay my ISP extra if I exceed a certain amount of traffic, so this huge increase has put me in a financial hole. I figure all the extra traffic probably came from someone linking to me. How can I find out what web sites have linked to mine, so I can stop it?

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BLOGGING

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The Annoyance:

The world needs saving, and I'm the man to do it. I've heard about "blogs" and would like to share my ineffable wisdom with the world through one. But I don't want to host my own web site—I want to blog as simply as possible.

The Fix:

A webblog, or blog, is a public diary kept on the Web. They're typically updated daily or several days a week, and blog postings can range from mundane "I brushed my teeth today" jottings to reportage from political conventions. As I write this, an estimated 8.4 million Americans have created blogs. Ever on the cutting edge, even Bill Gates is contemplating writing a blog that one source says would "share personal details, such as tidbits from recent vacations." I can't wait.

There are many ways you can blog, but the simplest is to use a free web site that hosts and lets you quickly and easily create a blog. The leader in the field is Blogger, at http://www.blogger.com. (It's owned by Google.) Just register at the site, fill in some basic information about your blog, and use simple forms to create one. After you register, you give your blog a name and choose a URL for it. (The URL will end in blogspot.com, so your URL might be something like http://www.prestonsposts.blogspot.com.) After you've chosen a name and URL, pick a template for it, and you're ready to start posting. To post, click the Start Posting button that appears after you choose your template, and you'll come to a page that looks like the one shown in Figure 4-9. Type in your musings, and use the HTML-formatting tools if you want to add fonts and colors. Click the Publish Post button at the bottom of the page, and you'll create your first post. Your blog will now be live at the URL you chose during setup. To post again to your blog, log in at http://www.blogger.com. You'll come to your Dashboard page, which is command central for your blogging. Click your blog name, and on the page that appears, click "Create a new post." You'll again see a page like that shown in Figure 4-9, where you can once again share your incisive thoughts with the world.

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Chapter 5: Browser Annoyances

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For most people, the Web is the Internet. And the window into the Web is your browser. And a very annoying window it can be.

Head to your favorite site. Oops! There are six pop-up windows that must be swatted down. Go to another site—an animated ad the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger covers the page. Great. Still another site has jumping, singing ads accompanied by eardrum-bending music. Oh wait...that e-commerce site just hijacked your browser, opening window after window after window.

These and other annoyances galore face every web surfer: from pop-ups to web sites that don't print properly to cookies that report your movements to nefarious marketers who want to send you even more ads!

In this chapter, you'll learn how to deal with all these and many other annoyances. You'll find out how to kill pop-up and pop-under ads, and how to flatten the most annoying ads of all time—animated Flash ads. In fact, you'll learn how to turn the Internet into an ad-free zone by killing all ads.

The Annoyance:

Browsing the Web these days feels like cruising a carnival midway, with pop-up ads screaming their messages at me everywhere I turn. If I wanted bright, flashing lights, I'd visit Las Vegas. How can I kill these digital carnival barkers?

The Fix:

The Web's all-time great search tool, the Google Toolbar, kills pop-ups from directly within Internet Explorer. Get it at http://toolbar.google.com. Another good free pop-up killer is EMS Free Surfer mk II, available from http://www.kolumbus.fi/eero.muhonen/FS/fs.htm. Also popular (and, I think, superior) is iHatePopups, available for $9.95 from http://www.sunbelt-software.com/product.cfm?id=935. It can distinguish between "good" and "bad" pop-ups, and it lets you add specific pages to a "whitelist" so that it knows which pop-ups you want to let through. (What's "good" and what's "bad"? Any window that opens without your instruction is considered a "bad" pop-up window. A window that opens after you click a link or press Enter is considered a legitimate new window. Pop-up ads typically aren't triggered by clicking a link, but editorial pop-ups generally are.)

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POP-UPS, ADS, AND FLASH

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The Annoyance:

Browsing the Web these days feels like cruising a carnival midway, with pop-up ads screaming their messages at me everywhere I turn. If I wanted bright, flashing lights, I'd visit Las Vegas. How can I kill these digital carnival barkers?

The Fix:

The Web's all-time great search tool, the Google Toolbar, kills pop-ups from directly within Internet Explorer. Get it at http://toolbar.google.com. Another good free pop-up killer is EMS Free Surfer mk II, available from http://www.kolumbus.fi/eero.muhonen/FS/fs.htm. Also popular (and, I think, superior) is iHatePopups, available for $9.95 from http://www.sunbelt-software.com/product.cfm?id=935. It can distinguish between "good" and "bad" pop-ups, and it lets you add specific pages to a "whitelist" so that it knows which pop-ups you want to let through. (What's "good" and what's "bad"? Any window that opens without your instruction is considered a "bad" pop-up window. A window that opens after you click a link or press Enter is considered a legitimate new window. Pop-up ads typically aren't triggered by clicking a link, but editorial pop-ups generally are.)

If you have Windows XP's Service Pack 2 (SP2), your updated version of Internet Explorer already includes a built-in pop-up killer. To make sure it's working, choose Tools → Pop-up Blocker, and make sure that "Turn off Pop-up Blocker" is unchecked. Both Opera and Netscape Navigator have built-in pop-up killers, too. In Opera, choose File → Preferences → Refuse pop-up windows. You can even tell Opera to allow pop-up windows but to open them in the background, instead of on top of your browser.

To enable Netscape's pop-up killer, choose Edit → Preferences → Privacy & Security → Popup Windows and check the "Block unrequested popup windows" box.

The Annoyance:

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FAVORITES AND BOOKMARKS

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The Annoyance:

When I add a web site to IE's Favorites menu, a cool icon often comes along for the ride, such as the red Y! logo for Yahoo! The icons stay on my Favorites menu for a while and then suddenly disappear, never to return. How can I make them stay?

The Fix:

Every time you add a site to your Favorites list, Internet Explorer sees whether the site has defined a favicon for itself (like the red Y!). If the favicon is there, Internet Explorer stores it in your temporary Internet files cache, and it shows up on your Favorites list.

If you use more than one browser and you want to keep all your bookmarks in one place, try Powermarks. It does more than just keep them in one place, though. Want to search through your bookmarks to quickly find the one you want? When you add a bookmark, Powermarks automatically grabs keywords and the description field for it from the Web site in question, and you can then search through the keywords and descriptions for the site you want. It will also automatically notify you when any bookmarked page has new content on it, and it lets you rate bookmarks on a scale of 1 to 10 so you can easily see which sites are your true favorites. You can also copy and paste bookmarks to the clipboard. Your bookmarks appear in a separate window, so you can drag and drop them for easy organization. A free 30-day trial is available at http://www.kaylon.com/power.html; after that, you'll have to pay $24.95 to use the program.

If you clean out your Internet cache, or your cache fills up to the brim, the icon is pushed out and vanishes. To keep that favicon, you must associate it permanently with the right Favorite. Here's how:

1. To find the favicon for a site, go to http://www.<website>.com/favicon.ico. For example, go to http://www.oreilly.com/favicon.ico for the O'Reilly icon. Keep in mind that not all web sites have favicons, so you won't be able to do this for every site.

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WORKING THE INTERFACE

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The Annoyance:

I hate filling out forms on the Web. Internet Explorer helps some—as I start to type my name or a phone number into a field, it pops up a list of past entries, which I can stick in the field with a click. But it's a field-by-field chore. Why can't I fill out the entire form all at once?

The Fix:

IE can't do it, but other tools can. The all-purpose Google Toolbar also includes a very handy form-filler that works with the click of a button. Simply fill out the Toolbar's form first, with your name, address, and any other info you'd likely have to enter at a web site. (You can even save your credit card number—password-protected, of course.) When you get to a site with, say, a registration form, click a button, and wham! The form is filled out. The free RoboForm does an even better job, automatically logging you into many sites, remembering much more information (it functions as a password manager, too), and working with any browser, not just Internet Explorer. Get it at http://www.roboform.com.

If anyone offers you a free form-filler called Gator eWallet, think twice. Considered adware/spyware by many, the program, as the company admits, "occasionally displays pop up ads on your computer screen based on your online behavior..." but "only your first name, postal/zip code, and country are sent to [the company]." Is that all? We'll pass. Caveat downloader!

The Annoyance:

When I browse the Web using Internet Explorer, I am constantly assaulted by error boxes that say "A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug?" As far as I can tell, this note serves no purpose other than to annoy me. How can I stop this?

The Fix:

That error message (see Figure 5-10) is designed to help developers fix problems, and you're right—it's of no use to you. You can easily turn it off. Choose Tools

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SPEEDUPS AND SHORTCUTS

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The Annoyance:

My life has three speeds: fast, faster, and fastest. I'll do anything to juice up my browsing speed. I've heard about some obscure file called a HOSTS file that can get me to sites super-quickly—how do I use it?

The Fix:

Yes, a HOSTS fi