How to get Online

  1. Where to store web pages
    1. What you want from a service provider
      1. Anyonimity
      2. Freedom from U.S. and Canadian Laws
      3. No restrictions on content
      4. Lots of space
      5. Lots of bandwidth
      6. Quick responce
      7. An easy URL to remember
      8. Freedom from their advertising on your web page
      9. Freedom from SPAM
      10. Collect stats on usage
      11. Quick to make a page
      12. Access to scripts (and custom scripting)
      13. Redundent connections to internet
      14. Billing processing and VISA processing
      15. Realaudio server
    2. Server at NMU
      1. Main server I'm told is a pain to use.
      2. Department servers not available to all.
    3. AOL personal account
      1. Also provides dial up access
      2. Costs $19.95/month
      3. Provides 6 meg free
      4. Content limited by the service agreement
        1. Says only things in good taste.  Service agreement You may only use AOL.COM for legal purposes. You may not use AOL.COM, or its services to publish, post, distribute or disseminate any defamatory, obscene, or other unlawful material or information, including another's proprietary information,  including trademarks or copyrighted information, without express authorization from the rights holder. Additionally, you may not use AOL.COM to collect or harvest personal information, including internet addresses, about AOL.COM users.
      5. Size:  Over 10,000,000 people
    4. Geocities
      1. Standard Membership
        1. Get dorky URL www.geocities.com/SOHO/Workshop/1234
        2. Get 11M
        3. FREE!!!!
        4. Advertising:  You can either put a banner on your page, or they will add a pop-up window to the experience.
      2. Plus Membership
        1. Get cooler URL www.geocities.com/~randy.  Can buy www.randy.com
        2. Get 25M free
        3. Avoid advertising
        4. Get special scripts (clock/counter/survey) but no custom scripts
      3. Size:  Over 2,000,000 people.
      4. Divides places into neighborhoods based on subjects.  I chose Art/Area51
      5. Content Limited by the service agreement:

        6.                                  Providing material that is grossly offensive to the online community, including blatant
                                         expressions of bigotry, prejudice, racism, hatred, or profanity;
                                         Promoting or providing instructional information about illegal activities, promoting physical
                                         harm or injury against any group or individual, or promoting any act of cruelty to animals;
                                         Defaming any person or group;
                                         For commercial purposes, including but not limited to the following:

                                               Offering for sale any products or services;
                                               Soliciting for advertisers or sponsors;
                                               Displaying a sponsorship banner of any kind, including those that are
                                               generated by banner or link exchange services, with the sole exception of the
                                               GeoGuide Banner Exchange program and the Internet Link Exchange;
                                               Displaying banners for services that provide cash or cash-equivalent prizes
                                               to users in exchange for hyperlinks to their websites;
                                               Promoting or soliciting for participation in multilevel marketing or pyramid
                                               schemes. Please visit the FTC webpage for more information regarding
                                               money-making schemes: http://www.ftc.gov;
                                               Conducting raffles or contests that require any type of entry fee;

                                         Displaying material that exploits children under 18 years of age;
                                         Developing restricted or password-only access pages, or hidden pages or images (those not
                                         linked to from another accessible page);
                                         Using your page (or directory) as storage for remote loading or as a door or signpost to
                                         another home page, whether inside or beyond GeoCities;
                                         For acts of copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret or other intellectual property
                                         infringement, including but not limited to offering pirated computer programs or links to such
                                         programs, information used to circumvent manufacturer-installed copy-protect devices,
                                         including serial or registration numbers for software programs, or any type of cracker utilities
                                         (this also includes files which are solely intended for game emulation);
                                         Violating Internet standards for the purpose of promoting your home page;
                                         Developing home pages or session posts that consist of hyperlinks to content not allowed in
                                         GeoCities;
                                         Having multiple GeoCities addresses which are within the same GeoCities neighborhood or
                                         which have the same theme;
                                         Using GeoCities for the purpose of gathering personally identifiable information for
                                         commercial or unlawful purposes.
                                         Posting or disclosing any personally identifiable information belonging to children. [Kids: For
                                         your safety, do not put your your real name, address, phone number, e-mail or other
                                         information like that on your webpage or give it to strangers.]

         

    5. ISP -- Stands for Internet Service Provider
      1. Economics -- Bandwidth is cheaper in large quantity, same with sysadmin time
      2. I picked one from an AD (www.9netave.net) which offers
        1. 50MB
        2. 15 Mailboxes
        3. Custom domain names
        4. Custom CGI scripts
        5. Detailed web usage stats including access to the raw web logs
        6. 2000 meg of transfer per month with
        7. Realaudio server
    6. Colocation service
      1. You put your computer at their site
      2. They provide bandwidth and hardware admin
      3. You do software
      4. COST:  5 GIG/month for with 1 hour admin responce time and a UPS $99
  2. How to get hits
    1. Tell your friends (best for personal web pages)
    2. Get your page in a neighborhood (Geocities and others)
    3. Get listed by index sites for your field
    4. Join a ring program
    5. Get listed by a portal
      1. Automated search engines
        1. Work by scanning text for keywords
        2. Best ones correct misspellings and know synonyms
        3. Often horrible for common ideas
      2. Human built indexes
        1. Must stick to predefined catagories
        2. Often croslinked
        3. Sometimes old
      3. You can get listed by either
        1. Asking each portal to search/list you (most accurate)
        2. Asking a search engine submission page -- Free.NetPromote.com (quick)
        3. Get a score by using www.scorecard.com
        4. Can avoid being listed by search engines by making a /robots.txt file
  4. How to access the web
  6. Crackers pose a real threat to everyone. Using programs that continually guess at

    7.        user names and password combinations, hackers can literally search 24 hours a day
           to get what they want. If a password is made up of eight characters using only
           lowercase letters of the alphabet, that limits the search to just 208 billion possibilities.
           Sound astronomical? It's not. At 100,000 guesses per second, the most rudimentary
           hacking program can crack this kind of password in about three weeks.

           But suppose that eight character password were made up of both upper- and
           lowercase letters, and included numerals and other special characters (like the dollar
           sign or ampersand). The possibilities for an eight character password would soar to
           722 trillion. And the time it takes to crack them: 229 years!"