Dear Visitors,

I have enjoyed publishing Internet Newcomer these past 18 months but lately my focus has changed. I have launched a new blog under my own banner at GregFalken.com.

I find my attention increasingly drawn to the intersection of computers, the Internet and communications, especially social media. At the new blog, I indulge my interest in these and several other topics. I hope you will join me there and that you will find them interesting too.

-Greg Falken
Tuolumne, CA
September 2009

Moving photo by Adam Schuster

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There are two online services that I return to many times throughout the day. The first is email. I always have Gmail loaded in a tab of my browser. In another tab is Google Reader, my feed reader of choice. If you don’t know about feeds, go take a look at the video in my post RSS In Plain English. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

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The China Vortex has this startling graph of Google China’s usage during the national moment of silence and mourning for the victims of the of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan.

As David Weinberger notes, it is, eerily, like the inverse of a seismograph.

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The choice of a web browser is an important one, because this software is the portal through which you experience the Internet. Most people never switch from the one that comes pre-installed on their computer, giving Microsoft’s Internet Explorer about an 80% share of the browser market. As you may have gathered from the big logo image over there, I am a Firefox user. There are many reasons why it’s my browser of choice but one of the biggest is it’s excellent (and free) selection of Add-ons. Add-ons (also called plug-ins) are small software programs that add various features that the parent program lacks. For example, I have an add-on installed called “IE Tab”, which allows Firefox to mimic Internet Explorer when it displays web pages. This is pretty handy when I’m developing web pages and want to check for compatibility between the two browsers. It can also be useful if you visit sites that were developed just for IE. Add-ons are cool and useful (though sometimes extremely geeky) and I want to share some of them with you that are installed on the various copies of Firefox that I use.

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I search the Internet for useful stuff, so you don’t have to. This three part video series was produced by Palm Beach CAFE, a weekly show hosted by Lee Keller and Kim Cavanaugh. The show is created by the School District of Palm Beach County and provides an informal look at technology in education.

Many of our viewers are just starting out on the Internet and wanted to know some basics that will help them conquer the Internet. This series will get you started on understanding the Internet and making it work for you.

For more from Lee and Kim, you can watch part 2 and part 3 of this video series on YouTube. You can also help me out by letting me know in comments if you prefer videos embedded in the post (like part 1, above) or linked to their original source (like parts 2 and 3 on YouTube). If you can’t watch videos at all, please let me know that too.

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At the suggestion of her computer helper, Mom is using a pair of USB flash drives to back up her new computer. It’s a good, simple strategy that should keep her data safe in the event that her new computer unexpectedly blows up. She did come up with a question though about using these drives:

I have my Flash Drive plugged in. Where do I locate its presence so that I can safely extract it? I find if I do leave it plugged in, the next time I want to turn my computer on, I get a message indicating an error and am not allowed to log on.

The short and simple answer: To remove the flash drive, double click on the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the system tray (the icon circled in red in the image at right). From the next window, select “USB Mass Storage Device” and click the Stop button. Click OK in the confirmation window and you’ll get a message that it’s ok to unplug the device. It will automatically re-enable itself when you plug it back in.

You can also just unplug it while the computer is turned off, to prevent it from complaining when you restart. The reason it does that is that the computer tries to find it’s start-up (boot) files on removable devices before looking on the hard drive. When it finds the device but not the files, it throws an error. Seems silly to me; it should ask you if you want to boot from the hard drive instead. But there you are. (more…)

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Everyone wants their emails to look nice. In the early days, there was plain text with no formatting or images. Now, almost all email clients understand HTML, the language used to build web pages. A little formatting can be a dangerous thing, however. A friend writes:

…[A] well meaning woman who handles *****’s online sales orders, mailing list, email list, etc. has been sending out horrible HTML emails. After informing ***** of the problem and encouraging him to get her to send simple email announcements until she can learn what the hell she’s doing, I decided to research the subject a bit and try making some myself. I thought browser compatibility of web sites was a pain, but it ain’t nothing compared to email reader compatibility. Any suggestions as to the simplest, most reader friendly html editor for emails?

It took me a few days to come up with a response, because there’s no easy and quick answer. I finally came up with this: (more…)

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A friend of mine who manages a couple of web sites writes:

Is there any good reason for me to install Safari [web browser]? I have no burning desire to do this, but wondered if I should be looking at Safari to see how the web sites perform on that platform. If no well known compatibility problems, I’d be happy to pass on the exercise.

From what I’ve read about Safari (I have no personal experience with it), the biggest advantage it has over Firefox is performance (this may change when Firefox 3 is released). It falls short though, of Firefox’s feature set and it doesn’t have the thousands of available plugins. I haven’t been tempted to use it as a daily browser. For compatibility testing, it would make the most sense to use it on a Mac, as that’s where the vast majority of Safari browsers are installed. Apple is getting a lot of heat for trying to “sneak install” Safari on Windows machines, along side of iTunes updates. I doubt they’re going to make much headway there.

Here’s a quick way of doing a Safari compatibility check on a single web page: http://www.browsrcamp.com/.

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There can never be too many ways to explain something, right? Stephanie, over at Back In Skinny Jeans, has written a wildly popular HowTo called How to Explain CSS the Oprah Way.

The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, “Uh, I don’t get it?”

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

Go read the whole thing.

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Every business and many individuals need their own domain name. This unique alpha-numeric address becomes the name used to identify you in a web site URL or an email address. The great things about a domain name are that 1) you own it and 2) it is portable anywhere on the Internet. You keep the same identity, regardless of which Internet Service Provider (ISP) or hosting company you use. There is however, a lot of confusion about how to register and then use a domain name, as well as their actual function in the structure of the Internet.

Why a domain name?

Every computer on the Internet (even yours) has an address and, being machines, these addresses are numeric. They are referred to as IP Addresses (for Internet Protocol) and they are written in dotted-decimal notation; four numbers, each ranging from 0 to 255, separated by dots (e.g. 147.132.42.18). Even in the early days, when the Internet was used mainly by computer scientists and academics, they realized that referring to everything on the Internet using dotted-decimal notation was not going to fly. So a system was devised to use a domain name interchangeably with its IP Address. In other words, a domain name is an alias to an IP Address.

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