Now
Where Did I Put That?
by
Clark and Kathryn Kidd
With
these techniques you can find your lost site on the Internet again.
We usually
use this column to alert you to Internet sites that are interesting,
useful, or just downright fun. This time we wanted to do something
different, and give you some hints for keeping track of those useful
places that you find during your own Internet travel adventures.
There is nothing more frustrating than finding a useful Internet
site, only to lose it forever because you forgot what it was named.
Hopefully, we can make you aware of some features already present
in your software that will prevent too many of these lost sites.
The most common
way of keeping track of your favorite sites is using a feature called
Bookmarks (if you run Netscape Navigator) or Favorites (if you run
Internet Explorer). Look for buttons with those names on the browser
toolbar, or as an option in the pull-down menus. Commercial services
also have similar features, such as the Favorite Places option on
America Online. Regardless of what it is called by your particular
piece of software, the function is the same. Creating a bookmark
is the electronic equivalent of taking out a notebook and a pencil
and writing down an address. Your browser maintains a bookmark file
of all the web addresses you tell it to remember. Once you have
told the browser to add a bookmark, you can simply use the bookmark
function to review all the previous addresses you have saved. But
you don't have to create many bookmarks to realize that some type
of organizational system is necessary. Most browsers give you quite
a bit of flexibility in terms of managing your bookmarks. They will
usually allow you to create multiple folders, so that web sites
with similar functions can be grouped in the same folder. For example,
looking at the bookmarks on one of our computers shows folders with
names such as, "LDS Sites," "Search Engines," "Travel," "News and
Weather" and the generic "Fun Stuff." You can also have multiple
levels of folders. For example, selecting our Travel folder will
reveal secondary folders with such names as, "Airlines," "Destinations,"
"Hotels," and "Cruises." Most browsers also support an import and
export function so you can move bookmark lists from one computer
to another. You can export the bookmarks by writing them to a small
file, probably on a floppy disk. Then when you are using the computer
that is to receive the bookmarks, you simply insert the floppy and
do an import function.
Managing
Bookmarks
There are really
quite a few options when it comes to managing bookmarks, and you
can spend a lot of time creating folders and sub-folders, and getting
your bookmarks into just the right format so that you can use them
without difficulty. Like most PC software, however, many of the
Bookmark editing features seem difficult to understand and use,
and the online "help" isn't very helpful. You may want to export
a copy of your bookmarks for safety before you start to experiment
too much. Then if the worst should happen, you can always import
them and get back where you started. Most browsers also support
an "Undo" function, which allows you to cancel the last operation
you performed. You can usually go back several operations, and get
yourself out of some serious problems assuming you catch yourself
in time.
If you're already
bemoaning a lost site, you may be able to recover that as well.
If you only visited that lost site recently, you may have a pretty
good chance of finding it.
When you type
in a web address (technically called a URL), you will notice that
there is probably a downward-pointing arrow button to the right
of the box where you type in the address. This is called a drop-down
button, and if you press on it, the browser should produce a drop-down
list of all of the sites you have visited recently. If you recognize
one of those as the site you wanted, just click on the name and
you will be taken there. Now remember to bookmark the site this
time, so that you won't lose it in the future.
The History
Log
If the site
you lost isn't in the drop-down list, all is not lost. A final option
is to check in the history log of the browser. Each browser maintains
a history file of all the different sites that were recently visited
(you tell the browser how many days it should remember these sites
when you set the options). If you use Netscape, select the "Communicator"
menu item, then the "Tools" option (may not be present on older
versions), and finally the "History" option to cause the history
file to be displayed. For each site in the history, the URL is recorded,
along with the title of the web page (what appears in the title
line of your browser when you display it), the dates of first/last
visit, the number of times the site has been visited, and the date
and time the entry will be removed from the history because of inactivity.
If you click on the titles at the top of each column, it will sort
the entries based on that column. For example, clicking on "Last
Visited" will sort the history by the date/time each site was last
visited, with the most recent visits at the top of the list. Click
on the title again, and it will sort in the in reverse order, so
the least recent visits appear at the top of the list. To change
the number of days entries are kept in the history, select "Edit,"
then "Preferences," and then double-click the word "Navigator."
You can specify the number of days to keep entries, and can also
use a clear function to remove all the entries from the history.
Displaying
the history file when using the Internet Explorer is a matter of
selecting "View," then "Explorer Bar," and then "History." The history
entries can be displayed using a number of different criteria, and
there is also a useful search function that allows you to search
for a specific word. This appears to do the search using the actual
web pages associated with the sites in the history, rather than
just the name of the web page or the web address. Right-clicking
the mouse on a web address and then selecting "Properties" will
show you such information as the date and time last visited, and
the number of times the site has been visited. Select "Tools," followed
by "Internet Options" to clear the history file or change the number
of days that entries should be kept.
In our book
A Parent's Survival Guide to the Internet, we make the
point that the browser history file can be a good way of keeping
track of the type of sites being visited by those using your computer.
Looking at the URL address and the site Title can give you a pretty
good idea of where Junior has been spending his time. If you see
something that raises questions, just click (Internet Explorer)
or double click (Netscape Navigator) on the entry to visit the site
and see for yourself. Keep in mind that someone trying to cover
his tracks can erase individual entries in the history, or the entire
file. Thus you won't be able to catch an expert hacker by using
the history file, but you may be able to track down the Internet
trail of an average user. There are some ethical issues with using
this feature to spy on others, so we will leave the decision to
you regarding your use of it for anything other than finding a useful
web site you visited somewhere in the recent past.
One final feature
that may help you locate a lost site is the type-ahead feature incorporated
into both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. If you start
typing a web address such as "www.ld," Navigator will complete the
address for you, based on recent sites you have visited. For example,
it might overlay what you already typed with www.lds.org.
If this is not what you wanted, type the next letter and it will
guess again using that longer prefix. Explorer does something similar
by producing a drop-down list with all the sites that match the
prefix you have typed thus far. Selecting the one you want is just
a matter of clicking on the address. This feature probably just
searches the history file to make its guesses, but if you think
you remember the first part of the name, it is probably faster than
searching through the file yourself.
There are too
many useful sites on the Internet to not have something to help
us keep track of them. Understanding the features and tools already
built into our software will make our online time more productive
and less frustrating. We hope this column helped a little in that
regard.
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© 2001 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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