![[Horizontal Rule]](../grph/marblebar.gif)
If you've got a page on the World Wide Web, you've probably included several links in it to other sites on the 'Net. Would you like to know which other websites have set up links to yours?
Head over to Digital's Alta Vista search engine, and type in the word link, followed by a colon, followed by the URL of the site you wish to check.
An as example, I search for link:http://www.magmacom.com/~leisen, which takes into account my homepage and all its subpages. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you find.
Many sites will link to you without asking, so you may appear more often than you think. It may be fitting to send a quick e-note to the webmasters, telling them that you've just found the site, and thanking them for the link.
If your system starts to dial up your ISP every time you launch Netscape, then this tip is for you.
There's no need to be connected to the Internet when you load Netscape; you only need to be live when you ask it to fetch a page that it doesn't have cached to disk. If you want simply to organize your bookmarks, for example, connecting is a waste of precious on-line time.
If the modem starts dialing as the program loads, it means that it is looking for a Home document. Netscape is pre-set to reach for one specific document, which happens to be located on - quelle surprise - Netscape's own webserver.
To change that, you need to do two things: first, create and save a file to be used as a Home document; and second, tell Netscape about it.
The easiest way to create a Home document is to export your bookmarks into a file. Go into the Bookmarks menu, and select View Bookmarks. Click the Export button, and save the file into a suitable folder or directory.
You may want to give the filename an .html extension (.htm, if you're running an MS-DOS/Windows platform). Then close the View Bookmarks dialogue box.
To designate this document as Home, go to the File menu and select Open Document. Navigate to the correct folder or directory, and open the new document you just created.
Its complete URL will appear in the Location box (above the document but below the toolbar). Select this URL with your mouse, and choose Copy from the Edit menu (to put the URL on the clipboard).
Now go into the Options menu, and select Preferences. You're going to change the Windows preferences. (It might be called Windows and Link Styles.) There should be a textbox specifying the document that your system starts with. Click into that box, delete what's there, and Paste the URL from the clipboard. Now close everything up.
The Home button on the Toolbar will always bring you back to that Home document, which - as a bonus - contains your favourite sites extracted from the Bookmarks file. You can recreate this Home document as often as you like, to bring the bookmarks up-to-date. Moreover, the next time you load Netscape, you don't have to run to check that your modem is on.
Are you maintaining a makeshift mailing-list without the benefit of mailing-list software? Maybe you are trying to set up a firm newsletter on e-mail, or you often send the same message to many people at the same time.
It's not hard to do, and it's very cost-effective. Be careful, though. If some of these people are your clients you may not reveal their names or e-mail addresses; to do so would be a breach of solicitor/client confidentiality.
Putting all the recipients into the To: field just won't do, since each recipient will see the e-mail addresses of the others. On the other hand, sending separate messages to each person is very time-consuming. So what's a busy lawyer to do?
The work-around is to send a single message to yourself, and put all other recipients into the Bcc: field (blind courtesy copy). They will all see only their own addresses as recipients and yours as the sender, and each can reply to you without reworking the headers.
Planning on registering a domain name in the .ca zone? I know from experience that it is very annoying when your first choice is refused. Why don't you scan what's already taken to make sure your proposed moniker hasn't been scooped?
Hie thee to <ftp://ftp.cdnnet.ca/ca-domain/>, where you can retrieve the circa-350K document called index-by-subdomain. Don't forget to check out what's registered in other provinces besides your own; if something's too close, it may not easily pass through the powers that be.
© 1996 Lewis S. Eisen