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Want to add snazzy features like chat rooms and shopping carts to your Web site... for free? In the first of a two-part article, Peter Kent explains how anyone can do this, even if you can't install CGIs or if your Web site is on AOL. We also provide phone numbers for testing your 56K modem, offer additional reader suggestions for ways of saving Web pages for later viewing or printing, and in our FAQtoids column, explain who pays for the Internet.
Contents:
Copyright 1997 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved. To subscribe to our weekly list, email <netbits-on@netbits.net>. Thanks to our sponsors for their financial support of NetBITS.
Testing 56K -- Looking to buy a 56K modem? Before you purchase, there is something you can do to find out whether or not your current phone line will support a faster speed (see Speed Jockeys on the Internet: Flying at 56K in NetBITS-008). Stan Teters <stan.teters@penguin.com> wrote in to tell us about several Web pages with testing phone numbers for both kinds of 56K modems. The test isn't perfect, but it's easier than buying a modem first, finding it won't go very fast, and returning it. [GF]
<http://db.netbits.net/getbits.acgi?nbart=04451>
<http://56k.com/trouble/#testline>
<http://x2.usr.com/connectnow/linetest.html>
Call for Writers -- As we've mentioned before, we enjoy working with both new and experienced writers. The five of us who represent the core staff of NetBITS all produce pieces and write FAQtoids, but we enjoy featuring other voices and areas of expertise. Last week we welcomed Jim Heid, and this week and next Peter Kent. Several of our readers in a variety of professions are currently working on pieces you'll see in the weeks to come. If you have ideas for articles you'd like to write, email us at <editors@netbits.net> and we'll help you get started. [GF]
Printing to Files -- We received a huge sheaf of suggestions on how to store a Web page for later printing or viewing, which we cover in Save Me from the Web, below. But we also received a note about an error in the FAQtoids section of NetBITS-009. The standard PostScript printer drivers on the Mac (which shows up as LaserWriter in the Chooser) and Windows let you save files in PostScript format, which you can later download to a printer. However, I noted the wrong location of this feature on the Mac.
<http://db.netbits.net/getbits.acgi?nbart=04448>
If you're using a LaserWriter driver that's earlier than 8.4, you'll note an option in the main Print dialog box (not Page Setup, as we said last issue) that lets you select between Printer and File for output. In version 8.4 and later, there's a pop-up menu in the upper right of the Print dialog box that has the same choice. [GF]
by Glenn Fleishman <glenn@netbits.net>
In response to our FAQtoid on how to save a Web page for later printing or viewing (see NetBITS-009), we got a pile of responses recommending techniques and software. Although we strive to cover all Internet platforms in NetBITS, most of the responses we received suggested Macintosh-specific solutions. We're happy to publish tips and pointers to utilities for other platforms as well and will mention any we receive in a future issue.
<http://db.netbits.net/getbits.acgi?nbart=04448>
With the Greatest of Ease -- Several readers mentioned using Adobe Acrobat as a way to read and print Web pages offline. Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) is a platform- and page-independent proprietary way to shunt an output stream to a file that retains the look and feel of the original document. The upshot is that if you've installed PDFWriter, an Acrobat component, you can choose it from the Chooser on the Mac, or in the printer pop-up menu wherever you print on a Windows machine. PDFWriter simulates a printer in function, but takes the output and makes PDFs that you can store, print, or give to others. The Acrobat Reader software that can display them is free. For more about this, consult the Acrobat section of the Adobe Systems Web site. We'll write more about Acrobat and the Web in a future issue of NetBITS.
<http://www.adobe.com/acrobat/>
Shareware Solutions -- Many readers contributed their favorite shareware approaches to offline reading, such as the Mac programs WebDevil and Netscape History.
<ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/comm/inet/web/web-devil-30.hqx>
<ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/comm/inet/web/ntscp/netscape-history-301.hqx>
Gordon R. Meyer <grmeyer@ricochet.net> wrote to tell us about his favorite Macintosh Chooser extension.
A great Macintosh solution for offline reading is Print2Pict - a shareware Chooser extension. It does an excellent job of printing Web pages to disk files for later reading. (I use the PICT format, but there are many choices.) Everyone I've demonstrated it to has immediately adopted it.
<ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/prn/print-2-pict-371.hqx>
A similar approach is eDoc, according to Dan Ringrose <ringrose@misu.nodak.edu>:
In the Mac world, the slickest way I've found to save or print Web pages (graphics and all) is a shareware program called eDoc. The version I evaluated (2.0) uses a Chooser printer driver to create a self-reading document. The files include graphics and can be printed. The program is small, elegant, and even has indexing capabilities.
<ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/app/edoc-20.hqx>
One more piece of shareware, says Josh Goetz <jgoetz@lamar.colostate.edu>, lives up to its name.
I use a handy shareware print utility on my Mac at work called Net-Print. Often, a document or Web page contains only some material that I want to print out, not the whole document or full Web page. With Net-Print, all I do is highlight my selection, pull down the Net-Print menu, select Print Selection, and it does so.
<http://www.luminet.net/~dmoe/>
Do It Yourself -- If you only want to print the text on a Web page or don't mind putting in a little extra work capturing graphics, you can get good results for free. Andrew Pavey <info@spelean.com.au> points out a browser feature that's existed for a long time.
The major Web browsers enable you to save the HTML source for a Web page (which you can view or print later by opening the files within a Web browser). If you need graphics, you can save individual pictures separately via commands in pop-up menus that appear on the Mac by clicking an image and holding the mouse button down, or in Windows by right-clicking on the image. You might need to edit the HTML to fix the links to the images, but that's not all that hard.
Good Dog -- James Jennings <jennings@halcyon.com> reveals a feature of Cyberdog, Apple's neglected OpenDoc-based Web browser.
By default, Cyberdog can save the entire document, pictures and all, as a single self-contained OpenDoc document that can be read offline. Choose Save As from the File menu and click the Save button. There is nothing easier. In fact, saving just the HTML source requires an extra step -choosing Generic Document from the pop-up menu in the Save As dialog.
by Peter Kent <pkent@topfloor.com>
If you've been thinking about setting up a Web site, you may have felt overwhelmed by the complexity. Sure, creating a few pages is no big deal - everyone seems to be doing that these days, from fifth graders to grandmas. But what about setting up a serious Web site, something that you plan to use to promote a product, for instance?
If you read the computer press, you'd be forgiven for thinking that without spending tens of thousands of dollars, you won't be able to do much at all at your Web site. Want to take orders at your Web site? Cough up a few thousand bucks for a shopping cart system. Need a chat group? You'll need another thousand or so. Discussion group? Open your wallet again.
There's another problem, too. In order to install all these things, you need control of the Web server, or to be working with a Web-hosting company that's going to charge you a fortune. With all this expense, how can the little guy compete?
There is another way, what I like to think of as the "plug and play" Web site. It's quite possible to build a great Web site, at a low cost, and with relatively little hassle. When you want to add something to your Web site, you simply "plug" that item in. There are a couple of ways to plug something into your Web site:
Find a service to provide the item you need at their Web site. You create a link from your site to theirs; the utility you are adding will appear, to your site's visitors, to be running at your Web site.
Find a CGI application or script and install it at your site. There are thousands of free and low-cost CGIs, and you can often get them installed for $50 or $100. (We'll look at this method of enhancing your Web site next week in Part 2 of this article.)
Think about this for a moment; if you can run a CGI on someone else's server, you're suddenly released from any restrictions imposed by your hosting company. Even if your hosting company doesn't want you to run scripts, for instance - or perhaps you have an AOL Web site - you can still do all sorts of things that require the use of scripts. You'll see just what I mean in a moment.
Chat's All, Folks -- Adding a chat room is the first of these plug-and-play methods that I find so interesting, and the method we'll look at this week. Here's an example. Let's say you'd like to add a chat room to your Web site. You don't find many Web sites with chat rooms, because they can be complicated and expensive to set up. But companies that have them say that chat areas help create a sense of community at a Web site, make people feel part of something, and keep visitors coming back. Chat rooms can be a great promotional tool, too. You can find celebrities or experts to do talks or Q&A sessions, then promote the event to the Web at large.
Furthermore, let's say that your Web site is a "personal pages" site at AOL or CompuServe; you can't add a discussion group, can you? Yes, you can. Though it's true that you can't install the software on most personal page Web sites, you don't have to run the software on the same server that hosts your Web site.
Finally, let's say you don't want to spend a lot of money. In fact, let's say you don't want to spend any money at all. But chat software can cost from $50 to $600, or a lot more. Or it can cost nothing.
I know of two companies that will give you a free chat room, TalkCity and NetDIVE.
<http://www.talkcity.com/irc/apply.html>
<http://www.netdive.com/>
Of the two, TalkCity currently has the best program. They'll set up a room for you at no cost, and it's your chat room to do with as you please. In contrast, NetDIVE's program sets you up with a connection to one of its chat rooms, rather than one customized for your site.
Setting up a chat room on TalkCity is easy. You fill in a form, then wait a couple of days. They send you a little block of HTML that you insert into a Web page. This HTML creates a form at your Web site, which is used by visitors to log into your chat room. When a visitor clicks the Start Chatting button, a Java program is transferred, and the chat session begins. You can see an example of this at my Web site's examples page.
<http://www.poorrichard.com/examples/>
This page contains a variety of low-cost and free utilities you can add to your Web site; the link to the free chat room is near the top. Read the information about the chat room, then fill in the form at the bottom of the page to begin chatting.
It takes a little while for the Java application to transfer the first time, but subsequent sessions can be faster, since the program may come from the browser's cache. (Note that you may not find anyone in my chat room; I'm using it as a technical example, though I may run chat sessions later.)
Notice two things about this chat room. First, there are ads at the top of the page. Okay, so it's not entirely free - TalkCity gives away the chat rooms so they can get advertising revenue. Also, notice the name of this chat room: PoorRichardChat. The room is named after my latest book, Poor Richard's Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site. So this chat room is really my chat room, and visitors don't think they're entering one of TalkCity's many other chat rooms.
Of course, the chat room actually is running on TalkCity's Web server. But many visitors may not even notice the URL in the Address field, and even if they do, they probably won't care. After all, they're clearly in a chat room associated with the site they're visiting.
The TalkCity chat room is a great example of the plug-and-play Web site. Need a chat room? Thanks to Talk City, you can have one for free - even if your Web site is hosted by AOL.
Taking Orders -- Another major problem for people setting up Web sites is taking orders for products. Shopping cart software (the system that works as an electronic catalog and order-taker) can be expensive, and setting up your own secure server can be pricey, too. Many Web hosting companies provide both these things, though they may charge an additional fee. Some provide a secure server, perhaps even for free, but not shopping cart software. If your hosting company can't provide what you need - or if they can, but at a high price - you can find it somewhere else. That means, once again, that even if you are hosting your Web pages at an ISP or on-line service, you can still have a shopping cart system and sell products on your Web site. (Note that I'm not recommending personal sites in this context; if you're selling products online, you should probably have your own domain name and be set up with a proper Web hosting company... but that's another article.)
There are loads of companies that provide shopping cart systems that you can rent. Go to my examples page again, and look for the Rented Shopping Carts link:
<http://www.poorrichard.com/examples/>
You can see an example of one of these shopping cart systems - VirtualCart, which costs $25 per month to rent. You fill in a series of forms, your shopping cart is set up on their server, and they tell you which page to link to at their site. You can then create a link at your site - Order Now!, for instance - that takes visitors to your shopping cart on the VirtualCart site.
VirtualCart is by no means the only company in this business. There are many enterprises that carry out "transaction processing" and provide shopping cart software. There are two things shopping cart software can do. The first is to take the order; many systems simply take the information from the buyer, and save it in a file. The second part of the process is actually getting a bank to give you money, and this is known as "transaction processing." In other words, the software contacts the bank, and processes the credit card information to begin payment.
Installing your own transaction processing system is expensive and complicated. But you don't need to install it yourself, you can use a service. (VirtualCart currently doesn't carry out transaction processing, though it will soon.) This may cost as little as $40 to set up and a $40 per month charge, plus a 20-cent or percentage-based fee per transaction. And the company will probably even throw in shopping cart software.
The URL below lists a few places that sell transaction processing services; note that the overall page of links from my book is quite large at 182K, so it may take some time to load.
<http://www.poorrichard.com/links/index.html#354>
Tune in next week, when we'll look at the second way you can enhance your Web site - CGIs.
[Peter Kent is the author of Poor Richard's Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site. Win a free copy at the Web page below.]
<http://www.poorrichard.com/info/tid.htm>
Question: Who pays for the Internet? Several readers, including Max Hahto <hahto@island.net> and Yves Dussault <dussault@qc.bell.ca>, have written to ask how the Internet is paid for. That is, since the Internet is worldwide, there must be long distance or other charges involved in moving data from your dial-up or permanent connections to other locations. How does this work?
Answer: The Internet is built a bit differently from the phone company's voice network. Voice calls are created as a "circuit" that is dedicated through a series of phone company switches from the caller to the receiver. This circuit remains open and in use - and reserves some of the network's capacity - for as long as the call lasts.
The Internet, by contrast, is packet based. We've talked about packets in previous issues (see Hey, I'm Talking to You! in NetBITS-001 and NetBITS-002); they're a way to split up streams of data into bite-sized units, usually a few hundred bytes long, that can go across different paths but still arrive at the same destination.
<http://db.netbits.net/getbits.acgi?nbart=04511>
<http://db.netbits.net/getbits.acgi?nbart=04502>
Because of this, your local dial-up call that goes to an Internet service provider (ISP) connects over a voice-type circuit. Once it reaches the modem on the other end at the ISP's point of presence (POP), it's transferred to the Internet. The ISP pays a combination of fixed and metered charges to aggregate data from their POPs to other locations over high-speed lines that can handle the equivalent of dozens or even thousands of voice calls. They pay charges based on distance and capacity, but those charges are typically fixed.
Sometimes ISPs must pay for data transmission over certain amounts if they buy a lower-tiered service but want to keep extra capacity on hand in case they experience a growth spurt or a busy day.
Other Internet providers who offer services to businesses - we call these network service providers (NSPs) or mid-level networks - as well as ISPs all connect their traffic to exchange packets bound for other networks at several points around the country. Some of these are Network Access Points (NAPs), which are lightly funded by the National Science Foundation. These NAPs and similar "peering" points are run by telephone companies (telcos), such as Ameritech, Worldcom, and Pacific Bell.
The "peers" who want to exchange data in these points pay fees to the telcos for hosting their equipment in these physical locations and running most of the infrastructure for them. Anyone can run a line into a peering point, but they must negotiate agreements with the other companies in those locations to exchange traffic with them.
The Internet is made up of these kinds of deals and peering points: it's a collection of different networks that agree to treat each other as though they were part of a cohesive whole. So any network, down to an individual who's dialed up at 14.4 Kbps using PPP, up to IBM's worldwide WAN (Wide Area Network), is part of the Internet. The Internet doesn't exist as a separate entity from the machines and routers that collectively make it.
Thus, the money comes in at every point at which data is passed up and down, and most of it is collected by ISPs, NSPs, and telcos. The telcos make their money from extra phone lines, the high-speed dedicated digital lines, and the peering point. ISPs and NSPs - and large companies with their own nationwide or global networks - pay these fees to telcos, but they collect fees from their downstream customers.
Ultimately, as in all business, the downstream fees they collect from their users and customers should more than pay for the upstream fees they pay for transiting their information as part of the Internet.
[Please send us any and all Internet questions whose answers have evaded you in the past at <faqtoids@netbits.net>, and include your full name and email address. Questions may be edited for content and length. We cannot guarantee publication or a reply.]
Non-profit, non-commercial publications and Web sites may reprint or link to articles if full credit is given. Others please contact us. We do not guarantee accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and company names may be registered trademarks of their companies. NetBITS ISSN 1096-4908.
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