TCS - Two Tips for Intermediate Internauts
Two Tips for Intermediate Internauts
by By Carol Daniels, Melbourne PC Users Group
From the August 1999 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter
Where are all these those visitors coming from?
As if keeping track of the links on your own web site isn't hard enough, you will also want to know who is linking to you. It's a way of measuring the success of your site. When you move your web site or change your directory structure, you can also use the information to let those that are linking to you know about the changes. A less pleasant (but very useful) way to use the technique is to discover if other sites are appropriating your content. Even if you have content you allow others to use freely, you generally want them to take a copy of your material, not link to your host.
So how do you do it? There are a number of ways, but one of the quickest and easiest is via AltaVista.
Point your browser at http://www.altavista.com/
In the search box enter the following search string
link:YourURL -host:YourDomainName
Where you replace "YourURL" with the appropriate actual information. For example:
(Figure 1)
link:www.melbpc.org.au -host:melbpc.org.au
This specifies a search for pages that contain links to Melbourne PC's web site, but excludes those
which are on Melbourne PC's site (that is to say, internal between Melbourne PC's own pages.) The results of the example search are shown in
(Figure 2)
A search for
is less specific and finds pages any link to our domain name, including (including mailto links). For our example search, there were about 10 times more pages with any link with our domain name, as there were links to files on our web. Since many of these are pages with a mailto link to a Melbourne PC Internet subscriber, it's an interesting way to get a glimpse of he kinds of things that interest our members. We are, as you might already imagine, a very diverse lot!
What's plugged in?
I'm a sucker for the latest plugins, if you are too, you may also find yourself wondering which plugins you do (or don't) have, and whether or not they are enabled.
Netscape Communicator has several cool commands to display information about your browser's set up, and one of the most useful is about:plugins, which will display information about all the plugins you have installed, including version number, file type and whether or not they are enabled.
How do you get this useful information? Simple.
Launch your browser, click on File, and then select Work Offline
Now, in your browser's address bar, type in the following:
about:plugins
you should see something like
(Figure 3)
Three more commands which you invoke as above, are
* about:cache
* about: memory-cache
* about:image-cache
which report on the status of your disk cache,
(Figure 4)
memory cache
(Figure 5)
and which
images are in the cache,
(Figure 6)
respectively.
This article is furnished as a benefit of our membership in the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG), an international organization to which this user group belongs. The author, Carol Daniels is a freelance writer and editor specializing in science, technology computers, computing, business, health, medicine, food and agriculture. She is on the Management Committee of the Melbourne PC User Group and a member of APCUG's Board of User Group Advisors.
For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here
This page has been accessed
times.
Tulsa Computer Society 7/10/99
Don Singleton, President
djs@ionet.net