Tips for web surfers.

About my site.

• I know a couple pages look very "tight". Sorry, but that's deliberate. Useful rates on my vision statement, attractive graphic design doesn't. I'm trying to get as close as I can to bringing you "one click away" from everything really useful on the web. I try to get as much information as possible on each screen without resorting to "microtype" or lots of menus. I want it here where you can see it! Some places I hide even more information under icons!
• Certainly that means the design of some pages leans to "information overload", until you get used to it. But I think you'll find you do get used to it, then you like the efficiency of having it all here in one place. That's what my site is about, one hub where we can quickly, easily, and efficiently get to the best sites on the web. We? Yes, I use it all the time too!
• I use all my icons for a purpose. They all have associated "Alt" text, visible when your mouse pauses on them. For that reason, Microsoft Internet Explorer works best on my site. Click on Tools in MSIE's toolbar, then Internet Options, then Advanced, and make sure Always expand ALT text for images is checked. Some versions of Netscape Navigator display the ALT Text, v4 seems to, and some don't, v3 & v6 apparently.

  ICON LEGEND
  Icon	Usage
  	Draws your attention to information new within the last month or so.
  	Problem found and fixed now.
  	Draws your attention to information updated within the last month or so.
  	Jewels link to supporting or supplementary information, usually off-site.
  	Pause your mouse here for special information.
  	Pause your mouse here for more extensive information.
  	Pause your mouse here for warning messages.
  	Help! Link to this page.
  	Mail to my email address.

• I've got some tips about surviving at other sites on another page.
• I use color to separate things, rather than spreading them out with "white space". I follow some general guidelines about color bars on my Nerd Zone and On The Web pages. Really important stuff like Security, Weather and Health is red, Free stuff is yellow, Investing and Jobs green, Portland sites grey (maybe you just have to live here to understand), News black and white, Data and Research orange, Computers blue, People purple, the Web cyan, etc.
• Here's the key to my color shading:

  Major Classification has intense color Lots of different information and links generally relating to the major classification, but not necessarily strongly related to each other, have the regular background color. Subclasses in lighter shades of same color Information and links specifically relating to this subclass have a tinted background color. With the regular background color this information and links relate to the major classification again, but not especially to the subclass above. Other subclasses usually the same, sometimes slightly different, shades With a tinted background color this information and links specifically relate to this subclass.

• You can always get back to the main, introductory page by clicking on my website title bar across the top. Take a good look at that page. It'll help you understand my site.
• This site is mirrored on these hosts:
  • "http://www.angelfire.com/or/paulrogers/"
  • "http://www.xprt.net/~pgrogers/"
  • "http://www.geocities.com/paulgrogers/"
  • "http://mywebpage.netscape.com/paulswebsite/" (unfortunately this is the least reliable host),
  One thing I cannot control is when one of my hosts makes a system or configuration change which affects performance or reliability. So I have duplicated the content of my site on different hosts. All the content is the same on all sites. If you are having trouble with the response from one of my hosts you can try the others. If everything seems to hang for a long time you can click your browser's STOP button. You should get the title bar and tab line displayed. Click on the book icon which will bring you here again, then click on the other host's address above. This only helps if the problem exists on one of my host servers. My pages often display content coming from other web servers. If they are not responding, your browser waits. Since all my hosts have the same content, you might end up waiting for the same server, but it's worth a try.
• It isn't obvious, but I've gone to considerable effort with this design. My pages dynamically adjust to use the full width of your browser window. I use "browser safe" colors. I work to make all my pages load as fast as possible. My use of color and graphics is designed to keep page loading reasonably fast. Small graphics, reused over and over again, are very efficient. Big, flashy, attractive graphics are almost always slow.
• But if you're interested in fancy JAVA/CGI scripts, sorry. I'm less interested in showing off than in being usable by many browser versions. Keep it simple and easy to use.
• TANSTAAFL! There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. My sites are hosted by companies free of charge to me, in order to provide advertizing banners to your eyes across the top of the page. I know that's not why you came here, to see those, but fair is fair. Please do your part whenever you can to keep the web as free as it has been by visiting our sponsors. If our sponsors go away, so do we, and where does that leave you, eh? Besides, you never know what you might find. You should do a little unplanned exploring every web session.
• Sometimes the page formatting won't look right, for example columns won't line up, especially if web response is noticably slow. Click on the reload button to download a clean copy and it should straighten up. It's possible to get a bad copy stuck in your own browser cache. To clean that up you'll have to force the browser to purge your caches.
• There are over 600 links to internet pages currently on this site. I'm controlling about 30 of them. That means there are over 550 webmasters out there working on their sites every day. Any given day I certainly wouldn't be surprized if at least one of these links might no longer be valid. If you find one, please send me e-mail and I'll see if the webmaster rearranged things and I can hook it up again, or it's just gone.

Understanding how the Web Works.

Stateless doesn't mean refugee.

The first thing to understand is that the basic interaction between a web server and your browser client is "stateless". There is no context from the server's point of view. Your browser asks for a page by its address/URL, "Uniform Resource Locator", the server shoves it out the door, and it's done. If you think about it, this is the only way anything as large as the web can work. There's no possible way any server could keep track of all the "hits" and context in the sense that a complex application program must do. It doesn't know or care who you are, whether this is the first or fourteenth page, what happened before or what comes next. This is also what gives web surfing its flexibility, nobody knows or cares what page you're going to ask for next—you're totally free to go where you will.

This describes the sort of interaction you have with the servers for my website. Everything is built in to my site and page design. Your browser receives the page and formats it as specified by my HyperText Markup Language. If I have specified any embedded images, it makes separate requests from the server for those too. Virtually everything is "done" by your browser client. The web server just hands out pages, files really, whenever asked.

Me want cookie! Yum, yum.

There are some interactions on the web which clearly have a problem with this sort of design. If I go to my broker to check on my portfolio, for example. How does he recognize me when when I ask for my balances or transactions? Sign-in for every request, sort of a "tell me again who you are and what you want now" design? That's a pain. What if he needs to know if I've seen and approved his Terms of Service disclaimer already? Or I told him which page I want him to display first when I arrive, my account overview or the trading floor?

That's what a cookie does. A server sends me a cookie when it needs to "remember" something about what's going on for a later time. So I login and get a cookie. When I want balances my browser sends the server the URL address for the balances page from the link on the account page and the cookie! Now the server knows what I want and who I am. Actually it sends all the cookies that pertain to that site: the login cookie, the disclaimer cookie, and the first page cookie. The server has everything he needs to know. When you visit a site, and it knows who you are without a log-in, a cookie is responsible. Order books from Amazon and your "shopping cart" is a bunch of cookies on your computer. The server isn't going to remember them, your computer is. If you come back next week or never, the server isn't storing a bunch of what might be just garbage. This is not to say that the server isn't going to keep information about you if it decides to. Buy something from a e-store and the server is probably going to keep a customer record which it can connect with your cookie when you come back. And it isn't to say that websites won't keep a surprizing amount of information in the cookies they leave on your computer even if it's not strictly necessary, like only the time of your last visit.

What's in a cookie is the Domain (which server or group of servers issued the cookie, e.g. amazon.com or schwab.com), the range of URL addresses the cookie is valid for, when the cookie expires (or at the end of the session), whether to secure any further requests by encryption, and of course the name and value of the data to be stored on my computer by the browser. So what's there comes from the server, and is returned to the server. It's sorta like going for your draft physical and carrying your paperwork around with you from station to station—the nurse checks off this and that but "out of sight, out of mind". Your paperwork is like the cookie—what needs to be known is there. What isn't there is some sort of inventory of everything about your computer.

So the thing to remember is except for these cookie things, and they're pretty much completely hidden, the web is "stateless"—it knows from nothing! Simplified, it is just a bunch of servers handing out files of HTML pages to whomever asks, whenever asked. To the extent there is any continuity in things it is either in your intentions, or in your cookies. As far as the security aspects of the cookies themselves, don't reveal more than is necessary, and don't visit sites you can't trust.