Getting Started on the Internet
What do I need?
You need an Internet access account. If you don’t already have one, you can get one as part of the USD community. Go to Serra 188 or to any of the computer labs on campus and bring your USD-issued student identification card.
You will use your Internet account to access the Internet from home, to receive electronic mail, and in future classes, to create your own personal Web site. Your Internet username and password will also grant you access to certain special areas of the USD Web site.
What is the Internet?
The Internet is a collection of computers that talk to each other through the Internet Protocol. That’s pretty much it. Some of these computers have humans using them to access information, some of these computers have humans using them to provide information, and some of these computers have no humans using them and just do what they do automatically.
Electronic Address
Every computer on the Internet has an Internet address. This address is an “IP” number (“Internet Protocol”), which currently has four digits in it. Our webserver, for example, is IP number 192.55.87.16. You don’t normally want to use the IP address, however. Besides being a number, it can also change. Almost every computer that you would actually want to “get to” on the Internet also has a “host name”. Even if the IP address changes, the host name will remain the same. Our webserver’s hostname is “www.sandiego.edu”. My desktop Macintosh is “cerebus.sandiego.edu”.
Hostnames have two parts: the computer’s name, and the domain that the computer is a part of. Our webserver’s name is “www”. It is part of the domain “sandiego.edu”. My desktop Macintosh’s name is “cerebus”. It is also part of the domain “sandiego.edu”.
Domain names also usually have two parts: the top level domain and the company’s identifier. USD’s domain name is “sandiego.edu”, which is “sandiego” in the “edu” top-level domain. All educational institutions are (or can be) part of the “edu” top-level domain. Businesses will be part of the “com” top-level domain. CNN’s web server is “www.cnn.com”, which is the computer “www” in the domain “cnn.com”, which is “cnn” in the top-level domain for commercial sites.
There are also top-level domains for each country. If you are visiting a commercial site in Australia, for example, it might be “hats.dundee.com.au”, which would be a computer called “hats” from a company called “dundee”. It has two top-level domains. You can do that sort of thing on the Internet.
Electronic Mail Addresses
E-mail addresses usually use domain names to identify where the person owning the e-mail address is, and a username in front of an “@” symbol to identify who the person is. The username can be some combination of their first and last name, it can be some word chosen at random, or chosen by the user, or it can just be an identifying number.
E-mail addresses must include both parts: where the recipient is, and an identifier for the recipient, separated by the “@” symbol.
The World Wide Web
Some of the computers on the Web are used to provide information. That’s what the WWW is for. Many companies and many individuals have “home pages” where they provide information about their products or about themselves, or about anything that they feel like providing information about. You can create a home page if you have something you want to provide to the world, but that’s a topic for another class.
Universal Resource Locators
Computers have hostnames, people have e-mail addresses, and web pages have URLs. Most URLs consist of three parts: the type of the resource, the name of the computer where the resource is located, and the “path” to the resource on that computer.
service://hostname/filepath
In general, this is easier than it looks. The service is almost always “http,” which means a standard Web page. The filepath is often just a “slash” or a username. Here are some examples:
You can type these URLs into the “Location:” or “Go:” box of most Web browsers, located at the top of the browser’s window. Go ahead and try some out right now! Type them into that box, and press “return” to see the Web pages.
You can also see these URLs when you move the mouse pointer over a “link” on a Web page. The URL will often appear in the “status bar” at the bottom of the browser’s window. Go ahead and move the mouse around the window. The mouse pointer will change into a hand at various locations on the Web page, often over blue text. These are “links” to other pages. If you click on the link, you’ll go to the new page.
Discussion Groups: FAQsPeople join discussion groups all the time. Some people on the discussion have been there for years, others have been there for hours. On any particular topic, there are questions that always get asked by new members, but have been discussed to death many times already on the discussion group. For this reason, many discussion groups have a “Frequently Asked Question” file that answers these questions.
When you first join a discussion, you should hang back for a while, get a feel for the group, and see if there’s a FAQ file lying around somewhere. The FAQ is often posted to the discussion on a regular basis, such as once a week, every two weeks, or once a month.
You can also find FAQ files on the Usenet newsgroup news:news.answers. These files are usually extremely informative within their topic.
Usenet News
Usenet is a collection of discussion groups on a huge variety of topics. The discussion groups are organized hierarchically. One common topic area is the “rec” area, or recreation. Common subdivisions of rec are arts, games, music, and sport. Within rec.sport, there are further subdivisions. If your interest is rugby, subscribe to rec.sport.rugby. There are two types: rec.sport.rugby.union and rec.sport.rugby.league.
There are seven major hierarchies, and many minor ones, as well as an alternative free for all.
There are three major ways to read Usenet news: you can use your Web browser, you can use the Google Web site or you can use a dedicated newsreader, such as MT Newswatcher for Macintosh or Free Agent for Windows.
If you use your Web browser, you can use URLs to reach the newsgroup.
If you use Google, you will find it very easy to search newsgroups for interesting discussions. If you use a dedicated newsreader, you will be better able to control how you read your newsgroups, and filter certain subjects and people so as to either not miss them, or not see them.
Mailing Lists
Mailing lists are discussion groups that take place over e-mail. You don’t need a Web browser or special software to read mailing lists, because you use your normal e-mail software.
Unlike Usenet, however, you need to know about mailing lists before you can get them. A good place to go to search for mailing lists on topics of interest is Liszt.
Subscribing to Mailing Lists
You also have to “subscribe” to mailing lists before you can start reading them. In some cases, this might even involve asking for permission from someone. Mailing lists, unlike Usenet newsgroups, can be private.
Mailing lists are controlled by “list servers." The list server is a central computer that maintains the list of members and their e-mail addresses. When you want to subscribe to or unsubscribe from a mailing list, you send your request to the central computer. When you want to send a message to the mailing list, you send your message to the central computer. The central computer takes your message and sends a copy to each member.
When you find out about a mailing list, pay attention to the instructions for subscribing! There are many different ways of subscribing to mailing lists, but only one will work with any particular mailing list.
Sometimes you can subscribe to mailing lists through a web page. You’ll enter your name and e-mail address in a form on the web page. Usually, you will also receive a confirmation message which you must reply to in order to complete the subscription. This ensures that you typed your address correctly, and also ensures that people can’t be maliciously subscribed to the list.
If the instructions tell you to subscribe through an e-mail message, make sure that you are sending your message to the right address! Most mailing lists have a “control” address, which is used for subscription and unsubscription requests, and a separate address for the actual discussion.
Also, pay attention to where the subscription command belongs. Some mailing lists need it in the subject line. Others need it as the first line of the body of the message. If it needs to be in the first line of the message, make sure that you have “styled” text or “HTML” text or “MIME” text turned off. Some mailing lists can’t handle messages that aren’t in standard text. It is also good etiquette to send discussion messages in standard, non-styled text: you don’t know what kind of software the other members are using.
After you subscribe, you’ll get some information about the mailing list. Keep this message! It includes instructions for unsubscribing from the list. If you ever get tired of the discussion, or too busy, you’ll need those instructions!
When Listservers Insult You
Sometimes you’ll get very strange mail back after you send a message to a mailing list discussion, telling you that something went wrong. In almost all cases, you can ignore these. They occur because someone else on the list is no longer receiving e-mail, so when your posting reached that someone else, it was “bounced back” to you. Your message went out successfully to everyone else on the list!
If you are worried that your message did not go out successfully, contact Academic Computing. We can tell from the error message whether it was a single bad user, or if you made a mistake in sending the message originally.
Taking Part in Discussions
In some mailing lists, your replies automatically go to the person who sent the message you’re replying to. In other mailing lists, replies automatically go to the entire mailing list. Pay attention to where your message is going! You shouldn’t send personal mail via the mailing list. If your reply is not relevant to the mailing list’s topic, you should send it to the individual.
If you become involved in a flamewar, try not to escalate it. You and the other members may have completely different ideas of what emotional information is carried over e-mail, about what e-mail “means”. Stay calm, and if you have a relevant question, ask it simply.
Make sure that you know what you’re talking about. If you make a statement, be ready to back it up. Try not to use weasel words such as “most,” “many,” or “well-known.” If it truly is “most,” “many,” or “well-known,” give the numbers instead. The Internet is huge, and what is well-known in your local circle might not be well-known to the world at large.
Never, ever, use the phrase “everyone knows.” Everyone does not know, or you probably wouldn’t be writing the message. More precisely, you probably don’t know, or you’d be providing a better citation.
Bookmarks
Occasionally when traveling the web, you will run across a page that you want to remember. This is what “Bookmarks” are for. In some browsers, these are called “Favorites”, although that’s misleading: you don’t have to like a web page to want to remember it. From now on, I’ll call these “Bookmarks”, even though you might find them under “Favorites” or some other name.
Under your bookmarks menu, you have an option to Add a bookmark. This adds the current page to your list of bookmarks. All of your bookmarks appear in the bookmarks menu. No matter where you are on the Web, you can always go to this menu item and return to the page you bookmarked.
You can bookmark as many web pages as you want. They will all appear in your bookmark menu. If you bookmark a lot of pages, however, your bookmarks will run down off the screen. When this happens, it is time to organize your bookmarks into hierarchical menus. This requires going into your “Edit bookmarks” menu item (or “Organize Favorites”). You can create folders for your bookmarks, and each folder will become a hierarchical menu in your bookmarks menu.
Useful Web Pages
Find People
You can look up USD e-mail addresses and contact information for USD students
and employees on this site.
Computer Tutorials
Go here to to look up computer tutorials. ITS offers a number of tutorials
covering computer use and Internet use at USD.
Yahoo and Google
Yahoo and, along with AltaVista, is
probably the most useful Web search engine you’ll find.
When you do a search in Yahoo, Yahoo first looks in its own database of Web sites, and shows you these “site” and “category” matches if it finds any. After the site matches, it will show you the “Web page matches."
A computer “spider” travels the Web and downloads pages, and then follows the links on those pages to other pages, and keeps going. For each page, it indexes the words in the page and stores this index in a database along with the URL for the page. It grants more precedence to words that appear in titles and headings, and to words that appear often.
You will almost always receive thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “Web
page” results. The ones at the top are almost always the ones that you
want. If you do a search on “Pineapple Pie,” you will first see
results that include lots of both words, and then results that include lots
of one word, and finally results that only include a few of those words.
Google also archives almost all Usenet discussions. Besides being a way for
you to take part in these discussions, you can also use it to search for messages
that talk about a specific topic. You can use this to find discussions that
took place years ago, or you can use it to find discussions that are taking
place now.
This is very useful, because Web pages take a long time to enter the Web page search indices. A new Web page will take months before it shows up in a Web index search. If some new hot topic just hit the world yesterday, you will not be able to find Web pages discussing this topic, but you will be able to find people talking about it on Google news.
