Netscape Communicator
Setting up User Profiles
Getting Started
Managing Email 
Email Images and Attachments
Address Book
Organizing Bookmarks
Search Tools
Using Netscape
Copy and Paste

Getting Started

To download Netscape Communicator.  This newest Windows 95 version of Netscape Navigator, Communicator, combines a fast web browser and a WYSIWYG web editor, Composer.  There is also a version available for Windows 3.1.  The program can be downloaded to a Temp file on your computer's hard drive or to the desktop.  Once the program has been downloaded it must be installed on your hard drive.  The minimum requirements for the Windows 3.1 version are a 386 CPU, 4 MB RAM, a 28.8kbps modem, and 10MB hard disk space.  (Note:  Once Communicator has been installed the screen must be resized in order to view the 4 icons, Navigator, Mailbox, Discussion, and Composer.  Simply click the Windows restore button in the upper right corner of the screen.

Setting up User Profiles
Creating a user profile allows you to receive your email through Communicator's mail feature.  You can also set up user profiles for each person using the computer.  Then each user can set up their own email preferences and create their own bookmark files.  When you install Communicator you will set up one user profile as you go through the directions onscreen.  To set up additional users follow these directions:
1.  Click Start button (be sure to close all programs before doing so.)
2.  Go to Programs, Netscape Communicator, Utilities, User Profile Manager.
3.  When you click User Profile, click the New button to set up a new user.  If you want to delete or rename a user, there are buttons here for these functions as well.
4.  Then provide the information requested onscreen.  After doing so, you will see the additional user profile name when you open Communicator.  Simply click your user name to access your email and bookmarks.

Managing Email
To change mail preferences click Edit, Preferences and the Navigator screen will appear. Double click Mail & Groups.  You will need to provide Identity and Mail Server information in order to receive email through Communicator.  To set up Ten-Nash accounts through Communicate .

Note:  If you do not want your mail removed from the server, be sure to check Leave message on the server after retrieval.  If you do not check this, when you supply your email password, all of your mail will be removed from your mail host server.

To begin reading email, click the Mailbox button in the lower right corner of the screen or click the word Communicator in the top of the screen, then click Messenger Mailbox.  You  will be asked to supply your email password.  If you are unable to access your mail account go back and check your mail preferences again and be sure you have typed in all information correctly.

Viewing Mail
You can change the way you view the mail on your screen.

To view the mail you have received, click the down arrow and select Inbox.  If you want to arrange this mail by an alphabetical listing of subject, click the Subject bar.  To arrange the Inbox mail by an alphabetical listing of who sent it, click the Sender bar.  You can also arrange this mail by Date and Priority.  To view mail you have sent, click Sent beside the down arrow.  You can also view mail in the Trash or Drafts.  Each of these environments allow you to view the mail by Subject, Sender, Date, and Priority.

To get your latest mail message, click Get Msg (Messages) button.


Email Images and Attachments

You can send files through email as attachments by following these steps:
While creating the email, click the Attach button, click File...then locate the desired file and double-click it to attach.

To send images through email use these steps:
While creating the email, click Insert...Image...Choose File...and locate the image file.  Double click its name and press Ok to insert the image.

Email font color and style can be changed by clicking Format while creating the email.
 
 


Address Book

The easiest way to add someone's email address to your address book is to open an email from that individual.  While the email is onscreen, click the individual's email address and an address card will appear with the information already supplied.  Click OK and the address will be added to your address book.

You may also create an address card by clicking Communicator, Address Book.  To make a new card, click the New Card button.  You can also create an address list by clicking New List.  While the address book is open you man change the view of your address book, click View and select to view your address book by Type, Name, Email Address, Company, City, and Nickname.  You may also save your address book by clicking File...Save As...If you want to transport it to another computer, it can be saved on the a drive.  To retrieve it later, open the address book, click File...Import, select drive a and the address book file.


Organizing Bookmarks

Bookmarks can be organized in folders.  To create a new folder, click Bookmarks...Edit Bookmarks...File...New Folder.  Select the name for your new folder.  To move a current bookmark to this folder, you may copy and paste it, or click and drag it to the folder.

You can also file your bookmarks directly into one of these folders.  Click Bookmark...File Bookmark...and then click the folder in which you want to place it.

To delete a bookmark click Bookmark...Edit Bookmarks...click the name of the bookmark you wish to delete once and press delete on the keyboard.

If you want to change the name of the bookmark, right click the name of the bookmark while in the edit screen and click Properties.


Search Tools

There are two main types of Web search services, directories (such as Yahoo) and search engines (such as Alta Vista). Directories and search engines are very different in how they work and, therefore, in what they are used for.
Search Engine Features
Parallel Web Search Engines
Children's Search Engines
Translate Search
Software Search
Image and Sounds






What is a Directory?
Directories are organized listings of web sites that are created manually by people. A directory is similar to the telephone Yellow Pages. They are usually arranged by subject matter into hierarchical (tree-like) categories, with the topics becoming more specific as you go down in the hierarchy. To become listed in a directory, a web site must be submitted to the directory's editors, who will decide whether to list the entry, and will then assign the entry to an appropriate category.

What is a Directory Used For?
Directories are more suitable for casual browsing, and when you know the category your topic is likely to be found under. Directories are also easier to use, since there is no need to learn the particular query format of a search engine. Yahoo and others also allow you to search for keywords in their own catalog, which can speed up your search of the directory.

The best way to learn how to effectively use a directory is to practice using it. Become familiar with how it is organized. Make bookmarks for frequently-consulted categories.

What is a Search Engine?
Search Engines are also known as spiders or crawlers. Search engines use automated software programs that constantly access different web sites and gather information about each site visited.  This information is then sent back to the search engine to create a database of web pages. When you submit a query to the search engine, it scans the databases and provides a list of web addresses that best match your query. The best search engines, such as Alta Vista, are likely to catalog most web pages that are publicly accessible.

What is a Search Engine Used For?
Search engines are used when you are looking for something fairly obscure or difficult to find, or you're not sure what category the topic would be listed under in a directory. Search engines a very good at finding the occurrence of a specific word or phrase, such as a person's name.

The key to effectively using a search engine is expressing your query (question) properly. Most of the popular search engines have similar query formats. Once you have a basic understanding of how to write queries, you'll probably get good results in most cases. Some common tips for writing queries include:  make your keywords as specific and relevant as possible (but not too specific or restrictive, or the search engine may miss some things you would like to see); don't use common words, such as a, an, the, Web, or Internet if you're looking for the occurrence of a specific phrase; enclose the phrase in quotes; and learn how to use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to customize your search (for those search engines that support this type of query). See the search engine's help page for more details.  For a description of search engines visit
Rating the Search Engines at http://macworld.zdnet.com/netsmart/features/searchin.review.html
PC Magazine Review of Search Engines
http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/websearch/edchoice.htm
CNET's Search Engine Shoot-Out
http://cnet.com/Content/Reviews/Compare/Search2/index.html

Search Engine Features
Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) is the original, and still the most popular way to access the World Wide Web. Although it is a directory rather than a search engine, Yahoo! matches your search-words to title (site name), and comment (description of the page) and only selects sites that contain all your search words. A very tight and useful list of sites results. When it doesn't find a match in its own directory, Yahoo switches automatically to Alta Vista, and a looser search process - a nice idea.

AltaVista (http://altavista.digital.com/) is a true search engine and searches every word in every document in their database. They match some of your search words, not necessarily all, producing a few irrelevant results. The results are sorted with the most relevant first.

Excite (http://home.netscape.com/escapes/search/ntsrchbkm-1.html) is simple to use, and fast.  According to Excite, you should search for ideas and concepts instead of keywords.

Lycos (http://home.netscape.com/escapes/search/ntsrchbkm-3.html) lets you search the Web, Sounds, Pictures, the Top 5% (their opinion), books, and personal homepages. Search for all the words or any of the words, varying degrees of match, plus exact phrase - all of which made no difference to our search results!. Results can be Just the links - page titles only, or Standard descriptions -URL and a one line description, or Detailed descriptions - an outline, a 4-line abstract, a 1-line description and the URL. Choose 10, 15, 20, 30 or 40 results per page.

Fast and accurate, InfoSeek (http://guide.infoseek.com) claims to check every word in the text of over 50 million web pages. Use double quotations ("-") around words that must be searched together or capitalize, to find a phrase. InfoSeek does not search for page titles but clear page descriptions are very helpful. This is the first search engine to truly refine a search with a "Search only these results" option.

WebCrawler (http://www.webcrawler.com)seems to return pages containing any one or more of your search words, but there is no explanation of what they search. You initially get Titles Only but can choose Summaries of the results. Summaries are a few words off the page - not always a relevant description of what the site is about. Titles Only come very quickly and this is the best way to use WebCrawler. You can also search for Similar Pages and while this might be interesting, the selected sites are often not very similar.

Hotbot (http://www.hotbot.com) says it searches the full text of the more than 50 million documents in its database. It lets you search for keywords by "all the words", "any of the words", "exact phrase", "the person", "links to this URL" and "Boolean expression". There are other features for advanced queries, like "Date" - which limits your search to "last week", "last 2 weeks, "last month" and so on - and "Continent" - which limits your search to parts of the world or cyberplace- ".gov" ".com" ".edu", etc.  Hotbot is fast and accurate, and page description are useful. Hotbot remains one of the best search engines around.

Parallel Web Search Engines
These are search engines that do not maintain their own database, but search other search engines to bring results:
Dogpilehttp://www.dogpile.com
Metacrawlerhttp://www.metacrawler.com
All Four Onehttp://www.all4one.com
Mammahttp://www.mamma.com
Ask Jeeveshttp://www.askjeeves.com

Children's Search Engines
These engines were created for use by children:
Yahooliganshttp://www.yahooligans.com
Ask Jeeves for Kids http://www.ajkids.com

Translate Search
Alta Vista Translator http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate?

Software Search
Filez http://filez.com/
Softseekhttp://www.softseek.com/
Cnethttp://cnet.com/cdoor/0,238,1017,00.html?sn.cn.fd.lftnav.Downloads
Sharewarehttp://www.shareware.com/

Image and Sounds
Lycos Multimedia http://www.lycos.com/lycosmedia.html
Select Pictures or Sounds
Filez http://filez.com/
Select what the type of file


Using Netscape

To locate a specific site in the location line type the site's address.  If a site begins with www.---and ends with .com you can simply type the name of the site.  For example, to visit Disney you would type http://www.disney.com but with Communicator you simply type disney and the site will appear.

Note:  This method has led to some embarrassing situations because many adult sites will use addresses of common known names to get more hits on their sites...advertisers like this.  If you type whitehouse you will not get the White House in Washington, D.C.  To read more about this practice, visit http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,13989,00.html?st.cn.nws.rl.ne
White House Goes Porn.

If you do access an inappropriate site, click the Stop button, and the Home button to escape.

Once you have found a site you would like to use again, add it to your bookmarks.

Main Toolbar

The first two toolbar buttons, Back and Forward, will help you move from page to page when you've been surfing around a while.  The Back and Forward buttons can move you one page at a time, or if you right click these buttons you will see a list of sites you have previously visited.  By left clicking on the desired site, you can jump straight to it without going through the entire list.  The Reload button reloads the page if you need an update or it is missing a graphic.  The next button, Home takes you back to your homepage.  Netscape Communicator will set up http://www.netscape.com as the homepage, but you can set up any page you desire.  Simply click Edit, Preferences and the Navigator screen will appear.  The homepage address will be in the location box in the center of this screen.  You may type in any address you desire, such as the state homepage, http://www.connect-tn.org so your computer will start up at this homepage each time you open Netscape.  The Search button links you to another part of Netscape's web site where you can begin a general keyword search on any subject using a search engine.  The Guide button allows you to select from four areas:  The Internet, People, Yellow Pages, What's New, and What's Cool (see following explanation).  The Print button enables you to print a paper copy of the web page displayed.  (Note:  Before printing you may want to click File, Print Preview to see exactly how many pages this web page contains.)  Below the toolbar are four small buttons:  The Internet for keyword searching with Yahoo!; the New and Cool button containing What's New and What's Cool web sites; the Lookup button to access the People page where you can search for a person's email address and the Yellow Pages for finding a business' street and web address; and the Search button which provides a group of search engines from which to choose.
Other Tools
Below the main toolbar are additional Netscape tools.  The Bookmark button is a shortcut for adding or deleting bookmarks.  A small icon beside the bookmark button is the Quick Link button also allows you to add a new bookmark by clicking and dragging it to the bookmark Quick File button.
History
Netscape keeps a history of sites you have visited.  If you want to locate a visited site, click the word Communicator, History.  A list of these sites will appear.  You can arrange this list by an alphabetical listing of title, by clicking the Title bar; an alphabetical listing of location will be viewed if the Location bar is clicked; and the time visited can be viewed if you cick the First Visited or Last Visited bars.  The History also keeps a count of how many times a site has been visited.  Once the desired site is found you can jump to it by double clicking on its name.

Copy and Paste
To transfer information quickly on the web to a word processor, use the copy and paste feature.  There are several ways to do this.  First highlight the desired passage and press Ctrl+C (or click Edit...Copy), open the word processor, and press Ctrl+V (paste).

This method is also useful when copying web addresses.  Click the mouse once in the location line and press Ctrl+C (copy) to create a copy of the address on the clipboard.  You can also copy locations by right-clicking the mouse on the hyperlink and clicking Copy Link Location.