University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
School of Information and Library Science

INLS 181: Internet Applications

Resource Links

Table of Contents

• Local Resources
• HTML Authoring and Validation
• Browsers and HTML editors
• Mailing Lists and Newsgroups
• Laws and policies

Local resources

• ATN's Help Pages offer comprehensive documentation for campus computing, policies and other computer-related activities. ATN has extensive online support, training documents, and in-person training classes. Some documents that might be useful:
  • How do I set up my personal web page and where can I find help on creating it?
  • Creating WWW Pages at UNC-CH
  • Putting your Pages on the Web
  • Web Authoring with HTML
  • Web Authoring with HTML: Advanced Topics
  • FrontPage 2000: Creating a Web Site
• Information about the Microsoft site license is available in two locations:
  • ATN's Microsoft pages, via their software pages
  • UNC's CCI pages for software licensing, via their general CCI pages

HTML Authoring and Validation

• The HTML Validator at w3.org. This will check your code for HTML compliance.
• Webmonkey, by Wired, has many tutorials on HTML authoring and related topics.

Browsers and HTML editors

• Netscape, one of the main Web browsers. You can use FTP to go directly to their FTP download site for product updates. HTML editors are included with Netscape.
• Microsoft's Internet Explorer, another of the main Web browsers. If you upgrade Internet Explorer, you should also seek the product updates and downloads at the Windows update site. Beware of very large downloads, though -- these updates can take awhile.
• Microsoft's FrontPage is a capable HTML editor, but tends to product HTML code that is not valid. UNC has a campus site license for FrontPage and other software.
• Macromedia's Dreamweaver is a fully-featured HTML editor. It offers a free 30-day trial.

Mailing Lists and Newsgroups

Mailing Lists

The important thing about mailing lists is to follow the instructions for subscribing and unsubscribing. You will generally send email to a special address to subscribe and unsubscribe, NOT to the same address used to post messages to the mailing list.

Over 10,000 mailing lists are open to the public, and many others are closed for private discussion. There are many resources to find out about mailing lists, but it's still likely that you will need to do some additional research to find out whether a list still exists. Some tips:

1. Follow directions to subscribe/unsubscribe
2. Don't post to a list until after you've watched the content for a few days or weeks. Get a feel for what the discussion is about
3. Many lists have very little traffic. If you subscribe to a "dead" list, consider looking for other lists instead
4. Many lists are very active, with dozens of messages per day. Make sure you check your email frequently after subscribing so your mailbox doesn't get overwhelmed.

Each listing has its own area of coverage, and none are exhaustive. You need to check in many different places to be sure whether a list on a particular subject exists (it probably does!).

• CataList, the database of over 12,000 mailing lists maintained by LISTSERV software. You can also search for particular lists by sending the message list to any LISTSERV program, such as listserv@postoffice.cso.uiuc.edu. Note: LISTSERV lists only.
• The Directory of Scholarly and Professional Electronic Conferences, now in its 14th revision. This is a fully-searchable and indexed listing of mailing lists and newsgroups of a scholarly or professional nature. Originated by Diane Kovacs. Note: Focus on academic/scholarly lists.
• Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists is very extensive, and includes a searchable index. It is also posted to the newsgroup news.answers and so archived via FTP at rtfm.mit.edu. Note: More emphasis on non-automated lists (often smaller).
• Tile.Net has lists of mailing lists, FTP sites, Web pages, and network newsgroups, but is not as extensive as some other lists. One useful category to search on is product "vendors."
• Topica (was Liszt), an extensive Web-based directory of mailing lists of all types.
• Yahoo! has a category for Mailing Lists which points to several domain-specific lists-of-lists.
• Want to search archives of mailing lists? Try Yahoo! Groups, which is a searchable index of many mailing lists. This is somewhat like what Google Groups does for network newsgroups, but the contents don't (apparently) expire.

Newsgroups

Newsgroups may be accessed via a client (built into Netscape and Outlook; available via "tin" and other Unix programs) or via the Web. Newsgroups contain an immense amount of knowledge and might be the best resource to get a question answered.

The list of network news groups that are available at a particular location depends on what groups the service provider has chosen to subscribe to. It's not unusual for schools, for example, to not get the alt.* hierarchy of groups at all.

• Search Usenet archives at groups.google.com. You can also read & post there.
• List of all 33284 newsgroups available at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Not yet available)
• MIT RTFM Archive, the FAQs for all newsgroups that make them available. Note that some are outdated, and many newsgroup-based FAQs have been replaced by Web addresses.

Laws and Policies

• THOMAS at the Library of Congress: all laws in process
• Cornell's US Code archive and collection. Searchable and very readable.
• UNC's University Procedures for Dealing with Possible Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights

Reference

• The Living Internet, an online book with extensive background, discussion and overview of the Internet.