Sher, the Web and You -- Free

[Benjamin Sher]

Dear Seelangers:

I am happy to report that I will soon be on the Web. And so can you. For Free.

By the strangest of coincidences, I just discovered while surfing the Web a
company called GeoCities. It offers FREE Web space (2 megs) to everyone.
(For an additional small fee per month you can up that to 10 meg).

GeoCities currently has over 640,000 members world-wide. It organizes its
members by "neighborhoods" ("Athens" for literature and philosophy,
"Hollywood" for cinema, etc.). It is supported by commercial sponsors. Its
only condition is that all members abide by a NON-commercial clause: that
is, no selling or soliciting of funds, etc. and by a code of honor and
integrity (no nudity or pornography, no defamatory name-calling, etc. etc.)
which, I imagine, helps to maintain the quality of life of the GeoCities
"neighborhood".

There is full technical support for everyone, including tutoring in HTML,
software to compose your pages, how to upload by FTP. All of this technical
support is also FREE.

The address of GeoCities is:

http://www.geocities.com

I cannot as yet give you my opinion of GeoCities, since I just joined a day
ago, but I can say that I am duly impressed, in general, by the quality of
the Web pages that I looked at and the general tenor of things. Of course,
there is the usual range of humanity here as in the real world, from
scholars to bankers to hippies, but everybody "behaves" by a code of
propriety.

No, I am NOT being compensated for this endorsement. And I hope that I
won't live to regret it. Judge for yourself. It may be just what you want.

By the way -- this has nothing to do with GeoCities -- if you need FREE
HTML software for whatever reason, I highly recommend the following sites:

http://www.stroud.com

http://www.tucows.com

http://www.winsite.com

When you get to these sites, use their on-site SEARCH engine and type in:
HTML EDITOR.

These sites contain commercialware, shareware and FREEWARE. There are many
freeware programs. I recommend for Windows 3.1:

 ANANSI -- through "http://www.tucows.com" -- (make sure you go to their
home page and get the latest Anansi 1.0 Freeware). It's what I use. It's
the best freeware HTML for Windows 3.1 I know. If you get Anansi, I highly
recommend you add the FREEWARE dictionary/thesaurus called Word Web. It is
one of the many great open secrets of the Internet. It can also be used
independently of Anansi as a standalone program or even added as a
supplementary dictionary/thesaurus to MS Word (by copy the "wordweb.dot"
file to the Word/Template directory. It is available through the Anansi
site. But first you must download it. It a HUGE file (7.5 meg), but well
worth it.

 A second choice is HT CREATE from Australia (through http://winsite.com).
It's a fine program produced by a university in Australia.

A third choice is HTML Writer, also Freeware.

But my favorite FREEEWARE HTML editor for Windows 3.1 (and I have looked
far and wide) is Anansi, version 1.0. Make sure you read their manual
on-line. The program is in process of development. But already, it is a
great program with full support for most things including color (background
and font), etc. I discovered it by doing a Lycos search.

I am at present using an antique 386 so I have had no chance to try the
Windows 95 programs. However, I have noticed that there are quite a few
FREEWARE HTML editors available on Windows 95 at the same above-mentioned
sites.

For those of you who are new to the Internet, you may be surprised to find
out that there is not only one but often several FREEWARE programs produced
by universities, institutions or even computer companies for just about
every possible need, from telnet to fax to email (such as the superlative
EUDORA LIGHT 3.01 email program (totally FREE) that caused such trouble
both to you and me not so long ago -- because it was a little more
sophisticated than I realized.

Well, that's it for now. Happy hunting.

Yours,

Benjamin Sher
sher07 at bellsouth.net