Netscape Tips and Tricks Netscape is program that offers a variety of tools in one package. In addition to serving as a graphical web browser, Netscape can handle email, Usenet newsgroups, provide access to older net tools such as FTP and Gopher, merge with a telnet program, and it's handy for file management in your cyberspace. You can run Netscape offline to allow you to edit pages before making them available to the world. You can download Netscape for free. For now (Spring 2003) I recommend you stay with the version 4 series as the version 7 series seems to be rather buggy. The section on bookmarks grew so large and complex that I finally created a separate Netscape Bookmarks page! A really terrific resource is the Berkeley Netscape Essentials page. For a more in-depth guide to Netscape try their Netscape basics. Escaping out of Frames Some web sites offer terrific information but the use of frames can make the information difficult to read and almost impossible to bookmark. You can pop a frame out into a new browser window, freeing the information. Place your cursor in the frame you want to pop out. Click the RIGHT (opposite) mouse button and a little menu will pop up containing the option to open frame in new window. Another approach to breaking out of frames is through the link to a framed web page. Place your cursor on the hyperlink Click the RIGHT (or opposite) mouse button. A menu will pop open. Select the menu option to Open in New Window. This will open a new browser window containing the web page for the link. Printing a Document Printing a Selection of Text Although the Print dialog box offers the option to "print selection"; it doesn't work! While you can't highlight a selection of text on a web page, and print only that, you can choose to print a single page: First determine where on a printed page the selection of text you need to print falls. Use the File/Print/Print Preview option. Enter the Print command: File/Print Click on the Pages button and type in the page(s) range. Is the Printed Page Blank? Getting blank space instead of text on your printout? Some printers have difficulty printing colored text. Try instructing the print routine to print all text as black. File/Page Setup/Check Black Text . Printing Headers and Footers Header and Footer options control the placement of the URL of the page. You can chose to include all or part of these header and footer options: URL, date printed, pagination, page title. I recommend you select all of these options. Displaying Links on a Printed page Identifying links on a printed page is *very* useful. This allows you to see where the links are and to decide if you want to return to the page and follow the links. To make the links apparent you need to select "Underline Links" in a Netscape configuration. Edit/ Preference/Appearance/Colors/check Underline Links Capturing Graphics You should always write to the author of a page to obtain permission before capturing a graphic not labeled as Public Domain or contained in a public archive. Put the mouse pointer anywhere *on* the graphic image and click with the *right* (or opposite) mouse button. A menu will pop up from which you can select to save the image. The image will be saved to your local PC (or Mac). If you want the image in your cyberspace, you'll have to upload/FTP it after saving. FTP With Netscape To quickly upload the saved image to your cyberspace use Netscape and a special FTP command: ftp://email address Use your email address instead of the literal text in this example. If you have a virtual domain then you will use your actual account name and perhaps a local machine name at the web host server. To connect to my academic account I'd use my own email address: edmiston@cs.unca.edu ftp://edmiston@cs.unca.edu Once you connect you'll be prompted to enter your own password. Then open any directories you need for placing the file you are uploading. Directories are designated by icons representing yellow file folders. If, for example you wanted to upload the image to your public_html directory (where you will save all of your web pages), you'd click on that directory name to "open" it. With the directory is open, click on the file menu and select upload file. In that upload dialog box is open, select the PC directory containing your file to be uploaded. Click on the file name and then click on the Open button. You can also drag filenames from the Windows Explorer program INTO the Netscape window. Displaying HTML Code of a Page You can learn a great deal about HTML by studying the code of pages on the net. Select View/Source. A window will pop up containing the text. Viewing the source code of a web page can be a little tricky. Netscape will display the source code in a special window that offers no menus for working with the source code. You can use the following commands in the View Source window. (I believe people on a Mac can substitute the "Command" key for the Control key noted here) Select (highlight) all of the text   Control-A Copy the selected text: Control-C Print the text: Control-P Mail the Source Code: Control-M Save the source code: Control-S Search the source code for a word or phrase: Control-F Navigation Options There are a number of options available for navigating the web. The Back and Forward buttons take you back and forward to pages you've visited this session in a sequential pattern. The Go menu option lists pages visited this session so you can jump over pages and return directly to a page. To open a web page you can either type the URL directly into the white Location strip at the top of the window, or select File/Open Page. All of these options perform the same function. In this File Open option you can type in the URL of a page on the Web, or you can select the Browse button to open a page from your own personal computer hard drive. I often work on a page in an editor and check it in Netscape. This gives me the sophisticated editing environment of an editor such as Textpad and the ability to view the file in Netscape. It also allows me to work on web pages offline. Telnet No web browser will automatically telnet. Instead, the browser can be configured to launch a separate telnet program. If you don't have a telnet program on your computer, then you can't use telnet-based URLs. Once you have a telnet program installed on your computer you can "teach" your web browser to launch that separate program when it receives a telnet request. You don't need to enter this configuration in a school lab; those Netscape programs are already configured. Configuring Netscape to Launch a Telnet Program Click on the Edit menu and select Preferences. Open the +Navigator section and click on Applications. Under "Description", scroll down to URL: Telnet Protocol. Click once, just to highlight it, then click the Edit button. Under Application enter the path and program name, or select browse to search your hard drive for the correct path to your telnet program. Note the use of %1 in my own entry: "C:\Program Files\netterm\netterm.exe" %1 The %1 forces the telnet program to connect to the actual site in the telnet URL. Without the %1 I found Netscape would launch my telnet program but the telnet program would not make the actual connection! If you need (or prefer) to install a telnet program I recommend Netterm. It's the most versatile and powerful telnet program I've found. I have a Netterm handout that guides you through acquiring the program and setting it up. Miscellaneous View your History and Cache To view your cache file, enter this phrase as a URL in the Location strip: about:cache. To view your History File, press control-H. You can delete your history file and the record kept of the Location Bar entries at any time: Clear the History and Location Bar Click on the Edit Menu Select Preferences Click on the Navigator option Click on the button labeled "Clear History" and/or click on the button labeled "Clear Location Bar" You can speed up the performance of your computer by deleting the files in your disk cache: Click on the Edit Menu Select Preferences Click on the plus sign next to Advanced Click on Cache Click on the buttons to clear disk cache (and clear memory cache too). Need to know what Plug-ins you have installed? Enter this phrase in the as a URL in the Location strip: about:plugins View Web Pages offline, from your hard drive. You can run Netscape offline. If, when you start Netscape you see a dialog box prompting you to dial into your Internet account, just cancel that window. Then Netscape will behave just fine. I often run Netscape offline, along with a word processor ( something simple but with adequate ability to work with ASCII, often MS Write). The command to open a web page from your personal computer is File/Open File Opening a Second Web Browser Sometimes it's helpful to run 2 or more Netscape browser windows. To do this, select File/New Web Browser. Or you can use the keyboard command, Contrl-N. Turning the Display of Graphics Off and On Sometimes I like to turn off graphics so that web pages will load faster. It depends on the types of sites I'm visiting. This is a "check mark" option. Select the option once and it turns off graphics (ie, the checkmark disappears) and select the option again and graphics are turned on (the checkmark reappears). The command is Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Automatically Load Images Turn Cookies off and On I generally leave cookies turned off. But occasionally I need to allow cookies in order to use certain tools. MS Internet Explorer has a terrific system for choosing when to allow cookies and when to forbid them. Most of time when I have cookies turned on I use the added security measure of forcing the server to ask permission to place a cookie. This keeps me aware of by who and when cookie files are created. Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Cookies In this dialog window you can Accept All Cookies, with or without Warn me before accepting a cookie! Or you can check the option to Disable cookies.