Free Software for Busy People

If you have ever used Google (www.google.com) to search the internet, then you have relied upon Free Software.

That is because Google's website runs on tens of thousands of computers and each of these is using the GNU/Linux operating system and the Apache web server.

Google's scientists have stated many times that only Apache and GNU/Linux can provide the stability and security required to serve the millions of web users every day. And only with Apache and GNU/Linux could they have afforded to buy so many scores of thousands of computers.

That is why Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay and numerous other companies depend on Free Software. In fact, almost 70% of websites are run using the Apache web server Free Software and the computers of many websites use Free operating systems like GNU/Linux or BSD Unix¹.

Your organisation does not need to have as many customers as Google does to be able to benefit from Free Software's internet tools. The fact is that the free cost of Free Software means that everyone can afford to use it. And as this part of the book will show you, the Free tools available are often superior in quality to commercial software.

Browsing the web with Firefox

“I suggest dumping Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which has a history of security breaches. I recommend instead using Mozilla Firefox. It’s not only more secure but also more modern and advanced, with tabbed browsing and a better pop-up ad blocker.” — Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal, September 16^th 2004.

In the preface I mentioned that one of the advantages of Free Software is that it breaks monopolies and that that is a good thing. Web browser software is a great illustration of this point.

The world wide web was literally invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist working at CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory. Sir Tim, who received a knighthood in 2004 for his efforts, created a standard for web pages and designed software for looking at those pages. The standard that he created was brilliant because it made writing web pages so easy. His software was not so brilliant, but Sir Tim made sure that anyone else could write software for browsing and creating pages. In fact, he deliberately refused to make money from his world wide web so that other developers would be free to create better and better software tools.

This worked magnificently and one of the first companies to take advantage of the web was Netscape. Their browser software was powerful and free of charge for non-commercial users. In the mid-1990s, up to 90% of people reading web pages were doing so with Netscape's web browser².

In 1995, Microsoft launched its own web browser, Internet Explorer³, which was initially inferior to Netscape's. However, Microsoft could afford to give the software away free of charge because it was making so much money from Windows and Office software. Furthermore, it included Internet Explorer with Windows and made it the default browser. Today around 90% of web users do so with Internet Explorer.

This does not mean Internet Explorer is the best browser. In the last few years features like tabbed browsing and integrated customised searching and themes have dramatically improved the experience of browsing the web. However, Microsoft has not added any of these to Internet Explorer.

Furthermore, Internet Explorer has been downright dangerous, exposing computers to attacks. These dangers drove the governments of the USA⁴ and Germany⁵, as well as several security companies, to advise against using Internet Explorer.

There are several reasons for this state of affairs. First, the incentives: Microsoft does not make any money from you when you use its web browsing software, its only interest being to to ensure that other web browser companies pose no threat to its monopoly. Because they have achieved this, obtaining 90% market share, they have no further incentive to improve the software.

Companies like Opera (www.opera.com) sell web browser software, so they are constantly adding features because they must constantly fight for income.

Second, many of the security risks risks come from a similar problem of incentives. At the time that Microsoft was trying to beat Netscape, they added features like ActiveX to Internet Explorer that allowed them to advertise capabilities that Netscape could not match. Netscape could not match these because the features depended on having direct access to the Windows code. But ActiveX had significant security risks⁶. Microsoft advertised the features despite the risks.

The advertising is gone, because Netscape's threat is gone, but on millions of PCs today the security risks remain.

Finally, Microsoft simply cannot do everything right because no one can be so perfect. It only has so many software developers, they can only spend so much time analysing their code for security risks and they only have so much expertise about security.

This chapter is about Mozilla Foundation's approach to web browsers and its product, Firefox (www.mozilla.org/firefox). The Foundation funds developers who are passionate about web browsing software. The tools are further checked by people from all over the world who are also passionate about browsing software. All these people use Firefox. If there is a problem with the software they know about it soon and they fix it soon after. They depend on the software being of high quality, which is why they have an incentive to fix it.

Second, the developers were concerned about security from the start. They lay the foundations for good security in their software because the it will be used by important people in mission-critical projects.

Furthermore, the code that they produce is available for everyone to see. The paradox of security is that by exposing every security hole it is easier to ensure security – experts around the world are constantly scrutinising Firefox code and pointing out deficiencies. On the other hand this should not surprise us.

The democracies of the West flourished while the Communist states of the Soviet Union collapsed because the democracies shared information with their citizens, not despite it. Transparency encourages security.

Finally, by making the code available to everyone, it is much easier to build good extensions to the code. The rest of this chapter will show you these tools and end with technical explanations of how to get them and use them.

But the main point for now is that the monopoly is breaking and that is good for users of the web. Every week brings more articles praising the superior quality of Firefox versus Internet Explorer. Every week more computer users decide that using the web is faster, more powerful and simply more pleasant when using Firefox. And every week decision makers in governments, companies and organisations make the decision that the security of their computer network depends on using Mozilla's software.

Microsoft will simply have to respond by improving the quality and security of Internet Explorer. All computer users will be winners from such improvements. Until that day, you can benefit by switching to Firefox.

Ms Yates searches Google, uses tabs and avoids pop-up windows

Firefox makes searching easy. Rather than visiting Google to begin a search, type your search text into text area in the top right corner of Firefox (see Figure 1) and press the return key. Firefox will show you the list of results from Google. The tabs feature allows you to study these results quickly.

Ms Yates typed “handheld computer accessories” into the search bar. She decided that the first ten companies in the list would be the the most important source of competition or partnerships.

With the right mouse button, she clicked on the title of the first website, then with the left mouse button she clicked on Open Link in New Tab. At the top of Firefox, a tab appeared with the title of that website. She repeated this for the next nine websites and nine new tabs appeared for the websites (see Figure 2).

By clicking on the title of each tab, she could see each company's website. Comparing different companies' sites by clicking on the different tabs was easy and quick.

Firefox was a particularly good time saver when Ms Yates connected to the internet through her laptop's dial-up modem. She frequently had to do this while travelling, which meant that she was often in a hurry, but that she had a slow internet connection. By opening multiple tabs for browsing, she found that by the time she had finished reading the text of the web page of the first tab, the text of all the other tabs' web pages had finished loading.

This is because Firefox works efficiently on multiple tasks, like loading other tabs, even as it remains responsive to your main task, which is reading a particular web page. It also avoids wasting time by blocking the windows that pop up on some sites, often called pop-up windows. These are almost always advertisements and Ms Yates was delighted that she was no longer bothered by them.

Mr Salah Al-Din searches for meaning

Google is not the only search engine that Firefox offers. Click on the

icon to see a list of alternatives included with Firefox and click on Add Engines... to see a huge and expanding list of other search engines you can add.

Mr Salah Al-Din was delighted to find the Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). It meant that he could search this encyclopaedia from the top right-hand corner of Firefox. There were all sorts of other encyclopaedias for him to choose from, including HowStuffWorks (www.howstuffworks.com) and Microsoft Encarta (http://encarta.msn.com/).

He also found a list of dictionaries, from which he chose the Wiktionary (www.wiktionary.org). Others on the list included the Cambridge Dictionary (http://dictionary.cambridge.org) and the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus (www.merriam-webster.com). He made sure that all of the students' PCs had the encyclopaedia and dictionary searches added.

Dr Digitalis searches PubMed

PubMed (www.pubmed.gov) provides the abstracts of the papers from most modern biomedical journals. It is run by the US government's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Dr Digitalis had found it an invaluable resource when dealing with unusual clinical problems because she could find the very latest papers that could help answer her questions.

Using the Add Engines... feature she added NCBI PubMed to her search engines, speeding up her PubMed searches.

She also found PubMed Central⁷ and PubMed Books⁸ as search engines for other NCBI tools. The first allowed searching papers for which the entire text was available. This was very useful because her private practice had not yet subscribed to many journals, which had previously meant that Dr Digitalis could read only the abstracts for free and would have to request the full copies from her local medical library. Searching PubMed Central meant that any papers that did appear would instantly be available free of charge.

PubMed Central makes all these papers available because the journals that published them did so under an Open Access licence (www.doaj.org).

This is the publishing world's equivalent to Free Software, because it means that there are no restrictions on the viewing and redistribution of the digital version of the papers. In 2004 the US Congress passed legislation so that papers from any research that received Federal funds would be made available through PubMed Central in this way. The UK's Parliament is also looking at similar legislation for British science, as are the governments of Germany, France and Japan.

Dr Digitalis found that the NCBI Bookshelf (“PubMed Books”) also provided an incredible amount of free biomedical information, but in the form of textbooks. For example, the HSTAT series of textbooks⁹ provided US government guidelines on the treatment of a wide range of diseases.

She frequently used the PubMed Books search engine to look up biological terms with which she was not familiar. This led her to textbooks like Stryer's Biochemistry¹⁰ and Baron & Samuel's Medical Microbiology¹¹ because they covered areas of medical science that were not her strongest. To her surprise, the books were well-written and actually enjoyable to read, a refreshingly different experience from her early years at medical school.

M. Braille downloads entire websites

Like Mr Salah Al-Din, M. Braille added the Wikipedia search engine to the top right corner of Firefox, but he used the French version of the encyclopaedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org).

However, his students could not use the encyclopaedia, nor even the web in general, because the school did not have internet access.

M. Braille could use the internet in his home through his own PC and phone line. When he found a page that would be useful for his lessons, he selected Save Page As... from the File menu and Firefox would save a copy of the page on his floppy disk. M. Braille would then take the disk to school and copy the page from the disk to every computer.

He was careful to only do this from sites that gave permission. He found many sites, like the Wikipedia, which used the GNU Free Documentation License, which gave him all the freedom he needed to make copies in this way.

But soon he found that he wanted several related pages from each site and the process of saving each individual page was lengthy and burdensome.

Spiderzilla (http://spiderzilla.mozdev.org) is an Extension that solves this problem. By clicking Download this site from the Tools menu, M. Braille could download entire websites onto his computer. He could then copy these onto the computers at the school and the children could browse around the sites without needing internet access.

Mr Big's team improves security, creates bookmarks and designs a theme

Mr Big's Chief Technology Officer was relieved when the IT department installed Firefox on all the PCs in all the hotels. Using Firefox rather than Internet Explorer removed several important security threats. It also saved the time of IT department staff who were having to constantly keep up with Microsoft's security patches for Internet Explorer and ensure that all of them were installed on all PCs.

With this security risk removed, the CTO felt more confident about his plan to provide computers for customers in all of the hotel lobbies. He wanted customers to be able to use the machines to get information about their hotel and about the local area.

To achieve this, the IT staff changed the default starting web page for Firefox in each hotel. They selected Options... from the Tools menu and clicked on General. Under Home Page, they typed in the web address for the hotel chain's website, then clicked the OK button.

This meant that when a customer began browsing the web on a PC in the hotel lobby, the first web page to appear would be the hotel's. If the customer wanted to get back to that page, they could just click the

icon.

The IT staff also taught the hotel staff how to add bookmarks that would be useful to customers wanting to learn about the local area. For example, the Washington Post's local events page is useful for hotels in the Washington, DC area. The easiest way was to visit the right web page, then click Bookmark This Page... (see Figure 3). The customer could visit that web page again by clicking on the Bookmarks menu and then on the web page's name.

The Themes feature in Firefox allows changing the colours and icons of the web browser. Selecting Get More Themes shows a list of freely available themes. Creating a theme takes a little more work, but the MozillaZine website provides clear explanations and examples¹².

Naturally, the marketing department wanted to use this for branding. Soon the hotel had its own Firefox theme and it was installed on all the machines in the lobby.

Further resources

Using email with Thunderbird

According to Grant Thornton's 2005 International Business Owners Survey the average US business owner spends two hours every day using email. Nor is this the highest average – business owners in the Philippines reported spending 2.1 hours per day. They were also highly optimistic about the internet, 84% of them reporting that the internet had increased their revenues. The French view was more sceptical, only 13% responding so positively about the internet. However, they still spent close to one hour per day using email¹³.

Whether you are of the French or the Filipino school of thought, it is clear that the internet has an important role to play in our institutions and many of us spend a significant part of each day reading and writing emails. Given this popularity it is no surprise that spammers have targeted email as a way to reach millions of people cheaply.

What is surprising is how long so many people tolerate using email software that is vulnerable to viruses. Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express are by far the most popular software tools for email, but they have also been the reason for the spread of the most devastating viruses. Sasser, Blaster, Nachi and Sobig were notorious names in the last two years, affecting literally millions of machines around the world.

Of course part of the reason for their creation is that malicious creators of computer viruses target the most popular software to cause the most damage. But the other component is that Microsoft had made some uniquely bad security decisions¹⁴ in the past and the users of Outlook and Outlook Express have suffered because of this.

Email does not have to be this way – and Mozilla's Free Software gives you impressive alternatives (www.mozilla.org/thunderbird).

Dr Digitalis switches to Thunderbird and imports her old email messages

The Thunderbird installer automatically asks you if you want to import your old email messages and settings. It can import data from Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora, as well as other email software from Mozilla.

This was a great relief to Dr Digitalis as she was worried about her old messages. Because she had so many old emails, the process took about half an hour.

After this, however, Thunderbird was quite fast. In fact Thunderbird indexes all email messages in advance so that searching through them is much faster than with Outlook or Outlook Express. You can quickly find an email by a particular person, or with a particular phrase in the subject, by typing next to the

icon.

Finally, Dr Digitalis was relieved at how easy it is to back up messages. As Figure 4 shows the Dr Digitalis folder is insider her computer's Documents and Settings folder. This contains the Application Data folder, which contains the Thunderbird folder, which in turn contains all her emails. Making a backup copy of this folder meant that all her messages were backed up.

This method is good for several reasons. First, the folder itself is easy to find – Outlook Express and Outlook use cryptic names for their storage. Second, Outlook stores the messages for each user in just one file. If any message in that file is corrupted, the whole of the file – and all the messages it contains – can no longer be opened. Because Thunderbird creates a folder on your computer for each message folder that you create in Thunderbird from the File menu.

Third, backing up a folder to a CD can be easier. If the size of a file exceeds that of your backup medium (around 700 MB for a CD) splitting up that file is complicated. Because Thunderbird uses a folder that contains several smaller files and folders, it is more likely that each of these files will fit inside your backup medium.

Mr Salah Al-Din switches from POP to IMAP for accessing his email at home

Thunderbird can connect to POP and IMAP email servers. POP stands for Post Office Protocol and is a common method for managing email within an organisation. Commercial email accounts from companies like Yahoo! and Google also provide POP servers for their customers.

Mr Salah Al-Din had a computer at home that he used to check his email outside of school hours. Initially, he had set up Thunderbird so that it connects to the school's POP electronic mail server.

However, the default for Thunderbird and most email software is to remove email from a POP server. In other words every time Mr Salah Al-Din clicked the Get Mail button, Thunderbird downloaded messages from his POP server to his computer then deleted the messages on the POP server. This is useful for saving space on the POP server.

However, for Mr Salah Al-Din this was a major inconvenience – as soon as he checked his email on his home PC it would not be available the next day on his work PC. And at home he could not access any of the messages that had been downloaded to his PC at work earlier during the day.

Initially the solution was to switch off the deletion using the Account Settings item from the Tools menu.

However, an even better solution was possible when the school switched to using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) rather than POP for running the email server. First, almost as soon as an email arrived for Mr Salah Al-Din on the school's email server, it appeared on the PC he was using. He no longer needed to click the Get Mail button.

Second, the message was not deleted from the server when it appeared on his computer – rather, Thunderbird gave Mr Salah Al-Din direct access to what was on the server. This meant that the messages that Mr Salah Al-Din read in the evening on his home PC were available for him to see the next day on his work PC.

In addition, the Thunderbird interface on both machines indicated which messages he had already read, because their titles were not in bold text (see Figure 5). The

icon showed which messages he had replied to the night before.

In fact, Thunderbird keeps a copy of the messages sent on the IMAP server, so no matter which computer Mr Salah Al-Din used for sending and receiving his messages he would always be able to see all of these messages.

Finally, he installed Thunderbird onto his laptop. The Account Settings dialogue included an option to keep an offline copy of the mail from the IMAP server. This allowed Mr Salah Al-Din to see his old email messages even while not connected to the internet.

Mrs Shrub reads the news with RSS

Thunderbird offers a useful way of getting the news. This is because many websites offer RSS versions of their news stories and Thunderbird can use RSS to collect those stories. RSS stands for the Really Simple Syndication, but the name belies the power that it offers and the professionalism of the organisations that offer it.

Mrs Shrub liked to start her day by reading the newspapers while watching the BBC's news on TV. She was intrigued to learn that the BBC offers RSS feeds from its news site¹⁵ (see Figure 6).

To use RSS, look out for the

icon in Firefox. Click on it with the right mouse button and select Copy Link Location. In Thunderbird, click on Manage Subscriptions, then Add and paste the address of the link you copied in Firefox. After you click the OK button Thunderbird begins downloading the stories.

As soon as the BBC published a new story, it would appear on Mrs Shrub's RSS account in Thunderbird. The BBC site also offers several news categories, from which she selected “News Front Page”, “UK”, “Business” and “Politics” (see Figure 6).

Other sites offer an even greater choice. For example, Moreover¹⁶ provides over 330 news categories, including “Top UK stories”, which collects stories from the UK's newspapers.

Once she understood the significance of the

icon Mrs Shrub began spotting it everywhere, including the websites of CNN¹⁷ and The New York Times¹⁸. Some consulting companies, like the Oxford Business Group¹⁹, used the

icon instead.

This is the icon that she found on many blogs – online diaries – that she enjoyed reading. One of these was the blog²⁰ of Margot Wallström, the Vice-President of the European Commission. Her site had developed a loyal readership and seemed a public relations triumph. Mrs Shrub wondered if she could create a similar blog to reach her voters in London.

M. Braille filters out his spam mail

Sadly, having an email address means receiving junk emails. However, when Thunderbird collects your email messages you will notice that many of the spammers' messages have a

icon. This is Thunderbird's Junk Mail Control... at work.

However, not all the junk messages will have the icon. Select each of these and click the Junk button at the top of the window. Conversely, some messages will have been identified wrongly as junk mail. Select each of these and click the Not Junk button.

Although M. Braille received many messages every day from family, friends and co-workers, he received even more junk messages from spammers. After a few days of manually overriding the junk status that Thunderbird had assigned to each of his messages he noticed that the program's accuracy was improving.

This is because the junk mail feature changes its rules to match more closely the judgement of the user. It also refrains from labelling as junk mail any messages that come from email addresses that are already contained in your address book.

Thunderbird has a subtle feature for blocking the efforts of spammers – it does not automatically show the pictures in an email if the picture was not included with the email. This is because some spammers simply include a reference to a picture in the mass emails that they send out. Some email software automatically follows those references, connecting to the internet to get a copy of the pictures and then displaying it. However, as soon as the software connects to the internet it confirms to the spammer that the email address is a legitimate one. The spammer targets confirmed email addresses even more strongly.

By not automatically following such references Thunderbird prevents the confirmation that spammers thrive on. The Show Images button allows manual overriding in each message (see Figure 7).

Soon M. Braille trusted the software enough – it did not label everything correctly as junk mail, but it stopped incorrectly labelling any of his legitimate messages as junk mail. From the Tools menu he selected Junk Mail Controls... and switched on automatic message handling. This meant that Thunderbird automatically moved junk mail messages to a separate folder, clearing his Inbox.

Inspired by this automation M. Braille began reading about the Message Filters... command in the Tools menu. This allows setting rules for handling new messages.

He added a rule so that Thunderbird automatically moved every message from his colleagues at the charity to a folder he called “Charity”. He created another folder called “Lit-Ideas”. This was for messages that he received from the Lit-Ideas mailing list²¹, an entertaining discussion list for university professors in the humanities to discuss the impact of technology. Every message that came from the list included “[lit-ideas]” in the subject. M. Braille created a filter that automatically identified these messages by their subject and copied them to the “Lit-ideas” folder.

Ms Yates uses extensions

Ms Yates had used several extensions for Firefox. She was delighted that extensions were also available for Thunderbird from the Tools menu.

The first extension that she installed was a dictionary²² – this allowed her to look up the definitions of technical words in her messages.

Another extension allowed her to control her iTunes music player and most other music players, including the Free Software Zinf²³. This was important because she spent a lot of time every day reading and writing her emails and she liked to do so with music playing in the background. The extension's controls were available in every Thunderbird window, meaning that she could fast-forward, rewind, pause, play and change the volume without switching away from the message she was reading. Another version of the extension gave her the same controls on Firefox as well²⁴.

New extensions are always being added and Ms Yates wanted to keep track of all them. She found the Mozilla Foundation's RSS feed about new extensions²⁵.

Mr Big uses Mozilla suite

One of the key strengths of Microsoft Outlook is its calendar. This feature is not included in the default installation of Thunderbird. Several Free Software options are available.

One is to use Thunderbird's extensions. For example, the Mozilla Calendar extension²⁶ adds a Calendar command to the Tools menu. The calendar icon can also be added to the toolbar (see Figure 8). The PalmSync extension²⁷ further strengthens Thunderbird's address book by allowing its synchronisation with Palm Powered handheld computers.

However, other Free Software tools are available that were designed with calendar integration as a key feature rather than an afterthought. For example, the Open Source Application Foundation is creating Chandler (www.osafoundation.org), with an impressive vision for personal information management. However, it is still under development and a stable version is not yet available.

On the other hand Ximian Evolution is mature software that is similar to Outlook in functionality and user interface but superior in security (www.ximian.com). It also integrates into the Microsoft Exchange email server, allowing group calendar functionality. However, it is only available for computers running GNU/Linux, not Windows.

In the end Mr Big chose the Mozilla Suite (www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/), after which the Mozilla foundation was originally named. Its integration is even greater than Outlook's, combining web browsing, email handling, RSS reading, calendar functionality and web page creation.

And because it is based on the Mozilla Foundation's technology, it can use the same extensions that are available for Firefox and Thunderbird.

Further resources

Creating a basic website

In 2004, King Sihanouk of Cambodia abdicated his throne²⁸. The world and his parliamentarians, found out about this through his personal website (www.norodomsihanouk.info). During 2003, Salam Pax (http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/) described to readers around the world his daily experiences during the fighting between the US and Saddam's army. And in 2005, BoingBoing (www.boingboing.net) continues to fascinate as “a directory of wonderful things”.

To create a website, you need three things. First, you need content in the form of webpages. Writing a webpage is simpler than writing a word processing document, so if you are comfortable with OpenOffice.org Writer then you will find creating a webpage is easy.

Second, you need a computer to store the webpages for your readers. This is called a webserver. Running your own webserver is expensive and can be a full-time job. But renting a webserver is easy and affordable and some companies even offer the service free of charge. The companies that rent out parts of their webserver to host your website are called webhosts.

Third, you need a web address so that other people using the web can find the webserver containing your webpages. Examples of web addresses include www.freedomsoftware.info for this book. The address also allows others to email you. For example, you can email me at mo@freedomsoftware.info.

The costs of these steps are constantly dropping, the ease of starting is constantly improving and this chapter will demystify the basics.

What is most important to learn from this chapter is that there are many possibilities for your own website. Each of the characters uses their site for different reasons and you will have reasons of your own.

It is a common reaction to feel shy about setting up your own website for the first time. However, we all have something to tell others about, whether it is our day's events for family and friends to read about, or our professional expertise for colleagues to learn from.

You may feel scared about the risks and workload of your website and you are right to think ahead. There are four points to mention. First, avoid putting information on the internet that you do not want everyone to learn about. It is possible to secure your website so that only certain users can read it, but this takes some knowledge and is never without risks. So stick to sanitised information, at least at the start. In other words, do not broadcast your love life, or your complaints about your boss. On the other hand these topics make for some of the most charming and compelling reading material on the web and in time you will gain the confidence to discuss them in a way that minimises the risks to you.

Second, running a webserver is often a full-time job because of the constant attacks from malicious computer users. However, by renting a webserver you avoid all these headaches as there are professionals taking the load for you. On a good webhost's website you will see a guarantee of at least “99.9% uptime”, which means that they will ensure that their webserver makes your website available at least 99.9% of the year. In a single year, your website will be working for almost every single hour of every single day, faltering for no more than 9 hours in total.

Third, writing for the web is different from traditional writing. Dr. Jakob Nielson has excellent introductory articles²⁹ about this, while Dan Briklin's site provides a wonderful guide (www.gooddocuments.com) from a pioneer.

Finally, the workload of creating and maintaining a site can build up, especially as you come to enjoy writing and your website's visitors enjoy reading. On the other hand, that may not be a bad thing. But start with a simple site and slowly add content to it.

What most often astonishes new authors is how quickly the content on their website grows. My personal website (www.mo.md) began as a single article that I wrote about handheld computers. I began occasionally adding articles, until a medical company noticed it and commissioned a ten-part series from me. Soon I had readers from around the world and in time I decided that I had enough material for a book. “Handheld Computers for Doctors” was the result (www.handheldsfordoctors.com).

Mr Salah Al-Din and his students use OpenOffice.org for simple websites

To create your first webpage you only need OpenOffice.org. From the File menu selected New then HTML Document. HTML is an abbreviation of HyperText Markup Language, which is the name the Sir Tim Berners-Lee had given to the language he invented back in 1989 and all webpages are written in HTML.

Mr Salah Al-Din's school already had a website, but it consisted of just a few pages. Mr Salah Al-Din wanted to give each of his students some space on the school website so that they could express themselves and improve their writing skills.

Because the school already had a webserver and a web address, all Mr Salah Al-Din had to worry about was the tools for creating the extra webpages.

OpenOffice.org HTML editor is easy to use because its icons are identical to those of OpenOffice.org Writer. You can make text bold, italicized or underlined by clicking on the

and

icons respectively.

Inserting images in a document is also similar to OpenOffice.org Writer: select Graphics... from the Insert menu. However, there is one important difference. It is better for the image file to already be in the same folder as the HTML file.

You can also create hyperlinks to other webpages. From the Insert menu select Hyperlink. If the hyperlink is to another webpage in the same website, click on the Document icon on the left hand side, then the

icon in the top right corner (see Figure 9).

For example, one student created several webpages in her folder, each containing a single essay. The student then created a single page with the titles of all the essays. For each title, she selected its text then inserted a hyperlink to the webpage with the full essay. And on every essay's webpage she wrote “Home” at the top of the page and inserted a hyperlink to the page listing all the essays. In this way her parents could start with that page, click on the title of every essay that they wanted to read and click on “Home” to get back to the list when they had finished reading an essay.

To link to any other webpage on the internet, click on the Internet icon on the left hand side. Then type in the address of the webpage into the Target field and click the Apply button.

For example, another student liked to quote a lot of references in his essays. Many of those references were available on the internet, so he selected the title of each reference and inserted a hyperlink to the website with the full text. Other references were to books that were not available on the web, so the student created links to the Amazon.com pages that contained more information about the books. By following a link the reader would find reviews of the book, find out information about its publisher and buy it.

However, OpenOffice.org is only capable of basic HTML. For more sophisticated layout or advanced HTML features the students needed more professional HTML editing software. The students began reading books about webpage design³⁰ and searching the internet for more information³¹. That is how they found out about NVU.

Ms Yates uses NVU to create her company's website

You can get a web address in ten minutes for less than $10 per year. Type in the name of your organisation as one word at www.godaddy.com then click the Search button (see Figure 10).

There are several alternative endings for your web address. For example, .com is for companies with global customers, .co.uk is for UK companies and .org is for non-profit organisations³².

Ms Yates bought a .com address. Within 48 hours her address was working. She ordered some new business cards that included her website and email addresses. For a webhost, she chose SiteGround (www.siteground.com).

A typical SiteGround account costs $60 for each year's service. This includes 1 GB of space, which is enough for detailed photographs. The performance of the site is good enough for starting and would cope with Ms Yates's expanding needs for at least the first few years.

Finally, for writing the webpages, she chose NVU (www.nvu.com). It allows more sophisticated page design than OpenOffice.org as it can handle tables³³.

NVU also copes better than OpenOffice.org does with multiple interlinked webpages. As your site expands, you will rearrange and reorganise the webpages. NVU automatically updates the links between the pages.

Finally, NVU can copy the webpages from your computer to your webhost's server. You will need some details from your webhost and SiteGround includes these in the welcome email you receive on setting up your account. Enter these details into NVU using the Edit sites button on the left hand side (see Figure 12).

The software is similar enough to OpenOffice.org to use comfortably for writing. However, designing the correct layout takes some more effort. The easiest way to get started is to use Firefox and find some websites that you like. From the Firefox File menu select Save Page As... to save a copy of the webpage on your computer. Then Open the copy in NVU and customise it to suit your needs.

M. Braille uses PayPal and Amazon to collect donations through his website

Two companies make it easy to receive credit card payments through your website: Amazon (www.amazon.com) and PayPal (www.paypal.com). Around the world millions of people trust these companies to handle their online transactions.

M. Braille wanted to use his website to raise money for his charity. He bought an address ending in .org and created three documents. For the first he used OpenOffice.org Writer to create the complete brochure about the charity with photographs of the children, the school and its staff. He then exported the document in PDF format.

For the second document he used NVU to create the main webpage of his website. It also contained a hyperlink to the PDF document that he had created and another to the download site for Adobe Reader³⁴. The former link would allow visitors to his site to get the brochure about the charity's work and the latter ensured that any visitors who did not have Adobe Reader software could download a free copy before dowloading the brochure.

To handle the donation through PayPal he used his charity's bank account in France. He registered with PayPal's French site (www.paypal.com/fr/) and waited for a few days while the company verified his bank account details. Logging in to PayPal's site he was able to access its Outils marchand (merchant tools) section to create payment buttons (see Figure 13). For each button he specified the currency and amount of payment.

Whenever a user clicks one of these buttons PayPal would guide them through the payment process, transferring the appropriate amount in the appropriate currency from the donor's bank account to that of M. Braille's charity.

M. Braille used PayPal to create buttons for the Euro, Pound Sterling and US Dollar currencies. For each currency he created three levels of payment. At the end, PayPal provided him with the HTML code for nine payment buttons. He copied these codes into NVU under the heading “Donate using PayPal”.

The final page that he created, again using NVU, was a “Thank you” page. This was the page that PayPal would show to donors after they had completed their donation and allowed M. Braille to thank the donor in French and in English.

For Amazon donations he used Amazon's Honor System feature. This required him to have an American bank account to receive deposits so he provided the details of a sister charity in the USA. At the end of this Amazon presented him with HTML code, like PayPal's, that he added to his webpage in NVU.

Underneath the Amazon donation button he included the 501(c)(3) information about the American charity. This would allow Americans to count their donation as tax-deductible.

The beauty of this system was its low cost. Annually, the charity had to pay around $100 for the domain name and hosting. Furthermore, PayPal and Amazon do not charge any setup fees, simply taking around 5% of each donation. Just $105 in donations would have made the site self-financing. But as it happened, the site became quite profitable, attracting interest and donors from around the world, including people that the charity's French postal mailings had not previously reached.

Mrs Shrub uses CivicSpace to blog

The 2004 US presidential elections demonstrated the use of weblogs by the political candidates. Weblogs – or blogs, as they're commonly known – are websites in which the author can keep a log of events and their thoughts about these events.

To a reader a blog is a webpage with several entries. Each has a date, a title and some text. The newest entries are at the top and the oldest at the bottom.

Readers of blogs like them because they can easily see the latest entries – in the US elections candidates placed their opinions about the most recent issues and provided links to more detailed information. Voters were able to follow these to make informed decisions.

Authors of blogs like them because they make writing easy – all you would need is a web browser with access to the internet. You can access your own blog, log in and fill out a new entry. For politicians travelling around the USA this was a godsend.

Furthermore, the structure of a blog means that the author does not have to worry about the layout, only the writing.

These efforts contributed to Howard Dean's ability to raise several million dollars. Ultimately, Dean failed to secure the nomination of his party, losing to John Kerry.

However, the software that his team had developed continued to be developed even after his campaign ended. Now called CivicSpace (www.civicspacelabs.org), it is available as Free Software and developers around the world have joined the effort to improve its features.

Mrs Shrub was halfway through her term which meant that she would soon begin campaigning again. For now, she had enough time to learn to write her blog and for her team to begin forging relationships with the authors of other blogs.

Dr Digitalis uses WordPress to create a blog about acupuncture

A key advantage of choosing SiteGround for web hosting is its Fantastico control panel (see Figure 11). It allows you to quickly and easily install a whole range of Free Software. This includes the WordPress blogging software (www.wordpress.org).

Dr Digitalis wanted to write a blog to keep track of developments in acupuncture and store links to the articles that she found useful. From godaddy.com she bought an address ending in .info. In her SiteGround account she installed WordPress.

Every day, during her reading of the latest literature, she would pick a few articles about which she would write. For each she included a link to the article, a few choice quotes from its text and her own comment on the article.

This was useful for her memory. First, because she had spent this effort on each article she found it easier to remember the contents of the article on future occasions. Furthermore, WordPress indexes all the entries and provides a search box. She could enter into the search box the keywords of the article that she was interested in finding and WordPress would show a list of the blog entries that included these keywords. The more detail she included in each of her entries the easier it was to find the article again.

In time, however, other doctors found the blog useful. Many of them were GPs and found the background explanations that she gave to be useful and entertaining. They, in turn, recommended it to other colleagues. For this kind of recommendation it was important that the web address that she had chosen was short and memorable.

What Dr Digitalis had not expected was the number of new referrals coming her way because of the blog. By providing an educational service she was also demonstrating to other GPs her knowledge and her ability to explain things clearly to patients that the GPs would send. All this without advertising.

Mr Big's employees use WordPress blogs to keep colleagues informed

More and more businesses are finding the advantages of blogs written by employees for internal communication. WordPress allows the creation of different user accounts and different entry categories.

The manager of the San Francisco hotel showed Mr Big the employee blogs. Using an internal server, available only to employees within the hotel's network, the team had installed WordPress.

This meant that each of the senior employees could write entries about their own department's work. For each entry WordPress would display the name of the author as well as its date. The author would also tick the categories to which the entry was most appropriate, for example “maintenance”, “room service”, “customer feedback” and so on.

This was a great way to communicate amongst the different employees who worked different shifts in different parts of the hotel. If an employee wanted to check on the progress of a particular item of maintenance they would search the blog.

Some employees found this so useful that they took advantage of the RSS feature on WordPress. This would allow them to subscribe to the blog in Thunderbird, to receive all the entries. At the start of their shift they would spend around 15 minutes reading all that had gone on in the previous shift.

Mr Big ordered that WordPress be installed on all the internal servers of all the hotels. The regional managers found they could subscribe to the RSS feeds of all the hotels that they were responsible for. The other employees around the world took some training before they understood the benefits – not all of them were like the technophiles of San Francisco.

But soon they too found the act of documentation and the ease of searching others' documentation to be useful. In fact the pendulum began swinging too much in that direction with some managers asking that every employee use the blog.

This was possible in the hotels that provided computers and internet connections in every room: junior employees that worked on individual floors could login to WordPress using the computers in customers' rooms and document their progress during the day.

However, the problem with this was the information overload. Regional managers subscribing to the RSS feeds of a hotel's blog were flooded with entries announcing that the cleaning of a particular floor's rooms had been completed.

The company's policy became that the main blog was for senior employees. Each hotel manager could then choose to have another copy of WordPress for junior employees. This would only be of interest to that hotel's employees but allowed those employees the freedom to use it in the way that suited their work habits.

At any rate the experiment was now enough of a success that Mr Big was looking for other solutions that Free Software could bring to his web servers. Perhaps San Francisco would show the way again.

Further resources

Creating a large website

Amazon is more than a bookshop – it is your bookshop. After a few visits to and purchases from the site, it begins to include recommendations that are eerily attuned to your tastes. But when I visit the site I see different recommendations, ones that are tailored to my tastes rather than yours. And when your friend visits the site they will see recommendations that are also unique to them.

This is all possible because Amazon's website is built on a database. A database is a place to store data – think of it as an electronic filing cabinet. Amazon collects all sorts of data about you, including your billing address and orders of course, but also your rating of these books and even book links you click on. It also compares data about you with data about other customers and uses that to generate more data.

All of Amazon's pages are shown to you after consulting the database. If you are ordering a book Amazon shows you previous delivery addresses that you used, in case you want to use one of them again. If you are looking at a book Amazon shows you ratings by other users who have read the book. Most lucratively, Amazon constantly extrapolates from your previous behaviour to recommend books to you that you would not have known about or thought of reading.

You, I and others buy these books because Amazon is not in the books business as much as in the database business. And databases are the beauty of the web.

The websites that you build with OpenOffice.org and NVU will for the most part not be database-driven. It is possible and many web programmers do so, to use NVU to develop database-driven sites. But for most people the process is complicated and requires too much training.

However, WordPress is a tool that allows the easy creation of database-driven sites. To add entries to a blog you need a username and a password, which WordPress keeps track of. WordPress can keep track of the login details of many users and it stores the date and authorship data about each entry.

WordPress is not the only Free Software that allows you to create database-driven sites – there are other tools and many are far more powerful.

But of course with power comes complexity. These tools require time and knowledge to set up and administer but they make it easy to create and edit content. So this chapter does not provide a tips section to explain how to do everything – reading the documentation for every tool is necessary for this.

This is why you might find it useful to hire someone's services, at least for the setup phase of your site. After that you will have the tools and ability to focus on content. So the rest of the chapter is to give you ideas on what you might do with the tools. Welcome to the database business.

Dr Digitalis creates a discussion board

Bulletin boards, or discussion boards, allow the posting and reading of comments about different topics. Phpbb (www.phpbb.com) is a popular Free Software version.

Dr Digitalis found it under the Discussion Boards heading of SiteGround's Fantastico. It took three steps to install.

Since starting the blog Dr Digitalis was receiving emails from clinicians around the UK and increasingly from abroad, asking her questions about acupuncture

The questions were good for business because many were followed by the referring of a patient. She also liked answering these questions. However, some would always be beyond her expertise. Others were simple and frequent, requiring her to type the same answers several times in a week.

Discussion boards like phpbb make it easy for people to ask questions and others to respond to the questions. It also makes it easy to debate the answers.

Furthermore, by debating the answers through phpbb the deliberations are available to future visitors to the site. A visitor can search through past questions and answers.

Finally, phpbb allows each user to include information about themselves. This pleases experts because each can include information about their work.

Dr Digitalis recruited colleagues in China, Toronto and California to share the load of answering the questions. Their geographical spread ensured that there would be at least one expert available to answer questions at any time.

Whoever sets up a phpbb site becomes its Administrator. This allows controlling the functioning of the site.

For example, at the start Dr Digitalis only allowed registered users to see the questions and answers and only allowed users to register after she had seen the details on their application forms. She wanted to restrict questions to those from UK doctors, so she would contact each of the applicants to ask for their General Medical Council (GMC) number. This would provide a safe environment for clinicians to discuss questions amongst themselves and maintain patient confidentiality.

However, there were several problems with this stringency. First, phpbb is a good system but it is designed for ease of use, not security. Quite simply, Dr Digitalis understood that she did not understand enough about security to provide the site's users with guarantees of confidentiality.

Furthermore, many UK doctors bristled at the registration requirement, assuming that Dr Digitalis wanted to send them junk mail. And applicants without a UK GMC number would be excluded. This meant that the international experts she had recruited would be deprived of local clients and patient referrals. In fact the restrictions on reading the discussion meant that Google and other search engines could not index the site, depriving the experts of a particularly significant source of clients: patients searching Google.

Finally, it was simply too much work to look at every single applicant's details.

Dr Digitalis switched to a more relaxed approach. She allowed anyone to read any of the pages. She also allowed anyone to register and to include as few details as they wanted to on registration, but registration was still necessary to contribute questions or answers. That way search engines and casual readers could access the site while a little more commitment was necessary to contribute.

Another administrative task is to organise a site's discussion. Dr Digitalis created topics and subtopics to help someone browsing through the site's past discussions. For example, she created the “Consultations” topic for general questions about patient problems that could benefit from acupuncture, while the “UK”, “China” and “Canada” topics dealt with country-specific questions.

The organisation of phpbb also allowed her to devote some topic areas to issues that would concern her experts. She chose to restrict the access to one area so that only the colleagues that she had recruited could read its contents and add to them.

This allowed for reasonably confidential discussions amongst her team. Most of these discussions centred about the occasional registered user who was abusing the forum. She would debate with her colleagues how to deal with the behaviour. When appropriate, Dr Digitalis could bar that user from using the site and remove any inappropriate contributions they had made.

In time she began to entrust her colleagues with more responsibility on the site, upgrading their administration privileges. This reduced the drain on her time from managing the site. It also increased the commitment of her colleagues as their profiles showed their new status.

Ms Yates uses the Mambo content management system

A Content Management System (CMS) allows easy adding to and updating of a website's content. Several are available from SiteGround's Fantastico including Mambo (www.mambosource.com).

Authors like Mambo because its editing interface is similar to a word processor's (see Figure 14). However, it still runs inside a web browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer. This means the authors can do their writing on any computer that is connected to the internet. You can write while at work, at a friend's computer, or in an internet café while on holiday.

Website administrators like Mambo because it is so flexible. Someone with a little programming knowledge can change every aspect of the website's appearance. There are also hundreds of extensions available at www.mamboforge.net. These add features to your website like discussion boards, group calendars and shopping catalogues.

Ms Yates installed Mambo for her company website. She searched Google for “mambo templates” to find ready-made designs for the site. She found several available free of charge but paid $20 for a professional design from www.templatemuseum.com. Customizing it was far easier than creating a template from scratch.

Of course the site lacked content. Ms Yates already had several OpenOffice.org documents with the text that she needed. She was able to Copy and Paste the text into her Mambo pages.

She installed mambo-shop³⁵ to manage her shop. This allowed her to handle different products, currencies, shipping rates, taxes and payment methods. For the latter she chose PayPal and WorldPay.

Mr Salah Al-Din's students use a Wiki to collaborate in writing

Wikis are websites designed for easy collaboration on content. The Wikipedia, at www.wikipedia.org, is a great example of this tool in action. The site provides free access to encyclopaedias in different languages. Each encyclopaedia was written by hundreds of authors around the world. Each author picks a topic about which they have an expertise then they write about it.

The twist is the peer review. Anyone can edit any of the articles. This sounds like a recipe for chaos but the outcome, in this case, is scholarly accuracy: if anyone writes an extreme view, other authors with opposing extreme views alter the page. This can lead to a back-and-forth of editing and counter-editing, but soon the parties settle down on objective accuracy, reporting only the facts that cannot be disputed and ensuring that all the facts are included.

Mr Salah Al-Din used a wiki to help teach his class about the Bahraini Constitution. In 2002 Bahrainis voted overwhelmingly in favour of the new Constitution³⁶, based on the one that had been suspended in 1975. Mr Salah Al-Din wanted to help his students understand the document and its political significance.

There are many different types of Wiki software. Mr Salah Al-Din chose DokuWiki because its emphasis was on easy documentation creation with a clean design (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki). The software has its own database as a text file, meaning that installation is quick and easy. He uploaded the files to his server, changed the access rules for some of the files as described in the instructions and the system began working.

Security features were not so good, but this did not matter in this case as the DokuWiki would only be reachable by computers on the school's network, not by internet users outside the network.

He divided his students into teams. Each team would be in charge of one part of the constitution. Writing this in a DokuWiki is easy. Each student would create a page by typing its address in the web browser. For example, to create the overview page they would type in doku.php?id=overview while to create the page about Section 2 Article 3 of the constitution they would type in doku.php?id=section2article3. They made sure that the overview page listed all the pages in the site and provided links to them so that a visitor could browse the constitution.

The next stage was what excited Mr Salah Al-Din the most. He asked each of the teams to compare the Bahraini Constitution with that of another country. Then the teams would write their thoughts in these comparisons. For example, the Bahraini Constitution states that Islam is the religion of Bahrain, that all citizens are entitled to education and healthcare and that the head of state would be a member of the royal family chosen through heredity. These features were in stark contrast to the US Constitution.

After each team had written their comparison and commentary he asked them to read and edit the efforts of every other group. Of course this lead to lively debates amongst the students, exactly as Mr Salah Al-Din wanted. The school was developing a reputation for teaching civic leadership.

Mrs Shrub uses CivicSpace for her campaign

Mrs Shrub's campaign team members were putting CivicSpace to great use. The software's installation is easy and includes step-by-step instructions to explain the various available options. The team chose to use the site as a political action platform which would allow them to manage spreading information to the voters about the campaign.

Two alternatives are also available.The first, a Slashdot-style community site, mimics the features of www.slashdot.org. That site, itself a Free Software project, is great for discussions between participants but terrible for spreading information in the top-down manner that campaigns depend on. The second, a personal website or blog, was a possibility for Mrs Shrub. However, it lacks the other features that would have helped coordinate her campaign.

M. Braille uses Claroline to run courses

Apache is the webserver software behind most websites and MySQL is open source database software that powers an increasing number of them. Both have proven their stability.

The latest computer that M. Braille received from the GNU/Linux User Group ran Apache and MySQL. M. Braille did not understand how to use these but he did not need to – once installed, M. Braille could just add the computer to the network in his school and the software would just work.

Because the network did not have access to the outside internet M. Braille did not have to worry about security – the only threat was attack from inside the network and that would only come from the school children.

The computer also included Claroline (www.claroline.net), which is software for administering an educational institution .

When M. Braille logged in to his computer's Claroline site he was presented with the view of a course teacher. He could create as many courses as he wanted. For each course he could write educational material and design exercises and tests. He could also determine who had access to each course.

Claroline allows the monitoring of which student had gone through which educational materials and exercises and their scores on the tests. M. Braille could impose time limits for the tests and weightings for the questions.

If M. Braille had wanted, he could have run a university using this computer. In fact, France's Université de Nantes, Britain's University of Glasgow, America's University of Pittsburgh and over 350 other organisations from over 55 countries around the world are using Claroline to deliver their education to students.

But his ambitions were more modest. He wanted to provide education to more of the parents of students in the village by using his limited computer resources. He made five computers and one assistant available to the parents of students so that they could access his Claroline-powered website.

Thanks to the testing modules he could also provide certificates for the parents as they learnt more and completed harder tasks. The service was modest but it made a difference to the parents and added to their pride. And he also knew that educated parents can better support the education of their children.

Of course the key was providing useful courses and M. Braille greatly enjoyed writing these. But he did not have to do all the writing – teaching materials are free at Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org).

The organisation allows creators around the world to make their intellectual property available to others according to each creator's individual preferences. The education section provides lesson plans that are freely available (www.creativecommons.org/education) for reuse and customisation. In time he would be visiting Creative Commons to make his own creations available to others (www.creativecommons.org/license/). But for now his students would be the beneficiaries of his teaching.

Mr Big uses dotProject for project management

Microsoft Project is designed to help with managing projects. It can keep track of the tasks for the project, the people carrying them out and the progress of the project. For the latter, the software automatically creates Gantt charts³⁷ to provide a visual representation.

The problem with all versions before Microsoft Project 2003 is collaboration. Only one person can enter information into the file at a time, which usually means that one person becomes in charge of entering all the information. That person must keep track of all the employees on the project, as well as document their progress on all of the tasks.

Microsoft Project 2003 helps solve this problem by providing a version that works on a server and a version that works on PCs. The server version keeps track of the information that the individual employees submit using the PC version on their own PCs. However, the server itself costs $1,499 and then there is the cost of upgrading to the latest PC version.

Mr Big is a fan of Microsoft Project, regularly using the older PC version and insisting that his immediate employees also use it, but this pricing was too high.

So dotProject (www.dotproject.net) seemed like the perfect solution. It is a Free Software project management server and its interface is accessible through any web browser.

Once installed each user can create as many projects as they need to manage. For each project they can collaborate with as many users as necessary. Each user in a project can enter information about the tasks they are responsible for, including their costs, expected duration and progress so far. The person managing the project no longer has to enter this information but still gets to see it, including the overview provided by Gantt charts that dotProject generates.

DotProject allows storage of files. The team can collaborate on these files, amending project proposals in OpenOffice.org Writer and presentations in OpenOffice.org Impress. The Record Changes feature in OpenOffice.org keeps track of these amendments.

The creators of dotProject cared about integration, making sure that it worked well with other software. Most immediately Mr Big appreciated this because he could import his old Microsoft Project files into dotProject. The software also integrates into LDAP servers, meaning that Mr Big's employees could use the same passwords to log onto dotProject as they used to log on to their computers. Once logged in they could see the contact details of all their colleagues because these had been imported from the company's LDAP server. Similar tools are being developed to integrate dotProject with the Mambo content management system and with the SugarCRM sales force software.

The creators also provided support contracts. The software is quite stable and well tested but Mr Big insisted that dedicated support be available to his IT department in case there were any problems. He began with a US company (www.caseysoftware.com) and added a contract with the Australian company that had started the whole project (www.saki.com.au). A third company, based in Brazil, is also available. The time zones meant that the first two companies provided his staff with support around the clock.

Further resources

32“Getting an internet address” by Mohammad Al-Ubaydli. BMJ Career Focus 2005. www.mo.md/id174.htm

37Invented by the mechanical engineer Henry Laurence Gantt (1861-1919), Gantt charts were used on large construction projects like the Hoover Dam, started in 1931 and the interstate highway network, started in 1956.

Part II

Browsing the web with Firefox

Ms Yates searches Google, uses tabs and avoids pop-up windows

Mr Salah Al-Din searches for meaning

Dr Digitalis searches PubMed

M. Braille downloads entire websites

Mr Big's team improves security, creates bookmarks and designs a theme

Further resources

Using email with Thunderbird

Dr Digitalis switches to Thunderbird and imports her old email messages

Mr Salah Al-Din switches from POP to IMAP for accessing his email at home

Mrs Shrub reads the news with RSS

M. Braille filters out his spam mail

Ms Yates uses extensions

Mr Big uses Mozilla suite

Further resources

Creating a basic website

Mr Salah Al-Din and his students use OpenOffice.org for simple websites

Ms Yates uses NVU to create her company's website

M. Braille uses PayPal and Amazon to collect donations through his website

Mrs Shrub uses CivicSpace to blog

Dr Digitalis uses WordPress to create a blog about acupuncture

Mr Big's employees use WordPress blogs to keep colleagues informed

Further resources

Creating a large website

Dr Digitalis creates a discussion board

Ms Yates uses the Mambo content management system

Mr Salah Al-Din's students use a Wiki to collaborate in writing

Mrs Shrub uses CivicSpace for her campaign

M. Braille uses Claroline to run courses

Mr Big uses dotProject for project management

Further resources