This may be a bit disjointed, but I'm not sure how else to cover the bases this month. As a result, you can expect to hop around a bit here.

First of all, a recent issue of The Scout Report featured a site called Recent Advances in Manufacturing. This site provides a bibliographic records database of articles on various manufacturing topics from more than 500 journals, magazines, books, videos, conference proceedings and other sources. In all, more than 24,000 records, dating back to 1990, are available and may be retrieved using Boolean and other searching methods. The site is hosted by The Library and Information Services Department at the Nottingham Trent University (UK), and the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) and is updated monthly. To access it, point your browser at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ram/.

Those of you who use a Macintosh should know that Microsoft has released its Internet Explorer 4.0 Web browser for the Macintosh. The full installation consumes approximately 14 MB on your disk, but you can squeeze a minimal install in just 4 MB. New features include subscriptions to inform the user when a site has been updated, offline browsing, Java support and security zones to restrict access to certain sites. For more information or to download or order the software, see http://www.microsoft.com/ie/mac/.

If you access the Internet through America Online, you may find a freeware application called AOL SuperFreeTools by Lou A. Moccia to be useful. The following was reported in the Ziff-Davis library online:

Using a well-designed tabbed interface with toolbars, you can customize some of AOL's behavior to your liking. Clear the stuck hourglass cursor in the AOL window, automatically dismiss several types of undesired or unnecessary dialog boxes and warnings, decide how Instant Messages and Invitations should be handled, adjust dialing and redialing functions, and more. As a bonus, AOL SuperFreeTools includes several useful built-in utilities to let you open and close certain apps when you enter/exit AOL, automatically empty up to five folders when the utility is closed, activate the Windows screen saver, and use a simple Web browser.

Freeware means that you may use it free of charge. This software requires Windows 95, but that should be no obstacle to most of you. I don't use America Online, so I cannot speak from experience; but the program comes highly recommended from several of my colleagues. Closer to the point, more than 29,000 people have downloaded this program from Ziff-Davis, and they give it a rating of four stars — truly impressive. For more information or to download this program, go to http://www.hotfiles.com/internet.html and search for SuperFreeTools.

Warning: Unless you access the Web the way I shop for groceries — an approach that my significant other calls commando raids — plan to spend lots of time on this site reading about and downloading all sorts of goodies.

For the oldie of the group, look for a publication called Boardwatch Magazine at http://www.boardwatch.com. Boardwatch is a monthly magazine that has been around since 1987 — a time when 2400 bps was pretty much state of the art, Kermit was king and the term online generally meant that we were dialed into a bulletin board system. Today, Boardwatch covers breaking developments on the Internet, the World Wide Web and the communications industry, and provides some of the best technical reviews of Internet products and services available today. Featured authors to this publication include John C. Dvorak and Mikee Erwin. As of this writing, an annual subscription costs $36 for domestic (USA) subscribers and includes a free copy of The Boardwatch Directory of Internet Service Providers. This directory is worth a few words in its own right.

If you need to find a good connection to the Internet (or are just tired of answering questions on the topic), the Boardwatch directory will save you a lot of time and trouble. This publication lists more than 4,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across the United States in over 16,000 listings by area code, with detailed profiles of 34 National Backbone Operators, including internetMCI, Sprint IP Services, AGIS, BBN Planet, UUNET, PSINet and others. It also provides detailed information on Internet architectures and measurements, tutorials on configuring Windows 95 for access to the Web and other useful technical information — 448 pages in all. I've never seen a more detailed reference of this kind, and I highly recommend it.

Meanwhile, in case you need to stave off questions from friends, this directory ranks the top three ISPs as IBM Connect, TEK Interactive Group and MCI. If that doesn't suffice, refer them to a news story titled "Study Ranks ISPs' Performance," by Jeff Pelline, which is located at http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,19261,00.html.

For those of you who run a Web site or who plan to do so, I also recommend The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) Graphic, Visualization & Usability Center's WWW User Survey. By the time you read this, results from the ninth survey should be released. At present, the latest edition of this survey was run from October 1997 to November 1997 and documents feedback from more than 10,000 users on the Internet. Topics include demographics, Internet usage, electronic commerce, Web site design and cultural issues, among others. The site also contains an executive summary, survey methodology, detailed results, datasets and questionnaires. The GVU survey is endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is one of the most respected surveys of its kind. To review the latest results and participate in the next survey, due out every April and October, point your browser at http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/.

Finally, those of you who are tired of contending with banner ads may want to check out some commercial software named Cybersitter. This software was really designed to block access to designated Web sites, but recently added an option to screen out most banner ads. You may not want to do this all of the time, but it can really speed up access times when your connection is poor. For more information on this product, point your browser at http://www.solidoak.com/.

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