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The Tao of Connection
Moving with the times into the electronic world of the internet and email
By Don Kent
Part 1 - The Basics of the Internet & Email
People no longer
rely solely upon communication by direct word of mouth like the early yoga students.
Our forefathers embraced the benefit of the written word, and more recently television and telephones. And, of course, being in the present world of rapid technological change (where microchip complexity quadruples every eighteen months!), electronic communication is progressing in leaps and bounds – and the internet (or web) and electronic mail (email) have become part of the every day scene over the last 5 to 10 years. Whilst millions of people do use these services, many millions are still to wet their feet. Part 1 of this article briefly introduces the use of the internet and email and Part 2 shows how you could truly become a full member of the new global web village community.
Surfing the web is a household expression, but how do you actually start to surf and how do you find anything useful?
If you walk into an internet café, or most libraries or workplaces, you can just sit down , grab the mouse and off you go. If you want to surf from home, the commonest solution is a home PC (new from about £500 or much less used - but make sure it's up to it!) fitted with a modem and a telephone socket that you can plug into. To surf you need a browser program and to use email you need an email program. These should be part of your computer software, but if not, or they are too old, you can get the latest for FREE. You will then need what is called an ISP (Internet Service Provider) so that you can connect your computer’s modem , via the telephone system, to the ISP and the internet – a globally interconnected network. Nowadays you do not need to pay an ISP a membership fee but you do have to pay for the connection between your computer and the ISP. This is typically either a low rate number (0845) where you pay for the time you are connected, or one of the packages for unlimited connection time during specified periods like evenings, weekends or any time at all. ISPs also like to give you other things as well like their own home web page and email addresses, but, quite frankly, you do not need these and they can be a pain! That’s it – you’re ready to surf now!
Go on, fire up your browser (typically Internet Explorer) and you should be asked if you want to ‘connect’.
This is because the default web page for your browser will typically ‘live’ at a remote location and the browser ‘knows’ it needs to access the internet to route a request for that page from the remote computer (a web server) which can, literally, be absolutely anywhere on earth. OK, so now you see the web page on your browser, but what can you do now? Just try moving the mouse pointer over the web page – you should see the pointer change and things on the web page change colour as you move over active areas.. If you click an active area (often underlined text or a button) you will be transferred, through the hyperlink, to a new location. Typically you will ‘navigate’ around a set of web pages that form a web site, but you could just as easily link to a completely different web site anywhere. And that’s why its called a web – it’s a web of interconnection. Try that in a paper book - and the Internet is more like a vast library in fact!
Don’t worry about getting ‘lost’ in hyperspace – there are several things you can do. You can use the BACK button on your browser to return to pages you have already visited, or use the HOME button to get back to your
default web page. If you find a page that you are likely to want to go back to, you can ‘bookmark’ it – in Internet Explorer you add the address of the web page to your FAVORITES (sorry – US spelling is the norm!) at the click
of a button.
You can even set up ANY page of your choice as your default page so your browser always opens with that. If there is a web page that you want to keep open for the moment while you continue to look at other pages you can open a new browser window – most computers will have the capacity for you to have at least half a dozen open at once. Typically, from a page you want to remain open, you might click the hyperlink with the right mouse button and choose ‘Open in New Window’. This technique is particularly useful if you have a page of links and you want to explore and compare several of them – like working from a search engine results page.
But, there’s a lot more to surfing than following links – you can go to specific web sites directly by typing in the web site address (in the browser’s address bar) or go to a ‘search engine’ and ask it to find web pages for
you. It is impossible to avoid the ubiquitous web address on television screens, radio, magazine pages, sides of vans, shopping bags, etc. – so just type it in!
You don’t need to worry about the http:// part as your browser knows that’s what you mean (you don’t need to know, but it stands for hyper text transfer protocol). Most addresses are like www.msn.com which are instantly recognisable as internet addresses with the ‘www’ bit (World Wide Web or sometimes World Wide Wait might be more apt). If you don’t know the address – just take a guess – more often than not you will be correct, although remember that the last bit of the address may be something like .co.uk.
What about searching? Searching is what takes the Internet to new heights. In a book you can search the index for a single word, but by using a search engine, you can search for several words in over
2,000,000,000 web pages (using Google)!
And there is a lot of incredibly useful information sitting on web servers around the world (as well as a lot of not so useful stuff – be discriminative). Go on, give it a try. Go to one of the best search engines – type www.google.com into your browser and then type something like ‘Hatha Yoga UK’ into the search box and press GO. Astonishing – isn’t it? The Scottish Yoga Teachers Association is right up there on the first results page, but there are in addition almost 5,000 matches! Of course, no body wants to look through 5,000 web pages, so you can always refine your search using additional key words on the search results you have or use an advanced search looking for phrases, recently updated pages, … the options possible are comprehensive to say the least!
OK, now email – electronic mail – who can be without it?
Whilst not intended to be an 'instant' medium - it can sometimes take several seconds, minutes or even hours - it sure beats the speed of 'snail mail' as it is often called in the e-world - but it is FREE! Not only that, but you can send the same message to lots of people at once. You can even attach a document you've been working on or a digital photograph. And, unlike the telephone, you collect, read and respond to email at the time of your choice. Now it would be very boring if you had to type in a person's email address every time you sent an email, but email programs (like the free Outlook Express) have an address book so that you can save or manually enter and then pick email addresses. And, if you have a group of people you wish to share messages with - just set them up as an email group and that's it. To ensure a degree of privacy if needed, you can send the email so that each person is unaware of who else you are sending to. Using email really does make it easy to keep in touch - and it's absolutely great for young people travelling around the world to maintain contact with home.
By Don Kent, a British Wheel of Yoga Teacher living in Wiltshire. Don is a professional engineer who is hooked on yoga.
Don provides low cost web sites and has a special package available for yoga teachers - the Yoga Web. You can contact Don on info@yoga-classes.info or 01793 740303. Part 2 of this article covers the subject of having your own web site.
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