WWW Stuff
Topics
Search engines and general reference databases.
Places around the world.
Net weirdness and other oddities.
"Useful" things on the wounderous web.
Web on the Web
Places with searchable indexes of topics on the net, and most of them
are searched by the
Google,
Meta Crawler,
Web Crawler,
Scirus (science-specific),
IXquick,
Dogpile,
All The Web, and
Wired magazine's
HotBot.
Turbo 10.
Lists of new stuff on the Web are provided by NCSA
and New Too.
References: encyclopedias,
dictionaries,
thesauri,
and the internet movie database.
This is a
geographically-indexed database of WWW Servers. And this is a sensitive map of worldwide WWW
Servers. The Finnish FUNET also provides
interesting (but useful?) links.
The WWW Virtual Library's
Subject Catalogue lists a large number of topics. The BoWeb (Best of Web) awards
provides a lot of useful links. Of course, you could just pick a server at random
and see what you find.
This is a often sluggish link to more reference
material (the US census, etc.). Heck, you can even find discussions of banned
books and electronic censorship, the peace/enviro/social issues (and valuable
links to related groups), or entertainment like at VoyagerCo.
You can see the effects of war in Croatia, and if that
inspires you politcally, tell the president at the White House. While in D.C., you can
visit the Library of
Congress and the Smithsonian Museum (and
if you're in a museum mood, hop over to peruse the Louvre, or any
other museums around
the world). If all that gets to be too much, take a peaceful hike through Rocky Mountain National
Park or escape to Arcosanti for a while. Or,
find the
best places to live in the U.S.A. with the census bureau's map servers, where you can
locate Boulder, a beautiful place Where The Buffalo Roam (which
was made into a movie).
But to find a specific address, anywhere in the USA, check out this very
excellent street map generator
Or, check out Burning Man
performance art gathering in the Nevada desert. Or, if you can't get there,
try some interactive performance
art.
I may or may not be the omnipotent,
omnipresent, omniscient Usenet
Oracle knows. If you have a penchant for the bizarre in general,
you may enjoy the Annals of Improbable
Research (published by and for Scientific Elites and
Scientific Illiterates), or reading some occasionally amusing comics. Be sure to tell a friend or
send a postcard (or
a complaint or
an insult of one type or
another). And if you are
tired of being here now, why not
time-travel to the 1960's, and maybe you'll
meet Timothy Leary? Or, are you more hip to
plug in to Alternative-X and TeleCircus at San Francisco's The Well? It's more fun than going to college.
Then, of course, there are the practical ascpects of the net such as currency
exchange rates (I prefer this one),
which can tell you how many Apple
Computers would a $1,000,000
bill buy, the current
weather, news from NPR, downloading some
software, and help adjusting your monitor's
gamma. And you can use the Fed Ex Tracking Form to help
you find the SPAM
you mailed yesterday. And here is some information on Dihydrogen Monoxide.
For newbies (and aren't we all at sometimes?) and reference, there is Virtual Library covering all things webby, a
Beginner's Guide to HTML
and a general (if writing pages makes you sick, this doctor can help find out what ails your
aching pages, as can this document validation service {someday,
I'll edit my web pages with
EMACS [and that's a faq, Jack]}), restrict
access with user
authentication using NCSA
HTTPd, and browse these collections of images
and special characters and
miscellanioud graphics
to spice up your HTML
documents. But beware to avoid the mistakes of excess of the Top Ten things NOT to
do on a Home Page. For more internettiquitte, lore, and jargon check out EFF's (Extended)
Guide to The Internet!!! (formerly Big Dummy's) This is offered on EUnet in Germany. Also,
some guy created an Internet Roadmap and
Class.
A key is a small thing next to the door it opens.
--- Ursula K. LeGuin.
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will
eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the
Internet, we know this is not true.
--- Professor Robert Silensky of California University
Joel Parker
(joel@boulder.swri.edu)
