Links to other web sites

Web sites of potential interest to web surfers

Sponsored link.

We have found the following Internet sites, useful:

	to provide information about the Internet itself,
	to save money when buying books,
	to search the Internet,
	to provide computer file backups,
	obtain screensavers,
	etc.

Information about the Internet itself:

The growth of the Internet has been phenomenal -- particularly that of the World Wide Web.

Netcraft reported a total of 92,615,362 web sites at the end of 2006-AUG, an increase of 4.8% from the previous month. However, of these, only about 45 million were active. ₁

The first World Wide Web site was launched by Tim  Berners-Lee on 1991-AUG-06 with the hope that it would grow to be "a force for individual, regional and global understanding." By mid 2006, the Web was being used by more than 1 billion people.

The total number of websites were:

	1991-AUG-06: 1; this was the first web site.
	1992: 50
	1993: 150
	1994: 3,000
	1995: 25,000. This site, ReligiousTolerance.org was about the 6,000th web site started up.
	1996: 250,000
	1997: 1.2 million
	1998: 2.6 million
	1999: 4.7 million
	2000: 7.1 million 2
	2001: 30 million
	2002: 37 million
	2003: 47 million
	2004: 54 million
	2005: 73 million
	2006-AUG: 93 million 3
	2008-AUG: 177 million of which only about 71 million are active 1

Book savings:

If you spend a lot of money on books, like we do, then you might be interested in the following two websites. By entering the book's ISBN number, title, or author's name, these web sites scan many book suppliers and report on their prices. They also show prices for other on the same topic.

Enter Book Title or ISBN
Powered by New & used books

BookFinder4U provides two searches: either in-print books, and for rare, out of print books. Compare book prices.

Communications options: Internet, cell phones, etc:

Cognigen lists information on cell phone plans, VoIP plans, long distance plans, etc. from various suppliers. See: http://ld.net/

Searching the Internet:

	Individual Search Engines: These are like gigantic indices of the Internet. You supply a phrase or one or more words which describe the topic that you are interested in and click on the submit key. The search engine then scans its data base and responds with "hits." These are web sites which may have useful information on your topic of interest. The most popular search engines are: Alta Vista, Excite, Google, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, and Yahoo. Google is introducing a new service to "search specifically for scholarly literature including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. See: http://scholar.google.com/
	Meta Search Engines: These submit your phrase or words to a group of search engines. Some useful ones are:  AllinOne Dogpile, MetaCrawler, Metasearch, and Savvy-search.
	Geographical search engine: Variety Search is a directory of web sites sorted geographically. See: http://www.varietysearch.com/
	Internet-Web Directory is a fully searchable and frequently updated directory of web sites. See: http://www.internet-web-directory.com

Internet archive:

WayBackMachine has stored more than 10 billion pages -- over 100 terabytes of data -- in its archives. Their goal is to build a digital library and other cultural artifacts in digital form for public access. You can view web sites, frozen in time as they existed as early as 1996. See: http://www.archive.org

Time:

US Naval Observatory time can be accessed at: http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/

Information about the Internet:

	Alexa, a web navigation service, has compiled some interesting information about the Web: number of domain names, number of unique host machines, number of intermittent sites, etc. See: http://www.alexa.com/
	Network Wizards conducts an Internet Domain Survey survey gives the total number of Internet hosts on a semi-yearly basis. See: http://www.nw.com/

Backing up files:

Computer files are only reliable until the next failure happens of one of your disk drives. According to a Carbonite ad on Sirius Radio, 43% of computer users will lose an irreplaceable file each year.

We use the Acronis True Image program to backup a complete snapshot of our main office computer to an external disk drive. We then transfer these files to DVD data disks. This is labor intensive, and does cost money for the DVD blanks. However, it can be set up to completely backup the computer so that if you have a major failure, you can recreate everything -- files, desktop, essays, programs, operating system etc. to their condition at the time of the last backup.

When we "upgraded" from Windows XP to the accursed Vista operating system -- a serious error in judgment on our part -- we decided to try offsite-backups as a supplement. We selected Carbonite. They offer a free 15 day service without asking for a credit card number. The program is simple to install. You select which files and folders you want to back up, or you can as the Carbonite program to do this for you. Once in place, it takes few days to backup those files on their remote computer. From that time onwards, every time the selected files are changed or created, they are automatically and quickly backed up. Icons of backed-up files are shown with a colored dot to indicate that their status. Carbonite claims that retrieval of files is simple. Carbonite currently backups almost 400,000 of our files.

It is important to realize that Carbonite does not back up all files; it does not backup the operating system or programs, for example.

The New York Times review states: "It's the easiest online backup software to use -- in fact, to not use, since it's completely automatic."

Click on this image to try Carbonite: We strongly recommend it.

Screensavers:

We originally had links here to four screen saver web sites: Screen Saver Heaven, FreeSaver.com, ScreenSaver.com, and Absolutely Free Screen Savers. Unfortunately, McAfee's SiteAdvisor� program rates all four web sites as red. A typical warning by MaAfee states:

"In our tests, we found downloads on this site that some people consider adware, spyware or other potentially unwanted programs."

Googling the word screensavers shows that 7 out of the first ten hits are rated red.

Some screensaver web sites that McAfee rated as green (safe) on 2008-FEB-01 were:

	Download.com at: http://www.download.com/
	Really Slick Screensavers at: http://www.reallyslick.com/
	Free Christmas Screensavers at: http://www.christmasscreensavers.net/
	3D Fireplace Screensaver at: http://dnl.crawlertools.com/
	Fun Utilities at: http://screensavers.funutilities.com/

Language translation:

	Dictionary.com provides a free language translation service at: http://dictionary.reference.com/ You can paste a text in simplified or traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish and have it translated to English.
	Babel Fish Translation at Altavista translates either a block of up to 150 words of text, or a an entire web page between many pairs of languages at: http://world.altavista.com/

News:

	Newspaper Association of America offers an index of newspaper web sites in the U.S., Canada and the rest of the world at http://www.newspaperlinks.com/
	The Newspaper Association of America provides a list of wireless news sites at: http://www.naa.org/
	Moreover provides news feeds for inclusion in web sites. See: http://w.moreover.com/
	FreeNewsFeed.com also provides news feeds on E-Business and technology topics. See: http://www.freenewsfeed.com/
	WebTerrace.com maintains a list of free news feed suppliers at: http://www.webterrace.com/

Sending anonymous Emails:

You can send an Email to anyone for free without revealing your identity by going to SendAnonymousMail at: http://www.sendanonymousemail.net/. You fill in the Email address of the destination, the subject, the message, and a security code. To conceal your identity, leave the default sender's email -- sender@email.com in place.

You can also enter your own Email address. However, that defeats the main purpose of the web site, which is to conceal your identity.

This is a helpful service if your own Email system is temporarily out of commission, or if you do not have an email program.

Non-profit agencies:

Actions Without Borders has a comprehensive directory of nonprofit resources, with over 2,500 links to organizations, directories and publications, They are arranged by location as well as topic. See them at  http://www.idealist.org/

Viewing web sites with a low speed Internet connection:

LoBand allows you to view a website without graphics, icons, burger dots, etc. Pages look really boring, but they do load a lot faster. It is a free service at http://www.loband.org

More information including what our own home page looks like in LoBand

Internet hoaxes:

The US Department of Energy has a description of some of the most popular hoaxes, such as the "Good Times Virus", the "Ghost.exe Warning," etc. See: http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/

Book ISBN numbers:

BooksPrice.com has a handy conversion tool to convert 10 digit ISBN book numbers to the new standard of 13 digits (e.g. 0-7922-77287 to 978-0-792277-28-6) See: http://www.booksprice.com/

References used:

1. "August 2008 web server survey," Netcraft, at: http://news.netcraft.com/ This survey is updated monthly.

2. "On the number of web sites in the world," Pandia, 2000, at: http://www.pandia.com/

3. "Spinning the Web," The Toronto Star, 2006-AUG-06, Page D1. It was based on data from Richard T. Griffiths at Leiden University and Netcraft Ltd.

Copyright © 1995 to 2009 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Latest update and review: 2009-FEB-01
Author: B.A. Robinson
Hyperlinks checked on: 2008-SEP-03

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