First, some digital photography news. I have added some new photos to my Oak Island gallery, including some shots of the Sea Turtle Habitat Restoration Project. See the section on "Digital Photography" on my website.
The topic for this week's discussion is how to manage URLs. (If you don't know what a URL is, it means Universal Resource Locator and even us 'net gurus who understand this stuff don't really know what THAT means. It means, in effect, "web page name" - what you type in to go to a specific webpage.)
There are now so many web pages out there on the web that it is literally impossible to list or categorize them completely. New pages would appear before you had barely begun to list them. So, how do you keep track of it all? How do you find time to look at all the pages you want to revisit?
The first step is to use the "bookmarks" or "favorites" feature of your web browser. This is pretty easy - when you find a page you wanted to remember, you just click (in MS Internet Explorer) on Favorites / Add To Favorites and it will be saved for you in the Favorites list. So far, so good.
But what happens when the list becomes too big to fit on the screen? The second step in managing URLs is to create folders within the Favorites structure. You do this by clicking on Favorites / Organize Favorites and using Create Folder. You can build a folder and subfolder structure within Favorites just as you would have folders and subfolders on your hard drive. You can then use the subfolders you create to organize or categorize your URLs.
But, now that you have organized them into folders, you find that you don't remember where they are - out of sight and out of mind. What do you do now?
My answer to all of this is to organize your Favorites not only by specific categories, such as "Recipes" or "Shopping", but by day of the week. You are, in effect, going to program your web viewing, just like TV Guide programs your TV viewing. Every time you add a URL to your list, think if you would want to revisit it on a regular basis. Then, set up a schedule of what websites you want to visit on Monday, Tuesday, and each day of the week. Create folders by those names, and put the list of favorites in them that you want to visit on that particular day.
Don't forget that it is OK to put a favorite in more than one folder - thus you can have www.oakislandnc.com both in a folder called "Local Stuff" and in a folder called "Tuesday".
When you start your browsing each night (you DO browse each night, don't you?), just start with the URLs in the folder for that night. In this way, you will program your browsing, and regularly visit websites each week.
Gosh - I am so organized since I retired!
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).