Mail menopause

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

Time was when I found email very straightforward. I set up my very first 'Windows' computer in 2000, obeying instructions - because I would have been totally lost without them. And when a message appeared asking me if I wanted Outlook Express to be my email client, I said 'Yes'. The only word I recognised in the message was 'email'...and I wanted it!

I went through the next five years using Outlook Express - and thinking that everyone else used Outlook Express - before I started work on an Internet provider helpdesk. I had to use Outlook for work and only then did I realise that other people were using 'webmail' or "Eudora" or "Thunderbird" or "Pegasus" or.....

So when I started the tutoring business I was ready to face a variety of email systems on my pupils' computers. (It's going to get confusing if I say 'clients', isn't it?)

What I wasn't prepared for was the need to explain the Mind of Microsoft and, still more, apologise on its behalf!

So here we go...

• If you're using Windows XP, you can use Outlook Express or Outlook. These are still the best mail clients that Microsoft have produced, so stick with them.

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• If you are using Windows Vista....oh dear!

  
  

  No seriously, all is not lost - apart from Outlook Express. Microsoft in its wisdom made sure that Outlook Express wouldn't work with Vista. Instead, they brought out Windows Mail.

  
  

  Now I thought Windows Mail was OK...until one of my pupils struggled to use "autocomplete" when creating a new mail. "Autocomplete" is the very useful feature in the To: box of the email. You should be able to start typing a name in your email Address Book - say you type a 'c' - and all the names beginning with 'C' appear in a drop-down. You just click on the one you want and the name and address are automatically entered for you. It saves having to type email addresses.

  
  

  Microsoft in its obtuseness made sure that the Windows Mail autocomplete only works for the last 29 contacts that you've written to. So if you have 50 contacts in the address book they won't all show up in Windows Mail "autocomplete".

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  Another niggle...

  
  
  

  Good ol' Outlook Express has a nice big button on the toolbar labelled "Addresses". It says what it is! You know where it is!

  
  

  
  

  Outlook calls the address book 'Contacts', but it's easy to find in the bottom left corner:

  
  
  
  

  Windows Mail has a silly little icon, which, if you find it and point to it, produces a tooltip label 'Contacts'. So you've got to know where it is before you can find it...!

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• If you're using Windows 7....

  ...you can't use Outlook Express or Windows Mail. You have the privilege of using Windows Live Mail. As far as I know, autocomplete works in Windows Live Mail.

  But... Microsoft - in their cussedness or forgetfulness or just indecent haste to get the thing on the market - failed to ensure that Windows Live Mail opens each time in the Inbox! So if you were last looking at the Sent Items folder or your Junk folder, and you then close Windows Live Mail, the next time you open Windows Live Mail it will open in the Sent Items, or the Junk, or whatever you last used!

  So I spend a lot of time training my pupils to get into the habit of clicking on Inbox before they close WLM.

  But why, O Microsoft, should they have to?

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I think in the future I shall steer new pupils towards Mozilla Thunderbird. I've had a little play with it and imported my Outlook Express Address Book into it to test "autocomplete"....and it works!

I imagine any Mac user reading this would be laughing her head off.

Colin

PS Anyone for Lotus Notes?

Charity catch-up

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

Well, "Hello, World!" as every computer programming textbook forces you to say. It's been a long absence, but rest assured that I have been nagging myself all these weeks to update the My Computer Tutor blog.

Let's say it again: what's the point of a blog if you don't keep on blogging?

First, I must catch up with my charities. It's now the end of June and I still need to do May's charity. I met my brother-in-law in May and his treatment from the Royal Marsden is now every 4 months rather than every 6 weeks, so that's cause for celebration and I'm making The Royal Marsden Cancer Campaign my May charity. They were my birthday charity last year - but I probably will repeat "my charities" as circumstances arise.

Two sad pieces of news:

• A lady who had three lessons with me earlier this year was postponing any more until after she'd had heart surgery. I heard a couple of weeks back that she didn't survive the operation.






• A lady whom I helped two years ago to produce labels and invitations for her 70th birthday party has recently developed motor neurone disease. 'Developed' isn't really the right word....

Diana is now being cared for in our local hospice. It's frightening to think how quickly MND can strike, and The Motor Neurone Disease Association is my June charity.

Now...how about this?

I have my July charity all sorted! I was bounced up to last week by Rose...you know, one of those bouncy young people who ambush you in town by smiling at you and waving at you and....well, just bouncing around!

The newspapers refer to them as "Chuggers" - charity muggers - but that's a bit unkind. After all, you can always ignore them...even if they start dancing like the young man in the picture. But I didn't ignore Rose. Her piercings couldn't be ignored for one thing, and for another these people always seem to catch me on the way to the bank!

But I had my patter ready too. So I quickly promised Rose that her Amnesty International would be my July charity and she'd get a mention on the blog - and to make up for all my tardiness in posting blogs and donations - and because I can't think of any reason to put it off - I won't wait for Friday but I'll do it NOW!

Colin

The Web's Wonders

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

It's half-term, which means that I have the week off from singing and don't have to keep looking at my watch as 5 o'clock approaches. It also gives me the opportunity to do the family visits, so I went way down South to see my mother, sister and brother-in-law.

I've given up trying to persuade mother to get a computer, but I can usually rely on my sister and her husband to buttonhole me about their website. This time, they were worried that they had slipped down the Google rankings, and could I do something about it.

Now I'm not an expert on Search Engine Optimization or SEO, but some people run businesses totally devoted to it, and you can buy some very fat books on the subject too. It's a game between all the websites out there and the search engines like Google and Yahoo! The search engine computers "crawl" the websites, inspecting and assessing them and awarding points. What do points mean?

The more the "web-crawlers", "spiders" or "bots" like your website, the higher up the search-engine rankings it will appear in response to the keywords entered by the surfing user, like you or me. (Do we still say "surfing" or am I old-fashioned?)

But what do the bots like? The answer to that question is constantly changing, because the bots want to keep the web-designers guessing. It reminds me of biology and evolution studies I did some years ago, when someone came up with "The Red Queen's Hypothesis". This is taken from "Alice Through The Looking-Glass" in which Alice meets The Red Queen, who tells her that "you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place". There is a continual "arms race" among organisms so that an equilibrium is maintained. Well, it's the same with websites - they have to be constantly 'tweaked' to keep up with the inspection of the search engines.

• Each of your web pages should have a title. The title is what appears on the 'tab' at the top of the webpage. This title should be relevant to the content of that page. I know that sounds obvious...but you'd be amazed how many times you can find a webpage with the title 'Untitled' because it started life as a Notepad and the designer didn't bother to give it a meaningful name.


• You used to be able to stuff 'keywords' into a list in the metadata of the HTML markup, but this was seriously abused and the bots now don't like it. It's much better to include 'keywords' - the words that you think will be searched for - as part of the content of the page. Incorporate them into the sentences you are writing.


• The bots like well-designed webpages. Good design has been a matter of much debate over the years but some guidelines are now established by the World-Wide Web Consortium, commonly known as W3C. The main principle is that of separation of content and styling. You should have the bare HTML content or 'markup' in the body of the script, and its styling kept entirely separate in a 'stylesheet'. There are numerous books written about this - make sure you find a book that goes into HTML and CSS (Cascading StyleSheets)

You may have noticed the Recommended Links over there on the right. If you're thinking of trying web-design, I really do recommend HTML Dog. I've no idea what the dog has to do with it, but the site has some excellent no-nonsense advice and examples. And WebPagesThatSuck is just what it says - a collection of the worst websites known to Man - but the editor does pass some very helpful comments about why the sites are so bad and so you learn what to avoid!

Colin