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Secrets of Internet Explorer

a. Favorites

Favorites (IE) and bookmarks (NS) are the same name for a similar idea. This is a place where you can store links to all of your favorite websites.

To add a Favorite, simply go to the web site you enjoy. Once you are on the page you want to save, pick Favorites-Add to Favorites. The name of the favorite is the title of the web page by default. Change it to something more intuitive if you want!

You can also organize your favorites. Use Organize Favorites under the Favorites menu to arrange your favorites in folders. This prevents things from getting too long. You can also delete all of the annoying default favorites that browsers include in this way.

b. Send a link to a friend

If you really like a web page and want to share it with a friend by email, you can do it in one of two ways.

The "low-tech" way is to highlight the complete URL in the "address" field on the browser, then pick Edit-Copy from the menu. Paste the URL into your email program and send it to your friend.

The "high-tech" way uses the Mail button on the IE toolbar. Single-click on the button, then choose "Send a Link". If your browser is set up to accomodate email, you can then send the link to a friend. Caution: this doesn't work on some computers!

c. Internet Options box

Go to Tools-Internet Options. This is a very powerful dialog box which allows you to do many things.

On the "General" tab, you can set your home page to the current page you're on (press the Use Current button), to IE's "default" home page, MSN (press the Use Default button), or to a blank page (my personal favorite, press the Use Blank button).

Also on the "General" tab, you can look at your Temporary Internet Files. These are web pictures, ads, cookies, sounds, movies, plugins, icons, and everything else you view on the web. This is because every time you view a web page, a temporary copy of all of the files associated with the web page is downloaded to your computer. You can clear these if they get too large.

You can also clear your history from the General tab. This will delete a listing of all of the URL's you've visited recently. You can also set up an automatic removal of URL's by setting the amount of time pages stay in history.

On the "Advanced" tab, you can do many interesting and useful things:

• Under "Browsing" subheading -- turn off the "go" button on the toolbar; remove the shortcut to IE on the desktop;
• Under "Multimedia" -- turn off all sound to any web page all the time! (I love this one!)

d. Saving an image from the Web to your computer

You can save images off the web and use them in teaching. Do the following:

• Right-click on the image you want to save. Choose "Save Picture As..." from the menu.
• Browse to the location where you want the picture saved.
• Note that there are some great resources for pictures, including:
  • images.google.com
  • Corbis
  • Photodisc -- if you register for the site, you can get non-watermarked sample images to use

Note: There may be copyright issues with using images from the web. We'll talk about this in class as well.

e. Plug-ins

A plug-in is a little program that works with your browser to display special content. This would include music (via RealPlayer, Windows Media, others), video (QuickTime, RealPlayer), Flash movies, and more. Occasionally you will see a message asking if you want to download a plug-in for your computer so that you can view the special content.

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