In addition to getting information off the Internet, you may want to put out some information for others to look at. Although this used to be a task outside the means of the average Internet user, times have changed.
Nowadays, many Internet access providers allow you to make information available through FTP, Gopher, and the WWW for a reasonable fee. If you do not want to go through the trouble yourself to make the information available, it is relatively easy to find a consultant who can do the work for you. This chapter is geared to those who want to do the work themselves.
People publishing information are faced with many choices. How do they pick the best services in which to publish their information?
In Part VI of this book, "Sharing Information," there are chapters on creating a Gopher, WWW, and FTP or Telnet server. This is not to say you do not have other choices. The following list briefly explains all the options and when you want to use each one.
- Anonymous FTP. If your Internet access site has an anonymous FTP server already installed and is willing to allow you to put your information on it, this is an easy way to make your information available. However, installing a new anonymous FTP server in a secure fashion is not easy. Also, your information may not be found as easily on an anonymous FTP site as it may be if it were stored in Gopher or the WWW.
- Telnet sites. You can also put your information on an existing Telnet site or create your own site. A major downside to this is that your information may not be easily found. The strength of newer systems such as Gopher and the WWW is that users have to know only one program to search thousands of sites; each Telnet site tends to have its own interface, which the user has to spend time learning to use.
- WAIS. WAIS is an excellent way to make databases of information and documents available. Installing the public domain software server can be tricky and the commercial version is relatively expensive. Once you have a server, however, adding another database is easy. With WAIS, however, end users cannot browse the information.
- Gopher. With Gopher, it is easy to add information; users find it just as easy to find information. Veronica and Jughead are well-established search engines. The downside is that Gopher is primarily a text-only system.
- WWW. The WWW is good for multimedia documents or documents that are interlinked with other documents. Documents to be put on the WWW must be converted into HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which at the present time is difficult to learn. Word processors and other software packages will start to support HTML in the near future. Another drawback is if the target audience has slow-speed connections to the Internet or older computers, WWW is too resource intensive for them to use. Over time, this will become less of a problem.
- Posting. Information can always be posted to Usenet news or on a mailing list. Posting is good for timely information; however, neither posting nor e-mail is acceptable for information of long-term value.
Always remember that sharing information is what makes the Internet the Internet. If you have something valuable to share, please do so.
Generally, any type of information can be published on the network. However, a few types of information should not be published. In the U.S., for example, child pornography is against the law and should not be made available on the Internet.
It is interesting to note that other types of pornography are tolerated. However, you can find them only on Usenet and not on any of the information servers. The reason for this is not purely moral: whenever a site tries to bring up pornographic pictures for anonymous FTP or Gopher, the computer or network becomes so overloaded with users attempting to download files that something eventually crashes.
Information providers must select a format in which to put their information. Information users must deal with the format and convert it into something they can use.
For documents without formatting, the format of choice on the Internet is a straight text file. If a document has special formatting, but will not be edited by the user, PostScript is an excellent choice. Most users can print or view PostScript. Unfortunately, documents with special formatting that must be edited by the user are tricky. The only thing to do is to pick a popular word processing format such as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect.
For picture graphics, the most popular formats on the Internet are GIF and JPEG. Some formats popular on microcomputers (such as PCX) are almost never on the Internet. For movies, MPEG is the most common Internet format, although QuickTime is seen quite a bit, too.
It is highly recommended that you use data compression programs common to the platform used by the target audience. For PCs, use ZIP, ZOO, or ARC. For Macintosh, use StuffIt or BinHex. For UNIX, use compress or gzip. When information is to be used by multiple platforms, it is probably best to use one of the PC formats or the UNIX gzip program.
Not only is providing information important, providing it in a useful format is of concern, too. A poorly organized site is one that people remember and dread using. The good practices to follow are listed here:
- Think about the organization. The worst thing you can do is to throw information into your server without giving it any thought. Over time, your site will grow; if you haven't planned for that, you will have a mess on your hands. Remember that users do not like to waste time searching for information and may decide that your site is not useful if it is poorly organized.
- Make the information pretty. If your information is in Gopher, make sure that there are definitely less than 80 characters per line, but preferably less than 70. For the Web, refer to Chapter 36, "Creating Web Pages with HTML."
- Keep information as concise as possible. Although there are times when information should be kept at a maximum for archival or research reasons, most of the time, users want only the minimum information to answer their questions. For users with slow modems, this rule is doubly important because large files take sufficiently longer to download.
- Always keep your audience in mind. If you are trying to sell cars over the Internet, the average buyer couldn't care less about the mechanics involved in making the car run. So don't highlight it on your site (although it would be fine to have that information off in a corner for those who do care).
- Avoid moving information frequently. If you have good information available, people will build links and bookmarks to it. If you move it frequently, people will have trouble finding the information. However, there comes a time on most sites when reorganization and moving items must happen. In those cases, try to announce the changes—especially to people whom you know point to your site. Some Web servers even have ways to make the change invisible.
Never use the actual host name. For your information services, always use a DNS alias instead of the real host name of the computer. You may want to move the information service to another computer; if you have an alias, people can automatically follow the change. For example, at the University of Texas at Dallas, the following aliases are in place:
FTP site: ftp.utdallas.edu
Gopher server: gopher.utdallas.edu
Web server www.utdallas.edu
The aliases ftp, gopher, and www are the standard addresses used for those information services across the Internet.
- Always have a contact address. Always make sure that, somewhere on your information server, you leave a note with a contact e-mail address for the server administrator. Users often notice problems with your server or with dead links long before you do.
- Make mirror sites. If your service is really popular and overloaded, find a mirror site somewhere else on the Internet. Often, it is a good idea to place mirrors on other continents to reduce the traffic load on busy intercontinental Internet links.
- Update obsolete information. Always remember that information must be updated. Because very few pieces of information remain the same until the end of time, plan to spend time updating old information periodically.