This article is from the May 2004 issue of Update.
After diligent searching by myself and colleagues, we believe there is a jump straight from the likes of AskJeeves for Kids and Yahooligans straight to Google and the world of ‘adult’ search engines, but we would value any information that you are able to provide about this.
Coincidentally, I’ve just done some work in this area myself, and have come up with a few links to various search engines designed for children that you might like to take a look at. The article is called ‘Child safety on the internet’ (www.philb.com/childsafe.htm).
You might particularly want to look at: Student-friendly search tools (www.cssd.ab.ca/tech/search.htm), KillerInfo Kids sites (http://kids.killerinfo.com) and a list of children’s search engines from FaganFinder (www.faganfinder.com/kids/).
There’s also a new one at www.kids.us/ which I’ve not yet tried myself.
Do you know of a website that tests websites under different conditions?
There are a number of sites which can provide you with useful feedback about how your site/page will look in different situations.
These include:
www.delorie.com/web/wpbcv.html
http://watson.addy.com/
www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML/
http://validator.w3.org/
www.anybrowser.com/
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/
browser_chart/
www.netmechanic.com/browser-photo/tutorial.htm
Is there a way to find out the name of somebody who has been emailing me? And along with this, if this is a person who has several email identities, is there a way to trace him back to a master account name?
In order to do this, you need to look at the headers for the email(s) that you’ve been sent. What is particularly important is the ‘Received: from’ line, which will give you the IP address the email originated from. It’s possible to fake a lot of the email address, but very hard to do so with this section. If you’re getting lots of emails that appear to come from different places or accounts, but all the headers contain the same IP address, you’ll know that they’re all coming from the same place.
Once you know this, you can identify the Internet Service Provider, and you can then contact them regarding the emails. Energis (www.energis-squared.net/service/search.asp) provide a useful tool for checking this. If you’re getting Spam emails you can report them (and identify the originating source at Spamcop (www.spamcop.net).
Site of the month
As regular readers will know, I don’t usually suggest game sites for my site of the month, but this is one time I’ll make an exception. It’s called the ESP Game (www.espgame.org/), and it’s produced by Carnegie Mellon University.
Basically you play with someone else and are shown a series of graphics. You have to describe the graphic in a single word (there are often taboo words you’re not allowed to use), and you get points once you both identify the image with the same word.
The university is trying to label as many images on the internet as possible to make finding them easier, though I have some doubts as to how valuable this is in the long term. However, it’s a fun game, with a very useful concept behind it. It’s also very addictive!
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Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. Visit www.philb.com for free information on internet introductions, search engine articles, web design tips and a host of other free information. Recently published: Getting and Staying Noticed on the Web. New: visit Phil's Weblog (www.philb.com/blog/blogger.html)! If you have any questions about the internet send an email to philb@philb.com with the subject header 'column query'.