Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this month’s readers’ queries.
Q Can you tell me something about this site FindTheDirt.com? They sent me an email saying that some of their members were trying to find out some information about me. It all sounded a little sinister. Can you enlighten me?
A Yes, it’s nothing to worry about. I’ve had a lot of these things before, and they’re a variation on a basic scam theme. Essentially what happens is that you get sent an email such as you describe and if you visit the site you’re told that in order to view the request, or the information about you it’s necessary to register. This is course is not free, and when you have paid over the cash you find that there’s no information about you (or very basic, such as your email address) and nothing else. I’d ignore it if I were you.
Q Is there an easy way (any way?) of finding out how many pages/screens there are on an individual website?
A Yes, it’s very straightforward in fact. Just go to a search engine such as Google and do a search for site: www.yoursite.com and you’ll see how many pages the search engine has indexed. I should however point out that it’s not going to be entirely accurate, since the site author may have hidden pages behind a password, or in a database for example. However, it should be a reasonable indication of the size of the site.
Q Can you recommend a search engine that will do truncation searches?
A Exalead (http://beta.exalead.com/search) allows you to run a truncation search using the asterisk.
Q You know those pictures that are made up from hundreds of little ones? Is there any software on the web that could create them for me?
A I think you’re referring to mosaics. Yes there is, and as a result of finding it for you I’ve tried it out myself and it’s very clever indeed. You can find the program at www.ezmosaic.com/ and download a trial version. Simply provide it with the picture that you want as the mosaic and then give it a list of other pictures and it does all the work for you. Very impressive indeed.
Site of the month
My site of the month is a game. I’m not usually very interested in games, but if you’ve ever played Pictionary, where you have to draw a word for others to guess, you’ll like this one. It’s called Isketch (www.isketch.net/). It’s free to play and might be of interest to teachers who wanted to improve their charges’ vocabulary, since you can set up your own teams of players by invitation.
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. New: 3rd edn of The Advanced Internet Searcher’s Handbook is now available! If you have any questions about the internet send an email to philb@philb.com with the subject header ‘column query’.
Updated: 03 March 2008