Table of Contents
Although this book focuses on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS as the three most popular and effective tools for publishing on the Internet, there are others. This chapter explores some of them with examples and pointers about where you can learn more about them.
Imagine a programming language written specifically for dealing with text. Instead of being designed for square roots and numerical calculations, this language is designed for finding and manipulating text in large or small files. Now suppose that it's free and available in UNIX, DOS, and Macintosh versions. And further suppose that it is so trustworthy that UNIX administrators often use it for system administration tasks. This is Perl, and you or your Web administrator should become familiar with it, because much of what you'll be dealing with is text--transforming it, rearranging it, and filtering it. The more you can do this automatically, the more time you'll have to call your own.
Many utilities for Web and Gopher servers are written in Perl. Perl has some features that are particularly useful for manipulating text. One such feature is the associative array, which allows you to store data in an array (sort of a table) subscripted (referenced or addressed) by text instead of just by number. With most programming languages programmers have to keep track of text in some numerical way, such as State(50)='Alaska'. But with Perl you can use the text itself as a locator inside your array. For example, you might make an array of countries in which the two-character country code is stored under the full country name $country{'Singapore'} = 'SG' or $country{'BR'} = 'Brazil'. Your UNIX administrator will find other uses for Perl. <http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/Web/People/rgs/perl.html>
Python is an extremely powerful programming language that has text-handling features and is object oriented. It interfaces to many systems and is extendable with C or C++. Python runs on UNIX, Macintoshes, OS/2, DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows NT, so Python programs are portable between all these platforms. Best of all, although it is copyrighted, it is free and may be distributed, even for commercial use. The commercial Internet indexing service InfoSeek claims that it set up shop quickly because of the power of Python. Check it out at <http://www.python.org/>.
Glimpse, which stands for Global Implicit Search, is a powerful tool for indexing the contents of a file system. Some people have started using it as an alternative to WAIS because of problems and bugs in the freeWAIS version. Glimpse was originally designed to index everything in a directory. It can create three sizes of indexes; the biggest index is the fastest at finding what you are searching for. Glimpse supports Boolean searches and has a feature called approximate matching, which allows it to find misspelled words. <http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu:1994/>
Harvest is a different approach to collecting, organizing, searching, and replicating relevant information across the Internet. Harvest can be tailored to digest information in many different formats and to offer custom search services. Harvest makes efficient use of network traffic, remote servers, and disk space. Harvest was developed by the Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery (IRTF-RD) in a project funded by ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the founder of the Internet). <http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu/>
Harvest may have solved three primary problems of Internet publishing:
In the bargain Harvest's developers created an extremely powerful set of tools that are available for commercial licensing or free educational and government use. Check out their link, if only to see their example sites, like the searchable index of AT&T's 800 numbers.
FTP daemons (daemons are programs that run by themselves) are an easy way to make files available publicly. Recall from Chapter 1 that Internet publishing began with FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Well, it's still around, and although it's not as friendly or easy to use as Gopher, WWW, and WAIS, it does work. You might choose to run an FTP daemon when you know that your users will have no trouble using FTP and you don't want to bother with anything extra. FTP daemons wait for FTP requests to come in and then service them. FTP is available as part of the UNIX system. For Windows, Macintosh, and mainframes you'll have to run special software--consult your network administrator.
Finger is a UNIX utility that was designed to give current information about a particular person, usually whether they are currently logged in, how they spell their names, and the like. A UNIX account holder can also put information into two files, .plan and .project, which will be displayed with their login information when they are fingered (queried with the Finger program).
One creative idea was to use this utility to quickly make available simple company sales or contact information. Just create a pseudo UNIX account name, such as sales or products, and put the appropriate company marketing information in the .plan and .project files for these accounts. When prospective customers give the command finger sales@company.name.com or finger products@company. name.com on their computer, they'll receive that company's sales or product information. It is also used to provide earthquake reports (finger quake@geophys.washington.edu). This system has the advantage of being easy for a UNIX system administrator to set up, and it can provide a small amount of information quickly.
CSO is a computer resident phone book, or a sort of White Pages for the e-mail and telephone directory system used at many universities. According to Ed Krol's Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, CSO (sometimes also called a QI server) got its name from the Computing Services Office of the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. What's important for us is that with a client program called PH, or with Gopher and from Web browsers, looking information up in these computerized White Pages is simple.
The server software for CSO can be found at <ftp://vixen.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/qi.tar.gz>. The client software is at <ftp://vixen.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/phitarigz/>. You may join the QI/PH mailing list by sending e-mail to majordomo@listserv.cso.uiuc.edu with subscribe info-ph in the body of the message.
Electronic mailing lists, commonly called list servers, are so common on the Internet that it's hard to think of them as a form of publishing, but they are. List servers are a means of distributing information to a controlled circulation list. Some list servers are open and anyone can join and send messages. Others are called moderated lists, and the moderator edits the contributions for what is appropriate and what is not. Finally, some list servers are one-way and consist entirely of announcements from a central source with no mechanism for sending replies or comments. People subscribe to such a list to get the most current information from that source. The three types of list servers are
Although most of the thousands of list servers are free, at least one group has figured out how to make money publishing this way. WEBster publishes two electronic magazines on the Internet entirely via e-mail. WEBster began with the Journal of High Performance Computing and, as it developed its customized list server software, added WEBster and is considering offering others.
You can find out more about WEBster by sending e-mail to sos@webster.tgc.com. If you prefer to correspond with a living breathing WEBster staffer, send e-mail to human@webster.tgc.com or call 800-795-4472 (from outside the U.S., call 619-625-0070). <http://www.tgc.com/webster.html>
MUD stands for (take your pick) Multiple-User Dimension, Dungeon, or Dialogue. MOO stands for Multiple-user system, Object Oriented. Basically, both are computer programs (usually text based) that you can login to and explore. Each user takes the role of a character that can walk around, chat with other characters, explore monster-infested areas, solve puzzles, and even create rooms, descriptions, and items. Some are similar to the Dungeons and Dragons game, others are more social groups. Basically, they allow a group of people to join together to play in (and create) the illusion of an artificial world. With MOO you can create objects that other players/users can build on or use.
If you think these are just games and have nothing to do with Internet publishing, here are some possibilities to make you change your mind:
MOO and MUD are not typical Internet publishing tools, but they have some interesting capabilities for those who want to give their users an imaginative experience. John December, co-author of World Wide Web Unleashed, maintains an excellent online guide to Internet tools that contains this section on MUDs and MOOs:
<http://www.rpi.edu/Internet/Guides/decemj/itools/cmc-group-mu*.html>
Also check out Francis Litterio's Web site on MUDs and MOOs at <http://draco.centerline.com:8080/~franl/mud.html>.
The Institute for Information Processing and Computer-Supported New Media (IICM) at Graz University of Technology in Austria is developing Hyper-G to replace WWW. The Web and Hyper-G have some basic differences in philosophy, primarily that Hyper-G maintains the connection between the user and the server throughout the session. Although maintaining the connection imposes a greater load on the server, it allows the server to know who the user is and what he has been doing. When combined with several different layers of user access rights, Hyper-G could enable the server to interact with the user in a very different way than WWW servers can. Hyper-G also supports multilingual hypertext and compiles an ongoing context reference to keep users from getting lost. Free client (browser) programs are available for Windows and UNIX. A paper about using Hyper-G to publish on the Web was presented at the April 1995 World-Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt, Germany. <http://www.igd.fhg.de/www/www95/papers/105/hgw3.html>
For more information see <ftp://ftp.iicm.tu-graz.ac.at/pub/Hyper-G>, <http://hgiicm.tu-graz.ac.at>. To try it in plain terminal mode, telnet -l info info.tu-graz.ac.at or telnet info.tu-graz.ac.at and login as info.
HyperNews is a conferencing system that is a cross between WWW and Usenet News (although it doesn't rely on Usenet News) that lets people add comments or responses to items posted to a HyperNews Web server. The comments are stored hierarchically (with sections divided into subsections that are in turn divided into more subsections), and users can add new areas on their own. Unlike Usenet News, the postings don't disappear after a few days, so the record of discussions is more permanent.
You might find this a useful tool, particularly if you want to create a discussion group for a subject and make the feedback immediately available publicly. This might be useful in an educational situation in which you want students to learn from each other's questions. <http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/hypernews.html>
Internet Relay Chat is a sort of free party line on the Internet for fast typists. It was designed in Finland as a replacement for the UNIX talk command, but it has since grown into an enormously popular (and addictive) Internet resource. IRC is divided into hundreds of channels on all sorts of subjects in many different languages (primarily English but also German, Japanese, French, Finnish, Spanish, and others). Because IRC is an Internet protocol, it is available wherever the Internet is, which means more than 50 countries. Users connect to IRC servers using free IRC client software and check the list of channels for one that looks interesting. Once users enter a channel, whatever they type appears immediately on the screens of all others connected to that channel. Such immediate interaction without regard for geography proved its utility during the Persian Gulf War and the attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin when live reports came from IRC in those areas out to the rest of the world. <http://www.rpi.edu/Internet/Guides/decemj/itools/cmc-mass-irc.html>
WebChat is a realtime, fully multimedia chatting application that is available as an add-on for most WWW servers. It is available in free and commercial versions from <http://www.irsociety.com/webchat.html>. What's nice is that it doesn't require special software on the browser side. It should work with any standard browser.
This might be something you could use to schedule an online discussion with your company president or just for discussions on topics related to your Web site.
Gopher, WWW, and WAIS together provide a wide variety of Internet publishing capabilities (especially when enhanced with CGI scripts). You may want to use other tools as well, both to enhance your existing servers and to provide different services.
Perl and Python are computer languages that are available on many types of computers for free. They are particularly useful in Internet publishing because of their text-handling capabilities.
Glimpse is an indexing alternative to WAIS (see Chapter 5 for other indexing alternatives), and Harvest tackles the whole problem of collecting, organizing, searching, and replicating information across the Internet. It can solve problems you didn't know you had, such as conserving network traffic and speeding up delivery by replicating portions of your data on various servers automatically.
FTP daemons and Finger are traditional UNIX services (available on other platforms as well) that can be useful in Internet publishing. List servers (electronic mailing lists) are another old standby that are useful for widening your audience because may people find that e-mail is easier to get than full Internet access.
MUDs and MOOs are multiple user systems that permit many people to build a "virtual world" together. Don't knock them unless you've tried them. Because of their unique capabilities they may provide exactly the kind of interactive experience that you want to add to your site.
Hyper-G may be the replacement for WWW because it maintains the connection between the user and the server and has several different layers of user access rights. It also supports multilingual hypertext and helps users keep track of where they are in their online travels.
HyperNews, Internet Relay Chat, and WebChat provide an interactive set of tools. You may want to use them to have online discussions with your site users. Kaleidospace, profiled in Chapter 10, uses WebChat for scheduled chats with its artist in residence.
As you can see, some creative software is already available, and more is being developed. It will behoove you to stay abreast of what's being developed on the Internet and how it might complement what you're doing.