Lately I’ve been in a bit of rut. Every time I get a chance to goof off surfing the Web, I end up at the same sites, playing with the same links, staring at the same screens.
Sure, I know there’s so much more out there, but for whatever reason, that never occurs to me as I sit at the keyboard. So, when the topic of pimentos came up the other day, my mind turned to the Internet.
Let me explain before you call for the commitment papers or write me off as an obsessed Nethead — although I no doubt qualify.
It has to do with my determination to careen down links I’ve never seen, dive blindly into sites I know nothing about.
Call it my helpful hints to put zest back in your surfing. First, take inspiration from everything around you.
My flash on pimentos started when guests began discussing “What is a pimento?” This was not a crowd concerned with the weighty issues of our day. But it was obscure enough to make an interesting challenge.
As they continued onto other issues, I dashed off to the computer with a single mission: Find the answer as quickly as possible. I started with Web searching sites, such as Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) and then moved into the Electric Library reference site (http://www.elibrary.com).
Five minutes later, I had a dictionary definition of the pepper and, better yet, the text of a course lecture from Puerto Rico about the introduction of the pimento tree into the Caribbean.
Admittedly, by the time I returned no one cared about pimentos anymore. But it was exhilarating. I’d set out to find a fact on the Net and did so. The fact that it was so obscure made the victory all the sweeter.
My second tip is even easier: Mine the sites you find.
After one of TNT’s 900 showings of the Civil War TV movie “Andersonville,” I decided to check out the program’s Web site (http://www.turner.com/andersonville/). One of the options was a link to other Civil War sites. Twenty minutes and who knows how many clicks later, I was staring at an 1864 photo of Union prisoners.
The address was http://clio.nara.gov:70/I/inform/dc/audv is/still/civwar/civil072.jpg (it qualifies for my longest URL of the year competition), although I honestly don’t have a clue how I landed there. But it was a great photo and I wanted more.
I could have gone back to the site that led me to the picture and looked for more links. But instead, I took time to read the address of the picture I found.
All those slashes in addresses separate directories that are part of the Web site. In this case, they were all paths that led off from http://clio.nara.gov. (Ignore any :70 or :80 that you see; those are added by the computer to designate the port where you enter the site.)
So I went to that base address, which turns out to be the National Archives and Records Administration, home of all the nation’s valuable documents.
But I hadn’t found the link to Civil War photos. So I went back to my bookmark to start again.
This time, I just started by typing in the entire address, except for the last portion, then hitting enter to move to that part of the site. If it didn’t work, I’d delete another section and try again. Eventually I got to http://clio.nara.gov:70/I/inform/dc/audvis/still/, which had a link labeled Pictures of the Civil War.
One click there and I was in vintage photo nirvana. There were 200 brief descriptions of rare photos from the Civil War and a link to each.
Every image was worth the wait, and at more than 300K each, these were very slow images to download.
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Todd Copilevitz can be sent e-mail at toddcop@onramp.net or U.S. mail at P.O. Box 655237, Dallas, Texas 75265.
