How Did You Find That Restaurant?

That's an easy one . . . the best place to go for recommendations on local businesses is a social forum called Yelp.com.  Let's back up a little bit . . . remember last time we talked about Social Networking?  The founders of Yelp decided to harness the power of lots and lots of people to build a robust recommendation engine.  By combining local listings with social networking (a network of people writing reviews about those listings).  The result is a really powerful tool, especially when you're looking for a great place to eat.  What I love most is the filtering capability of this tool.  You can limit what you see by price, type of food, hours of operation, etc.:

Try it out!  Search for anything and make sure to enter in your address to make the filters work better.  And, if you are feeling adventuresome, take Yelp's advice!


Tip of the Day:
The best part of Yelp is the flexibility.  Take a look at the forums where users discuss various topics (for instance, there's one for New York City discussing the best place to go for pizza . . . really awesome to see how users rate spots and their attributes).  Type a topic into the search and look below the listings at the lists and topics.

 

How Do I Share This With My Friends?

So you had a chance to take a look at our new blog and you want to share it with your friends....

Great! Let's get started with some fundamentals! Think of it as the A-B-C's of internet browsing.
A) Your browser is the program you use to access the internet.

If you're using an Apple computer, then you are likely using Safari. There is a really good article on the Wellesley College Computing site on tips for getting started with Safari.

If you're using a PC (a non-Apple computer), you are probably using either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Again, the Wellesley College Computing site did a much better job than I would explaining how to get started with IE or Firefox.

B) The Website Address you are viewing can be found in tthe toolbar of the browser. The what of the hmmmmmmmm? The toolbar of the browser (see A above).

In the address bar, you can type the website address you wish to visit. Website addresses generally start with "http://" but most newer browsers will allow you to just type in everything that comes after. For instance, if you want to visit our blog, you can just type in "techtips4nana.blogspot.com". You will also hear people refer to the website address as a URL.

C) Browser Buttons allow you to easily use the browser to go back to previous pages you visited, stop the current page from loading, start back on your home page, record your favorite sites, etc.

Now that you have the basics down, let's figure out how to share the blog postings with your friends, here are three options:

1) Show them on your computer. If you add this site to your list of favorites, you can call up TechTips4Nana with just a couple of clicks.

2) Tell them the URL (address) of the blog: TechTips4Nana.blogspot.com

3)Click on the email icon at the bottom of each posting to send links to individual postings. Let's say you think Pat would love this introduction to browsing, you could simply click on the button that looks like an email, fill out the form, and she'll get an email telling her how to visit the blog. Simple right?

Tip of the Day:

Did you ever hear someone say "go to dub dub dub dot blah blah blah dot com"? The word "dub" is short for the letter W and "dot" is a way to describe the periods in a web address. Next time you are on a website that starts with "www", try typing in it's address without the "www". (For instance, Washington Mutual has a website at http://www.wamu.com/. Try typing "wamu.com" into the browser address bar, hit enter and see what happens.)