Making Friends vs. Friending Someone

God bless Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb . . . . I mean, the way they coin phrases like "you friended me yesterday" just makes me smile. Now, those are two ladies who have embraced technology! So, when you called and asked me "what did Hoda mean by 'friending' someone on Facebook" I grinned a little.

We're hearing a lot about Facebook in the press. It's a very cool Social Networking (an online, interactive community) destination that allows people to find and keep track of their friends.

Try setting yourself up! Go to facebook.com and sign up with their extremely simple form:

Next, add some friends (or "friend someone" as Hoda would say).

Here are the sections I find most useful on my homepage:

(personal info has been greyed out for privacy)

In later editions, we can go through how to look up other people or upload photos.

Tip of the Day:
You can use the search bar for more than finding your friends! Once you have added someone to your friend list, try typing their name into the search bar and see what happens!

Who Is Craig and Why Does He Have a List?

One of the better things to come out of the internet is the wealth of information one can find quickly and easily. A great example of this is classified listings. It used to be very costly for an individual to list their stuff (in technical internet speak) and difficult for individuals to find listings. Remember back when you were looking for houses to rent? You had to look in the newspaper or contact a property manager! How could you tell you were getting a good deal?


Enter Craig Newmark, an IT professional looking to start a list of things to do and see for his family and friends. Little did he know that his fun little project would almost undo an entire industry; newspaper classifieds have been made obsolete and, with more people getting their news online, so have newspapers. Nearly 15 years later, Craigslist.org has evolved into one of the most popular internet destinations. Let's take a look:

Step 1: Type "www.craigslist.org" into your address bar. Once the page loads, find your location. Perhaps this picture will help.

It will ask you to select your city next which is pretty self explanatory.




Step 2: Now you are in your local craigslist site. Take a look at the website address. See how it has distinguished itself from what you originally typed into the address bar?




Step 3: Browse the listings. The great thing about Craigslist is that it separates listings in a very logical, newspaperish way. So, you can look for housing or stuff that's for sale or jobs or services. By clicking on any of the categories, you can actually find the postings of people who are using craiglist to hock their wares!



Step 4: Find your listing. You can go about this in two ways, either browse or search. For instance, let's say you wanted to see how much people were asking for 6 bedroom houses in Boise, ID.


To Browse for Listings -- You would open your craigslist.org page and look for "real estate for sale", click that link:



On the next screen, you would refine your search (narrow the list of results) by selecting the number of bedrooms the houses have to have:

The resulting list is all houses in or near Boise that have 6 or more bedrooms.



To Search for Listings -- You would open your craigslist.org page, type a search into the search box and select "For Sale" from the type of search.


You will see that I obviously typed in the wrong thing:
*A good rule of thumb for internet searching is to type in keywords you might look for in a card catalogue if you were searching at a library.




Tip of the Day:
Craiglist is available in cities all over the world! That means that you can find classified listings for cities you've never even visited. Just for fun, why don't you try finding education jobs in the South San Francisco Bay Area! Hint: If you have browsed to education jobs, you can click on the "South Bay" tab at the top of the page to narrow your results. It will look like this:

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.)

Hey Nana! Let's Get Started!

So, we were talking last night about blogs and, while I know you're interested, I could tell you didn't really understand why one might use blogs for something other than cyberstalking. (Cyberstalking, in case you don't know, is the use of the internet to stalk someone. According to wikipedia, it's a way to harass someone; I just mean keeping track of the goings on of friends and family without necessarily talking/emailing/seeing them.) So here goes. . .

Every once in a while, if I think you might be interested in something I'm doing online or with technology, I will document it here. This blog* will keep track of what I've done in reverse chronological order so you will see the most recent posting first. And, in future postings, I will show you how to use some of the navigational tools on this and any blog you find online.

I hope you find this fun and interesting Mom! And, if you ever stumble across something you want some help using or finding, let me know!

*Did you know that the word "blog" is short for the term Web Log?

Tip of the Day:

You want a quick and easy way to find the definition of a term? (Hint: Your HUGE unabridged dictionary may not be the right answer.) Simply type in the word "define" before the word you're looking for in your favorite search engine.

The first result in your search will be a definition! Here's some more information on search shortcuts:

Yahoo! Search Shortcuts (my favorite)

Google Search Features