Stamp Column Archives

Glassine Surfer August 2004

Now, back to the page in your browser. Click on "1847 USA" and in the task bar it'll tell you that the address is "http://1847usa.com/". Click the link and wait for the page to load.

The motto of the site is "Knowledge is Power," and it's a good website to save. It has just about every US stamp image and the essentials. You can save it to your Link bar or to your "Favorites" menu.

Favorites

To save it to the Favorites, you can right-click on the webpage, then select "Add to Favorites..." In the dialog box that opens. The page title will be shown, which you can edit if you like, along with a list of folders under Favorites. If you opened Links bar in your browser it will be listed here. Select and highlight your choice and click OK. You can check it by clicking Favorites on the top bar. You can also click and drag it to your Link bar if you want.

This process of saving websites is usually called "bookmarking," as it started in Netscape and they term saved links Bookmarks. It's one of the repetitive tasks people do online to get them back where they want to be.

The Web is something of a tangle of links and, after surfing for 20 minutes from page to page and site to site, it's easy to lose the page you really liked. There's two ways to find your way back.

The first is to bookmark just about everything that suits you at first glance, but that's tedious and ultimately self-defeating. All you have is lots of so-so sources and one or two good ones. The easier thing is to open up your History list by clicking the blue and greenish circle on your Standard Button toolbar.

History

A separate window pane will open on the left side of the browser and show the webpages that you have recently visited. To get to the page you wanted, click on "View" in the History toolbar and select "By Order Visited Today." Then just look back at the pages you've just been to.

This is also an easy way to dredge up the webpage you were looking at last Friday that you need again on Monday. If you select "By Date" you'll see the sites by the day you were there, going back as far as you selected in "Tools" - Internet Options - History.

Highlight and Save Snippets

As you surf, you're going to find passages of text on a webpage that you'd like to quite in email to a friend, or save on your PC for comparisons. There's a way to simply save snippets of text that's fairly easy.

Drag your cursor to the beginning of the snippet of text. Your arrow will change to an I-beam when it's on text. Then, hold down your left mouse button and drag the mouse while holding the button to the end of the snippet. That text will then be highlighted in a different color. You can let go of the button, but don't click anything else just yet.

With your snippet highlighted press CTL+C on your keyboard. This saves a copy of the snippet to your memory, and now you can open up the text or word processing program you like to use. Once you've opened a file for the snippet in you text program, you can simply click CTL-V, which will paste it into that file.

You should know that sometimes the saved snippet will not appear arranged exactly as it was in the webpage because you're only copying text and not the html text formatting code that is often used to layout text and tables on the web.

If you need to save an illustration to your PC, that's generally as simple as putting your cursor on the image and clicking the right mouse button. You can then select "Save Picture As..." and save it to your desktop or folder on your PC.

Set Your Homepage

Everytime you open your browser the first page it loads up is the "homepage." It's also the destination of the Home icon on the Standard Buttons toolbar.

To do it, or to change it, all you have to do is surf to the page you want as your homepage, whatever that may be. While that page is sitting in your browser, click Tools - Internet Options and under "Home page" click "Current."

It's a good idea to select a homepage for your browser that's useful to you. Generally speaking, you can choose any webpage or file on your PC as a homepage, even a picture, though that might not get you anywhere on the Web.