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Check out Google Calendar for a great, free online calendar, that you can share. You can add such 'public' calendars
as a moon phase calendar, various country's holidays (I use the US holidays) and also add this
to add some pagan holidays to your Google Calendar. Go to Google Products to see a
lot of what Google provides, for free. Google reminds me a lot of how the World Wide Web was in the 90's, before it
became so commercialized, and before the dot.com bust.
for computer health on MS Windows based machines.
Learning enough HTML to write a site is not too difficult. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is a set of text based markup tags that instruct a browser (Firefox, Netscape, IE, Operah, etc) how to display the text, graphics, and other media on a website. While all you need for a basic site are less than a dozen HTML tags, writing up a good site takes time and experience. Yes, there are many website editors that create the HTML for you, but these always write very hard to edit HTML (browsers read it fine, it's just a pain to make sense of if you're not a computer program) and I like to know how the hell my website works. I write all my sites by hand, with an occasional cut & paste of more complicated javascript or perl.
To find a huge selection of new and used books on computer/cyber stuff, see Powell's Books.
If you'd like to see the HTML source for any page you see online, go to the View menu in your browser window, then hit "source" or "page source" and you'll see what your browser sees. For browsing the Web, I use Firefox. Pages load faster and a feature Firefox has that I just love is it's ability to open web pages in 'tabs' across the top of the Firefox window. I have a set of 15 web pages I start everyday with (Yahoo, Gmail, Craigslist, Google and a few others) and I have all those sites open with only 1 footprint in the taskbar down below. There are some obnoxious sites that only work with IE, and Firefox has a plug-in that makes those sites 'think' Firefox is IE. It even works on the Microsoft update site. I urge you to give it a try (you can copy all your IE favorites and such over to Firefox at setup) and see what you think!
For my website hosting (where this site is stored on the Internet) I use 1 & 1. You can see their banner at the top of this page. I pay a mere $3.49 a month (paid for in 6 month packages - $20.94 twice a year) for 2 domains (the domain name registration is included with the hosting price). Domain names on their own (without a hosting plan) start at $5.99 a year. If you want a good host or to get a web address/domain name of your own, check them out. Access them through my site, if you would. That gives me some litte bit of something. Not a lot for 1, but heck, if I get a few dozen, it'll add up in time.
Here is a fun, freeware program that gives you a moon icon in your system tray. It shows the phase the moon is in now, as well as an icon that shows what astrological sign it is currently in. Lunabar It comes to you as a 4mb zipped file.
If you're a gay man or a lesbian (or bisexual or whatever) and want to keep your money "in the family" you can go with Gay Web Hosts, who are a small, personal company based in California and run by 3 marvelous guys (no, I've never met them - we've just traded emails a few times).
If you'd like to learn some HTML yourself (it's really not hard) check out
e-learningcenter or
W3C's Guide to HTML or pagetutor and you can
quickly search up a mess of other sites for learning html or anything else you can possibly think of at the best search
engine there ever has been: 
All you need to know is about a
dozen HTML tags and you can write up a cool website. There can be problems as different browsers
(Netscape,
Mozilla,
Opera,
Amaya
and others). may
display a page in different ways. They should all follow the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) but some companies, like Microsoft, go off on their own tangents to make their browsers
support features the W3C has not reviewed and approved.
Ever since Microsoft drove the then-leading web browser Netscape into the motherly embrace of AOL, they've been very bold
at thumbing their noses at the W3C.
Once you have an online host for your HTML files (that's what a webpage is - essentially just a single or collection of HTML files) you need an FTP (file transfer protocol) program to send your HTML files to your host. A good, free one I use is ACE FTP. ACE FTP is made by Visicom Media, and you can get their basic FTP program for free, or pay for their PRO version. I haven't seen yet why I need their PRO version. Perhaps in time I will.
For a little cyberfun and to sink even deeper into your own personal
geekiness ~ Slashdot ~ you can stay up to date on some of the latest news for nerds.
And find low price stuff @ HUGE BLOWOUT on Electronics with savings up to 70%!!
Here are some sites that give free services, advice, graphics, etc. for building websites:
Free Website Templates A template is a ready-made design you can adapt to your needs
Web Spawner A Fast, Easy, Free way to create web pages
Netfirms A low cost hosting service. (though not as low as Peoplehost) They offer domain names too.
Animation-Station Animations, Backgrounds & Graphics for the Web
Soft 3Z Free Backgrounds
Template Monster The best templates on the web, apparently
Email is one of the most widely used cyber technologies in the world. There are many free web based email companies that support themselves through advertising. The world leading search engine Google has come out with Gmail, which now has 2.77 gigabytes of storage and is increasing all the time. Along with many other groovy features.
Yahoo is a leading web portal who offers email, and they have enlarged their free email accounts to 100MB, and if you pay them $20 a year, you get 2 Gigabytes of storage for your email. That is what I use and frankly I can't imagine ever using TWO GIGABYTES of email space!
I'm sure Microsoft has enlarged their Hotmail service as well, but I found my Hotmail address got so much crummy SPAM, I gave
it up years ago. Plus, I just didn't like running everything in my life on Microsoft.
To 'surf' on the web, I started out using dial-up way back in 1990, when I started with computers, and used that for years. My first modem was a 14.4 modem, and I 'upgraded' to a 28.8 speed modem as soon as I could (28,800 bytes per second) (that is 28.8 kilobytes too, not even megabytes), and back in 1990-1991, that was fast! Then it sped up to 33.3 and then 56.6
Now I've used DSL or cable to connect to the Web for a few years, and when I have to go back to using a dial-up modem, it is
PAINFULLY slow. If you use dial-up, I really recommend getting DSL or a cable connection. Using any kind of broadband makes
the Internet such a different experience. It is worth the extra $10 to $30 a month. You save yourself so much time and
frustration online! In my experience, DSL is fast enough to show movies and such online, and I do not need to up or download
tetrabytes of data. I can download a 56 MB Microsoft 'update' in a few minutes - that's just fine. I do not need to pay
twice as much for cable to save a few seconds of download time. My new Earthlink DSL goes 400MB/sec, much faster than the 100MB/sec
I had with Verizon, and for almost half the price too!
About DSL though - it can be great, and it can be not. Great. You need to physically be within 4 miles of the phone company's
"central office" (an electronic nerve center that all phone lines in the area come out of). Farther than that and the DSL signal
degrades too much.
Check out Covad or Yahoo for local DSL or RCN for cable or Broadband Buyer to see a few services. Shop around. DSL should cost $30 a month or less and there ought to be a cable deal for $40 a month or so. Trust me, if you're just getting a personal, residential account, you do not need a pricey service you pay more than $50 a month for, tops. Unless you must be able to upload/download 10+ megabytes a second. If that's the case, you're in business.
is another cool portal site. Very simple. It loads fast, and has hundreds of
links to news sites, multiple search engines, shopping sites for a myriad of items, finance/money sites, travel sites,
entertainment sites, research sites, "fun & games" sites, domestic sites, communication sites (online cards, chat, forums,
personals),and tech support for computers, html/webmasters, games and program downloads. Check it out.
The Grandpapa of online auctions where you can find almost anything at all on sale.
This is a site where I get lots of excellent computer goods:
You can search for whatever computer and computer related electronics you can think of:
Search
at TigerDirect.com:
To just go to Tiger Direct in a whole new window:
Here is another place I have found good prices on computers, computer components, scanners, digital cameras and the like:
Another online computer site with an array of items and good prices:
Newegg is where I got an AMD Athlon 2600 CPU to upgrade my old system for $90 in 2003. I had an AMD Duron 750 and
sometimes (especially when I was running 3 or more application at the same time) I really wanted a more powerful 'brain' for
my computer. Now, July 2007, I've bought an AMD X2 6000 and some other great parts to make a fabulous computer, all for under $600.
One of the nicest things about computer technology is it just keeps getting better and cheaper all the time.
My first computer (in 1992) had a 386 Intel CPU with 24mb of RAM, and it cost almost $1000. I can build a totally dreamy
computer for far less than $1000 now. One that just blows the socks off my old 386.
