Jinfo: Newsletter No. 6

Newsletter No. 6

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                             Free Pint
          Helping you find quality information on the Web

ISSN 1460-7239                                     22 January 1998 #6
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                 Welcome to Free Pint Number Six!

We have another great issue for you packed with loads of practical
information on using the Web.  Free Pint now has over 3000
subscribers, with around 50 new subscribers every single day!

The theme for this issue is medical resources.  However, don't worry
if you are not interested in that subject as there's plenty of other
useful information.  The Tips & Techniques article explains how to
diagnose some of the common error messages you receive whilst using
the Web, and we then have a great Feature Article telling you how
and where to find the best Medical resources. This is followed by the
letters section, with feedback from subscribers, advertisers and
other supporters (including details of some prestigious awards we've
recently received).

Please feel free to pass Free Pint on to any of your colleagues,
students, friends or family. The newsletter can only remain free
with support from advertisers, and so please do get in touch with
them and tell them where you saw their advert.  Why not also send me
a letter and let me know if you find Free Pint useful or if there
is anything else you would like to see covered.

Read on and enjoy!

William Hann
Editor
w.hann@freepint.co.uk

PS: If you do not already receive Free Pint automatically, then
register to receive your free fortnightly copy at:

                   http://www.freepint.co.uk/

You may find it easier to read and use if you print it out first.

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                           IN THIS ISSUE

                        TIPS AND TECHNIQUES
                     "Diagnosing Web Problems"
                          by William Hann

                          FEATURE ARTICLE
             "The Best Medical Information on the Web"
                by Sue Welsh, OMNI Project Manager

                              LETTERS

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          TRAINING COURSES FOR THE INFORMATION PROFESSION
TFPL, the premier training organisation in business information,
presents the following courses:
   The Effective Web Page                            3 February
   Internet for Market Research                      12 February
   Intranet: Anarchy to Sanity                       17 February 
   Internet Tools for the Advanced Searcher          24 February
For further details please contact sarah.sheldon@tfpl.com, visit our
website at http://www.tfpl.com/ or telephone 0171 251 5522

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                        TIPS AND TECHNIQUES

                     "Diagnosing Web Problems"
                          by William Hann

What a week we've witnessed on the Web! The Free Pint Web site has
been overloaded with visitors, and so we are currently moving it
to a brand new upgraded Web server.  Also, InterlinkUK (advertisers
in the last issue) are having to move to a new server due to sheer
number of banners they are displaying across their network.

These problems, along with various others on the Web this week, have
meant that you are highly likely to have seen a number of error
messages whilst accessing our site and others.  Therefore, since we
have a great Feature Article this issue on Medical resources, I
thought I would write a brief guide on how to diagnose error messages
experienced whilst using the Web.


The Common Web Cold - "4" Errors
--------------------------------

I know hardly anything about medicine. However I do know that when
you get a cold it is inconvenient and very irritating.  Colds happen
on the Web too (and I'm not talking about viruses) - there are
various error messages you will receive regularly which interrupt
your daily dose of Web usage. Web colds can be quite simple to cure
if you understand their symptoms (or error messages).

The most common Web error message is "404 - Not Found".  This means
that the document you are trying to view cannot be located.  Make
sure that you've typed in the correct address (URL) and that you have
entered lower and upper case letters correctly. An example of the
importance of this can be seen when trying to access the excellent
"Internet Resources Newsletter" at Herriot Watt University. The URL
has a mixture of upper and lower case letters and is easy to
type incorrectly:

                http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/irn.html

If you still get the 404 error message and are sure you have typed
the URL correctly, then try shortening it in stages until you
actually see a valid page. For instance, if you got a 404 message
whilst trying to access the example page:

                http://www.example.com/issues/number1.htm

Then you could try removing "number1.htm". If you get the same
message again then try without "issues/".  You should at least be
able to get access to a main page and contact the Web site
administrator from there.  If these measures don't work then you will
have to accept that it is highly likely the document doesn't exist
any more, and look elsewhere.

Any error message which begins with a number 4 (such as
400, 401, etc.) is classed by the Internet as a "Client error".  This
means that the Web server (the machine at the other end) is denying
responsibility for spreading the Web cold you are experiencing. 
You can often work around this problem as described above, but if you
get a "403 - Forbidden" message then you simply don't have permission
to access the document.


The Web Flu - "5" Errors
------------------------

Things get much more serious when the error message begins with a
number 5.  This is full-blown Web flu, and is classed as a "Server
error". This was happening on the Free Pint Web site where large
numbers of people were requesting documents at the same time. The Web
server started to strain under its workload, and this resulted in
lots of error messages like "Server Error 500: could not fork new
process". When you get full-blown Web flu then there is usually not a
lot you can do except stay in bed (well, metaphorically).  You could
try to contact the system administrator and enquire as to what is
causing the problem.

Another type of Web flu occurs when your browser tells you that it
is "unable to locate the server ... [because] the server does not
have a DNS entry". DNS stands for Domain Name Server and is basically
a table. This table contains a list of computer names
(such as "www.freepint.co.uk"), and their respective computer numbers
(such as "194.222.130.16").  Computer names (or domain names) are
easy for humans to remember, whilst computer numbers (or Internet
Protocol (IP) numbers) are needed by Internet-connected computers to
talk to each other.  Therefore, the DNS is a way for the computer to
look up the IP address when you enter a domain name.  If it can't
find an entry in the table then it will give the above message, so
check that you have entered the domain name correctly. It may also be
that the server is unavailable at this time, and so try again a bit
later.  Another alternative is that the network may be down somewhere
between your computer and the Web server, and this commonly happens
if you access the Internet over a modem:


Modem Medicine
--------------

Internet access via a modem (rather than a permanent connection)
means you have to look out for some other potential symptoms as well.
Using an external modem (rather than one which actually fits inside
your computer) means you can keep an eye on the lights on the front
of the device. When you are connected to the Internet you should see
a number of lights (some of which should be flashing). An external
modem also allows you to easily reset it by unplugging it from the
mains.

If you get an error message numbered 503 or 504 then this often means
that the modem has disconnected due to inactivity.  If it does this
regularly whilst you are viewing sites then you may want to try and
increase the "inactivity time-out" in the Internet access software.

Web Doctor Not On Call
----------------------

If you use the Web regularly then you will spot that some of the
above errors occur frequently. I'm afraid there is no doctor who you
can call on when you get this kind of Web cold.

Finally, if you want to know what the "weather" is like on the
Internet (i.e. if there are problems, bottle-necks, etc.) then have
a look at some of the weather sites.  A good list can be found on
Yahoo! by searching for "internet weather".

Stay well.

William Hann


Links
-----

Free Pint on the Web - http://www.freepint.co.uk/
InterlinkUK - http://www.interlinkuk.com/
Yahoo! - http://www.yahoo.com/ (.co.uk for UK & Ireland version)

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William Hann is a qualified information scientist, and runs the
information consultancy "Willco". The company provides Internet
consultancy, training, and Web site services. Full details can be
found at http://www.willco.co.uk/

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      See the advertisers page at http://www.freepint.co.uk/

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                      RBA Information Services

For publications and training on how to use the Internet more
effectively, contact us at RBA. Topics that we regularly cover in
our workshops and seminars include Internet search tools, using the
Internet for business information, beginners guide to the Net,
choosing the right software, how to avoid and get rid of junk mail.
Tel: 0118 947 2256, E-mail: enquiries@rba.co.uk http://www.rba.co.uk/

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                          FEATURE ARTICLE

             "The Best Medical Information on the Web"
                by Sue Welsh, OMNI Project Manager


  "Where is the proof?" you hear the medical profession screaming.
  Well as your mother used to say, "The proof is in the eating of the
  pudding." You can read thousands of testimonials and listen to
  medical scientists argue for and against the benefits of shark
  cartilage, but until you try it yourself you will never reap the
  benefits of this incredible white powder.

  Except from Shark Cartilage Products: Wake up your Body's
  Powerful Immune System with Shark Cartilage
  (http://www.steeples.demon.co.uk/secrets.htm)


Information quality is important for everyone who uses the Internet,
but never is it a more crucial and immediate issue than when
searching for medical information. The Web especially has empowered
patients by allowing them to access a library of information about
their condition and treatments but this has lead some professionals
to complain that the amount of time they have to spend countering
bogus health claims during consultations has increased intolerably.
On the professional side, useful sites proliferate but how many busy
medics really have the opportunity to use them? How can good
information be located and recognised? which sites can be trusted? 
and what are the "must-have" sites for medical professionals? I will
attempt to answer all these questions in this short article.


Searching

Firstly, the key medical sites described in this article are the tip
of the iceberg. In order to locate precisely the information you need
it is necessary to become adept at searching the Internet, and
luckily, there are plenty of dedicated sites to help you. Many of
them are available on the launchpad on the OMNI server 
http://omni.ac.uk/other-search/, so I will not list them all here,
but highlight the sites I use constantly. 

These are: 

- OMNI (http://omni.ac.uk/) especially good for UK orientated
  material

- Medical Matrix (http://www.medmatrix.org/index.asp) lots of US
  professionally orientated sites

- Health on the Net (http://www.hon.ch/) home of the Health on the
  Net Code of Conduct - see below

This is not to say that medical search services can replace big
search engines such as AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, etc. - each type
of tool has its strengths and weaknesses according to the type of
search being carried out. Comparisons of the big search engines are
frequently published elsewhere, and particularly recommended is
SearchEngineWatch (http://searchenginewatch.com/) which maintains a
frequently updated collection of material comparing and contrasting
all the major search engines.


Quality

The three medical search services mentioned above all have one thing
in common, a well-documented approach to evaluation of the resources
they present. Evaluation doesn't offer a guarantee of accuracy and
reliability, but it does cut out the mass of useless sites obscuring
the picture and bring the gems to the surface.

OMNI is compiled by librarians using a set of evaluation criteria,
which each site included must satisfy. For example, the following
questions about the authority of the resource must be satisfied:

"has an individual or institution taken clear and unambiguous
responsibility for the resource? is it possible to ascertain the
status, qualifications or reputation of the author? is the publisher
a reputable, recognised organisation? "

Medical Matrix includes resources that have been reviewed by an
editorial board of medical professionals. This process is analogous
to the peer review of medical information published in professional
journals; each site is approved before entering the database.

Health on the Net promotes good practice with its "code of conduct"
for web sites, which lays out 8 principles for publishers. For
example Principle One states:

"Any medical/health advice provided and hosted on this site will
only be given by medically/health trained and qualified professionals
unless a clear statement is made that a piece of advice offered is
from a non-medically/health qualified  individual/organisation."


Of course health consumers need to be particularly careful when using
the Web. The British Healthcare Internet Association has recently
published a document aimed at enabling safer surfing, with rules of
thumb for health consumers looking for information
(http://www.bhia.org/public/news/currentdocs/temp_accesshinfo.htm)


The Best Sites

With so much information available, picking a selection is a real
challenge. Here are my choices for the web sites everyone in medicine
should know:


PubMed

  Free access to MEDLINE, the largest bibliographic database of the
  medical journal literature, provided by the National Library of
  Medicine (of the USA) who own it.

  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/

The Virtual Hospital

  A huge collection of lecture notes, tutorials and other teaching
  materials, made available by the University of Iowa.

  http://www.vh.org/

The Department of Health

  The UK government information server is a key resource for official
  information and the Department of Health Home page a especially
  useful

  http://www.open.gov.uk/doh/dhhome.htm

Cochrane Collaboration

  The web site of the Canadian Cochrane Centre, and a mecca for those
  seeking out the evidence.

  http://hiru.mcmaster.ca/cochrane/default.htm

World Health Organisation

  Sometimes difficult to navigate, as it many documents reside on
  other web servers, but somewhere here are details of all WHO's
  programmes and publications.

  http://www.who.org/


AIDS resources

  A good example of what can be done are these major resource for
  clinicians and researchers working with AIDS and HIV. There are
  others, but HIV Insite, based at the University of California, and
  the Johns Hopkins AIDS Service, at Johns Hopkins are particularly
  impressive. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have issued an
  AIDS daily summary, containing news about the AIDS epidemic from
  the journal literature and news sources, for some time, and there
  is now an archive for this excellent service.

  http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/
  http://www.hopkins-aids.edu/
  http://198.77.70.131/cdcnac/cgi/databases/news/adsdb.htm

British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and other key medical journals

  UK doctors can now read excerpts from the BMJ online, and receive
  email alerts of each week's table of contents. The Lancet also has
  an online service, as do the New England Journal of Medicine,
  Nature and many other key journals. A core collection, in fact,
  from the desktop.

  http://www.bmj.com/bmj
  http://www.thelancet.com/
  http://www.nejm.org/
  http://www.nature.com/


Conclusion

I have reached the end of my space and have not even mentioned all
the hospitals, university departments, charities and professional
societies who have a web presence, never mind the wealth of teaching
and learning materials, mailing lists and news services that are also
relevant. Bewildering quantities of material, but don't forget to
exploit the various search services recommended. For the medical
community at least, there are many things to see and also many ways
of getting there.

Sue Welsh

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Sue Welsh is Project Manager of OMNI, a JISC funded project based at
the University of Nottingham.
More details can be found at http://omni.ac.uk/
Sue can be contacted by email to sw@omni.ac.uk

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          Would you like to see a certain topic covered?
             Drop us a line to letters@freepint.co.uk

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                   Always Apple-UK Mac Web Site

Always Apple is the largest and most popular Internet Mac Site
available for UK Apple Macintosh Users. The site provides free
classified adverts, Online Conferencing, Downloads and uptodate
information. We have a regular column about the Apple Industry
which updates each week and plenty more.
The site can be found at http://www.alwaysapple.co.uk

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                              LETTERS

We are getting a tremendous response to Free Pint. We have had
complimentary letters from advertisers and readers, and have even
been awarded two prestigious "site of the day" awards from "Dr.
Webster's Web Site of the Day" and the "Cool Central" site.

Therefore we have printed a number of letters this issue to show
you some of the great support we are getting. There is also a
question about using the Web site, and some feedback on "Dogpile".

If you would like to send a letter, then please write
to letters@freepint.co.uk.   Please note that we will not publish
your letter if you do not want us to.  Any that we do publish may
be edited for content or length and we cannot guarantee a reply.

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Dear Free Pint

Launching a new business means advertising budgets are limited.   I
put an ad in Free Pint because I liked the size of the readership AND
the international reader base.    Two serious enquiries and a number
of other contact on the very day it appeared was the result.
Enquiries are still coming in and I am impressed.

Regards
Sue Hill
MECI
Sue Hill Recruitment & Services Ltd.
Tel/Fax +44 171 732 6718
Email: SueHillRecruit@compuserve.com

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Dear Free Pint,

I enjoy your newsletter and am looking forward to the Medical
Resources issue. May I invite your readers to view our site:

Guide to Internet Resources for Cancer
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~nchwww/guides/clinks1.htm

This is a non-profit site providing an index of 2,500 cancer related
web sites sorted by disease, country, speciality, and other topics.
The site includes resources that will be of interest to health
professionals and researchers, as well as those for patients,
relatives, and friends. 

As far as I know it is the largest index site for cancer information.

With best wishes,

Simon Cotterill
Reseach Associate, University of Newcastle
Email: S.J.Cotterill@ncl.ac.uk

Children's Cancer Web
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~nchwww/guides/guide2.htm

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Hi Free Pint

I am the webmaster for the awards site "Dr. Webster's Web Site of the
Day" at http://www.drwebster.com. Free Pint has been awarded 
today's "prescription", and the review follows:

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Today's prescription is a great resource for keeping on top of the
rapidly developing world of the Net. Free Pint is a free E-mail
newsletter that is bursting with tips, techniques and well-written
feature articles that comes out every fortnight.
I've subscribed to many newsletters and, with many of them, the first
thing I want to know how to do is to unsubscribe. With Free Pint, I
find myself counting the days until the next issue of this very
well-done publication comes out.
It's obvious that a lot of work goes into each issue. Free Pint
features compelling and informative topics like "Fakes and Frauds on
the Net," the "Top Five Web Resources of 1997" and "Getting Even
Better Results from Search Engines." You can't find a lot of this
information anywhere else, folks. Check it out.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

My second site is The Free Site at http://www.thefreesite.com where
I have Free Pint listed under "Notable E-mail Newsletters" in my
Free E-mail section. Needless to say, I like Free Pint!

Sincerely,
Marc McDonald

Dr. Webster's Web Site of the Day
http://www.drwebster.com

The Free Site
http://www.thefreesite.com
"Your one-stop resource for finding
the vast number of freebies that are
scattered across the Internet. Tons of free
goodies for Web surfers and Webmasters."

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One reader described the following problems when using the Free Pint
Web site:

>When I leave your home page I cannot use the back button.
>When I leave your site the page remains active in my browser.

William Hann replies:

On the Free Pint site we have made all external links (i.e. those
which point outside of the site) appear in a new window on top of the
current one. Therefore, if you click on an external link then a new
browser window will open containing that resource.  If you then close
that window (rather than using the back button) then you will be
returned to the Free Pint site.

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Hi,

I receive Free Pint regularly and just read the very good article on
meta-searchers [issue 4]. I agree entirely. One point: I keep hearing
people dump -as it were- on the name "Dogpile." I suspect they
entertain scatological allusions. When I was a child we all use to
play a game called "Dogpile" where one child would scream "Dogpile
on X (fill in a name)!" and everyone would run and jump on top of
poor X. In the case of meta-searchers, "X" is your query. :-)

[Name withheld]

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         Promotional gifts supplied by Riverside Promotions
                Tel: 01784 454785  Fax: 01784 466157

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As mentioned earlier, we are in the process of moving our Web site to
a different Web server.  Therefore, if you have problems accessing
the site then please do try again at a later time.

We hope you have enjoyed this issue and found it useful.  If so then
please tell other people about us so that Free Pint can remain
first-rate and free.

                           Kind regards,

                       William Hann, Editor
                      w.hann@freepint.co.uk

(c) Willco 1997
http://www.freepint.co.uk/
ISSN: 1460-7239

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Free Pint (ISSN 1460-7239) is a free email newsletter for anyone who
uses the Internet to get information for their work in any business
or organisation. The newsletter is written by professionals who share 
how they find quality and reliable information on the Internet.

More details about subscribing, contributing or advertising can be
found on the Web at http://www.freepint.co.uk/

Please note: The newsletter is published by the information
consultancy Willco (http://www.willco.co.uk/), and the publishers
will NEVER make the subscriber list available to any other company
or organisation.

The opinions, advice, products and services offered herein are the
sole responsibility of the contributors. Whilst all reasonable care
has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the publication, the
publishers cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions.

This publication may be freely copied and/or distributed in its
entirety. However, individual sections MAY NOT be copied and/or
distributed without the prior written agreement of the publishers.
All rights reserved.

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