By William LaMartin,Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Spam Last month I mentioned that I had enabled Earthlink’s spam filter, Spaminator, for my NetCom email account with them, and that it seemed to be working well. I made one factual error in that I said that blocked email was held on their servers for three days before being deleted. It is actually held for 10 days. Right now I have 372 messages being held, an average of 37/day. I don’t even bother to check on them anymore, letting Spaminator take care of that. To delete the 372 messages myself I would have to view 19 pages of 20 messages each, selecting all messages and then deleting them.

Of course, some spam is still getting through on that account. Furthermore I can find no such feature for my Road Runner email account. I am probably getting about 50 spam messages a day with Spaminator stopping 37 of them and the other 13 getting past Spaminator or coming in on the Road Runner account. My own spam filter set up in Outlook Express probably catches half of those.

Google AdWords Also last month I mentioned pay for placement in getting web sites listed on the search engines. I described setting up an AdWords account with Google to have an ad appear in a box on the right-hand side of a Google search results page when certain key words were part of the search. The web site owner only pays when someone clicks on those words. And it seemed to be working fine. But apparently Google made a change in their calculation formula since when I checked the statistics at a later date it showed:

That was somewhat above my budget limit of $5.00/day. Obviously someone didn’t do a check with real data after some change was made to the code that calculates this information.

Overture Since the above only got you guaranteed exposure on Google, I later set up an account with Overture (http://www.overture.com) and bid on several key words and phrases. This gets your links placed in the “sponsored links” sections at the top of searches in Overture, Yahoo, and most other search engines.

Since I did the cheaper “self submission”, of the material to Overture, I was supposed to have to wait three to five business days, have someone phone me to verify certain credit and other information, have them review the web site and other things. Really, it sounded a bit overdone-and most of it probably never occurred since I never received the phone call- but everything was set up and running over a weekend.

The Overture advertising has only been running for about one day, and has produced only two clicks. Certainly much less than the Google AdWords produced in their first day. At the rate it is going, we will produce far less clicks than required to reach the $20 minimum charge each month. But one day isn’t much of a test. After a month we should know if Overture produces results. Of course, I could bid more for some of our key words, and that would get us a lot better position. Even though we had no problem getting on Overture’s first page of results with a bid of $.07 for a certain key word, since Yahoo displays only the top three bidders on such a word, we would have to bid $.40/click to be also listed there-with no guarantee that the formerly number three bidder wouldn’t up his bid to, say, $.42 for that word.

Telnet Before the World Wide Web there was Telnet. Member Don Patzsch is probably just about the only person left in the U.S. using Telnet, everyone else has moved on to the web when seeking information. I just did a search on Google for “Telnet” and found a site with a directory of “historic” Telnet sites-universities, libraries, governments, etc. Of a random sampling of six of these, none still functioned.

One Telnet site that still functions, though, is at our Tampa/Hillsborough Public Library. Even though they have moved everything to the web including their card catalog, they still maintain their Telnet site. This site used to be the only way to view their card catalog. Originally you had to dial in with a modem directly to the site. Later you could access it via the Internet.

Once connected to the library site, you were presented with a DOS window where you entered key strokes to navigate and retrieve data. There are no mouse clicks and pretty looking pages, and thus it is not used by many other than Don Patzsch-and me. In fact, it is the only Telnet site I use, and I hope the library doesn’t discontinue it because every two years or so I use it for a special project of mine.

Those of you have visited my web site, http://www.lamartin.com, are probably familiar with the link there to my database of the collection of old photos of Tampa taken by the Burgert Brothers between the 1890’s and the 1960’s. I don’t have the actual photos, just a database that you can search and about six web pages, each with upwards of 1,000 photo descriptions with links that can be clicked on to take you to the actual photo at the library site.

I did this originally because the only way of getting a listing of such photos was to use the Telnet link to the card catalog, do your search, then copy the photo link to your clipboard, open your browser, paste the link to your browser and then view the photo. At my site you could simply view the information about the photos, choose the one you were interested in and click on it to go to the photo at the library site. That was then, but now the library has moved to the web, and you can do essentially the same thing at the library’s site.

While the search feature at my site is now duplicated by the library’s search, they still don’t have the listing of all the photos available spread over several web pages that you can browse to see if something strikes your interest. For that reason alone, I decided to update my listing of the photos. When I last updated the information about two years ago, there were approximately 5,000 photos online; now there are over 8,500.

So how does one go about getting card catalog information on 8,500 items. You do it by programming an automated Telnet process. When I did this the first time, I wrote a Visual Basic program that interacted with the Windows Telnet program to request the information on each of the Burgert photos and record the results in the Telnet program’s log. I did this in batches of, say, 500 items at a time. Next each batch’s log file had to have the text parsed for only the information I wanted: Title, Date, Notes, Link. Then everything had to be checked for errors and put in an Access database. It was a lot of work, even with the automation. By the way, for each of the 8,500 plus items, about five Telnet commands needed to be issued to retrieve its data. But that is what computers are good at.

This time around I decided to write new software in Delphi since Delphi has its own Telnet component, and I could, thus, have better control over the process. So I wrote three programs. The first ran the Telnet sessions and saved the results, minus all the returned text that tells Telnet where to position lines on a screen, into a text file of raw results. Then my second program parsed out the information I wanted from this raw text. Finally, my third program took this parsed data and stored it in a database.

I probably won’t have my site updated with the new database until after I get this newsletter out. I think this time I will break down the separate HTML pages into date ranges, like all the photos before 1920, etc. u