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When you login to Chebucto Community Net (CCN), you are presented with a screen of text with certain phrases emphasized and labelled with numbers. These phrases represent "links" to other, similar pages on CCN and on various computers across the globe. That is to say, if you select one of these links a new page related to the link you selected will appear on your screen. This page will likewise have links to further pages, which will have links to more pages and so on.
The process of reading pages and selecting links that lead to other pages, or "net surfing", is the fundamental means you will use to find information that interests you on CCN and the rest of the World Wide Web (the collection of all such pages linked together across the world). The software CCN runs to allow you to do this is called Lynx. Lynx also serves as a launch pad to other services CCN provides, like e-mail and USENET news (described later in this document).
You select a link by typing the link's number and pressing "enter" ("return" on some systems) or by moving the highlighted region to the link using the the up and down arrow keys and pressing "enter". The left arrow key moves you back to the last page viewed. The right arrow follows the highlighted link (like pressing "enter").
Move to the Previous Link
/|\
Go Back to | Follow the
Previous <-- --> Highlighted Link
Document | to the Next Document
\|/
Move to the Next Link
If your arrow keys do not work then you can also use your "Control" key ("CTRL" on many keyboards) to move around. The symbol for the control key is "^". To move around the keys are:
The space bar moves you down within a document, and the "b" key moves you back up. If you know the address of a web-page you want to visit, press "g", type the address (e.g., http://www.altavista.digital.com), and press "enter". To read CCN's online help, press the "?" key or type "g" and then type the word "help" followed by "enter". Press "q" to quit and log out of the system.
To spare you the trouble of memorizing the various key commands, Lynx has a command bar summarizing them on the bottom of the screen:
Commands: Use arrow keys to move, '?' for help, 'q' to quit, '<-' to go
back.
Arrow keys: Up and Down to move. Right to follow a link; Left to go back.
O)ther cmds G)o to P)rint B)ack H)ome page C)omment ^L=refresh Q)uit
In the last line, the letter before the closing bracket is the key you press to do that command. Pressing "O" changes the last line to show more commands. Note that if you know the letter of a command you don't have to type "O" to make the menu bar with that command visible before you type it -- you can just type the command's letter and it will execute. If you aren't sure what a command does, try it. You can cancel most commands by typing control-c or control-g. If you get lost type "h" to return to the CCN Homepage.
Instead of typing something horrendous like:
"http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/cgi-bin/who"
When using the G)o command, you can type in certain single words after pressing "g" (without the quotes) for the more commonly used web pages and programs on CCN. The shortcut names you can use at the time of this writing are listed below. Type "g" followed by "?" in Lynx to get an up-to-date listing. A listing is provided in this book under the section: Go Commands - The Shortcut List.
Information Providers are organizations or individuals who have formally registered to provide public information on CCN through special-interest web-pages. You can access the Information Provider pages using commands similar to the shortcut commands. Typing "i" followed by a single word or acronym will get you one of these pages without your having to type the full address. These shortcuts are called jumpkeys. To get a list of Information Providers and their corresponding shortcut words and acronyms, type "i" followed by "?" while in Lynx. Information Providers are covered in more detail in Section XV.
Once you get into the swing of things you may want to look at the more obscure Lynx commands by pressing "k" ( K)ey bindings ). Here you will find some neat little commands like "<" to go to the top of a document or "*" to represent images as links so you can download them to your computer and look at them later using a graphics viewer.
If you already know how to follow links and return to where you were, try the "User Help Index, User Help Outline or the keystroke_help Help Quick Reference. If a document fills more than one screen, press the spacebar once to view more. Remember this as you will need to use it while reading this help document. Whenever you are asked to press or hit a key, be careful to only press and release it once.
To find a word in the current document, type W followed by the word you seek and then press RETURN. This will take you to the next occurence of the word, highlighting the word to draw your attention to it. The N key will search for the next occurence o f the same word.
If you are looking for information and you don't know where to find it, you can search all the documents on the system for a word or words. The way to do this is to use a shortcut to go directly to the Finding Information page. Type "g" then "info" and then select one of the search options.
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