I just read NSD 2.37. It was one of the best issues I have received. There are several sites listed that will be of interest to me now and in the future. I had never heard of many of these terrific sites before (not surprising, given the number of total sites available). Thank you for your outstanding publication.
Paul Croy
I must tell you that over the past two months I've noticed a huge change in your publication. Where before, I might be interested in one or maybe two links, now there's so much that is interesting! It will probably take me a week to check out all the cool stuff!
It's like watching a nephew grow up to be an interesting young man. I'm so proud.
Cher
Thanks. I'll take that as personal as well as professional compliment, since I decide what goes in based on my tastes. I think the biggest change is due to the increased number of submissions we get in "pressrm@netsurf.com". Right now, I sort through over 150 a week. Add in the dozens I get from newspapers, magazines, and mailing lists, and you can appreciate how selective I can be. I only use about 10% of all we get. - LN
I find your digest very useful. The Halloween edition was done very well, I thought. You should rate the sites you write about, e.g. on a scale of 1 to 10, or something like that.
Douglas Ulyate
I think a qualitative review helps more than a quantitative one would, especially if everything is an 8, 9, or 10. - LN
Congratulations! Your Site has been listed on the Awesome Universal WebSite 500 and awarded CyberTeddy's Top 500 WebSite award.
Edward Anderson
Maybe it's all the crass commercialism warming my heart this season, but I just wanted to take time out and thank you all for the service you provide. I've been subscribed for an eternity (over a year, I think) and never have I let you all know what a swell bunch you really are, so... here goes:
What a swell bunch you really are.
Matthew Davidson
I like your digital magazine, kewl idea. What I want to know is how do I get a job surfing the Web all day. I could buy a direcPC setup and surf from my little stick town in Northern California (Weed). After a while, I could even learn to write clever articles like you guys.
Mike Servis
Job? You call this a job? It's an overwhelmingly consuming monster of a hobby. - L
Netsurfer Book Reviews has been chosen as Useful for the December 9th edition of That's Useful, This Is Cool! Congratulations!
Lynn Siprelle
I tell my friends and co-workers about all the newsletters I get. When someone asked me to do a quick annotated list (we are librarians), I discovered that Netsurfer Digest is the best! It is the only one I would not cancel and I may have to cancel something.... Librarians DO have lives!
Keep up the good work.... Surfers need you!
Barbara
When even librarians like you you know you're good! - AB
Just a short note to thank you for sending me your excellent digest for the last six months or so. I look forward to it each week and hope that 1997 will be profitable for you. May you and all at Netsurfer Communications have a good Christmas.
Alistair Clarke
I'm very appreciative of the Netsurfer mail. It's easy to use and the sites are very hot. Who chooses this sites?
Sebastiao
I choose most of the sites, mostly from reader suggestions but also through press releases, newswires, and good old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Arthur chooses most of the Breaking Surf articles. - LN
Did Netsurfer stop its publication or were you all on (how deserved) holidays? I miss it ! Ciao and the best to you and all the team for this new year.
Monique Neubourg
We took a from December to early January (unfortunately a little longer than planned, thanks to Delta Airlines), then had some slight server problems. Everything's fine now. - LN
Hello, anybody there??? Just checking. I noticed the last publication I received was 12/18/96. Are you still publishing? I have enjoyed your publication & would hate to see it go quietly into the ether...
Jim Douglas
Hi. The last issue I received was December 18 of last year. When is the new issue coming out? Boy, you got me hanging.... Happy new year
Ala Zikra
Nothing like a case of the DTs, eh? - LN
Hi! Just thought I'd put into words to you the thoughts generated each time I read the Digest: "This is great!", or "I'm so glad I subscribed to this thing", or "What a wonderful assortment of stuff to look up!" I do really enjoy the Digest. Not sure how I found out about it, but I'm glad I did. Kudos!
Alisa Bearov Landrum
From "The Web's Dynamic Top 100" in NSD 3.01: Hey, wouldn't it be cool if Netsurfer Digest got on there? Like 100,000 times?
Well, I'm sure I'm one of the happy 100,00 who would be delighted to submit you as a Dynamic Top 100!
Netsurfer Digest description: This site provides a great e-mail newsletter on surfing sites with excellent descriptions. They have not steered me wrong and I have found quite a number of sites that I have enjoyed and that have helped me both in my home and work life.
Mary David
Thanks. Actually, I hope I don't have to thank 100,000 people for doing so. This past weekend alone I had 800 e-mail messages to sort through.... - LN
Well, my lower school teachers found the neat Netsurfer X-mas page, but as the teachers were clicking on the links they got a surprise on the Lords link. Traci Lords in underwear wasn't in the game plan.... Is this the best you could do for Lords????
Mike Mundt
Well, you know we're not a kids' publication, and given the demographics of the Web, Traci is probably in some of our reader's letters to Santa. :) We could have gone with the English House of Lords, but that is much more boring, as I'm sure you'd agree. I'm also sure we've offended any number of politically correct and devout netsurfers with some of the links and copy over the years, but hey, this is the real world. If the kids are educated properly I doubt they'll be scarred for life by seeing the nubile Ms. Lords in her skimpies. - AB
Man, I'm still chuckling over this one - LN
You probably already know this, but Tennile was the Captain's singing companion. It was Sir John Tenniel who did the illustrations for the original "Alice in Wonderland" (NSD 2.40). I mean, really. Tennile? Jeez. ;)
Steven Champeon
And let's not forget the recent Julius Irving/Erving gaffe. By the way, it's "Tennille", but love, love will keep us together. - LN
I don't know if this will help, but I did have to make a change with the advent of Windows 95. Windows 95 tries to save your file as a default with a .txt extension. The first change I made was to make it .htm. I still got error messages. That's when I discovered that Netscape isn't interested in Windows 95 file names - longer than 8 characters and full of spaces. Now I just call you 2.37.htm (for example) and everything works as before. Oh! It's also easy to lose the file in Windows 95, since a request saves defaults in the Windows directory, and Netscape looks for files in its own directory. I just save to the My Favorites folder, which certainly fits.
Thanks for your wonderful surf-ice.
Tom Linton
I receive your e-zine in HTML, and i wonder why don't you put a link back to the top under each description of a link. Your index is at the top.
Pedro Almeida
I subscribe to the HTML version of Netsurfer and have a simple suggestion that ought to make viewing it in my e-mail reader easier.
The format you now use has a table of contents at the beginning. Would it be possible to add links from each article backto the table of contents at the top that linked to it? This would save a great deal of manual scrolling of the mail window and make better use of hypertext capabilities.
Martin Miller
Pedro, meet Martin. Martin, Pedro.... We try to keep NSD as small as possible, and always less than 25 kB. Adding even only one extra line of text or code to each article adds the equivalent of three articles. We'd rather include more good stuff than cut three articles to add more garnish. - LN
That said, the link back suggestion does have merit, since I noticed I frequently want to go back to the top when looking at old digests for some reference or other. So in the grand Amercian tradition we compromise starting with Volume 3 and add a link back to the top at the end of every section. Also it's not quite a whole line in the HTML version, but only a few extra characters. Given that the vast majority reads us in HTML, and that we've had a number of such requests over time, on the whole this solution is probably worth the space. Naturally, if we get tons of complaints, I'll quit this job and never set finger on keyboard again. - AB
I am using Pegasus E-Mail and when I save Netsurfer Digest as a .htm file and bring it up in Netscape 3.0, there is a box character before and after the link addresses, so the links don't work. How do I fix this?
Thomas S. Bradley
It's easy to fix - use Eudora Light, or some other mail program that isn't screwy. There may be an option in Pegasus that will fix the problem, but I don't know what that might be. Hunt and peck, if you want.
If I sound impatient, sorry. I'm not impatient with you or your problem, but there's no reason e-mail programs shouldn't deal properly with our e-mail. I'm impatient with programmers. More below. - LN
I subscribe to the HTML version of NSD. There is a problem with saving it to a file with my mailer (Pegasus v2.4). When the NSD is saved to disk, all the links in NSD, except for mail-to links, have a control character embedded at each end of the address. This makes it impossible to lanch from these links unless I put the page in an editor and strip out the control characters, which is too much trouble, quite frankly.
I didn't have this problem with an earlier version of Pegasus and I am wondering if you can tell me what is the problem. Perhaps you ought to consider sending the NSD-html as mail attachments.
Patrick Dominick
Two possibilities: Your e-mail gateway does something wierd to the links or Pegasus does something strange with our formatting (enclosing HTML within double quotes). We certainly don't send any strange control characters, all we send is plain text.
We have not changed the way we have been sending our e-mail since day one, just standard HTML. You may want to write Pegasus and tell them they have a problem with HTML display.
We plan to start sending the HTML NSD as mail attachments in 1997 - MIME, just the way Netscape's InBox Direct is sent. It's the wave of the future. :) - AB
Are ya'll crazy or what??
> Investigative Resources for PIs... >...And Stalkers
Or are you just insensitive?? I know this was just meant to be humorous, but STALKERS??? This is a very real problem for many women. Boy, I hope you get spammed till your mail box is full. You should have better sense.
Otherwise, I like your product. I checked out the LookSmart.com thing you poo-pooed awhile back, and then the retraction. That's a great site! Y'all seem to like stepping on your crank, don't you!?
Dan Johnson
Beside the complaint from the site we described as being for stalkers, this was the only letter we received on that headline. Either you readers have keenly honed senses of irony and humour, or you're somewhat apathetic. - LN
I am always eager to try to find those people I haven't heard from in a few years so I tried to find them using the "one-stop stalker's shop" that you mentioned.
No luck. In fact I was not even listed. I have lived in my current location for eight years, I have a listed phone number, and I'm registered with various online search engines.
Later, when Tim Dick of WorldPages quickly responded to your interest- piquing descriptor, I hoped he had updated his data base.
Again I looked for myself and still no listing. In fact the listings for family and friends that I could find were incomplete and at least two years old. I am glad that your publication has recounted your erroneous statement of a one-stop shop and let the organisation speak for itself (such as it is).
Nicole Glowacki
"Kappa maki" (NSD 3.01) is julienned cucumber wrapped up with rice inside nori sheets - the typical maki roll, eaten with soy sauce and wasabe sauce except it is a vegetable roll, rather than a fish roll. Thus, it also serves the ideal order for someone who may be diffident about eating raw fish while providing an introduction to the great sushi taste.
Jack McGrath (Zyaku Miguratsu)
I detest those constantly changing graphics which cause my computer to flash on and off with a repetition reminiscent of Chinese water torture, now even available via e-mail. It's enough to have me considering going back to a strictly text-based connection!
Rita Winn
Address your letters to
editor@netsurf.com.
Letters and signatures edited for clarity and brevity.