CAB Tips

If you're 'Surfing the Net' with an Atari then these tips from Roy Goring 
will help you to get the best value from your on-line time :-)

We all want to keep our phone bills down to the minimum, but 'surfing' can 
be time consuming. Follow these tips and you should get 'better value for 
money'.

All of you who are familiar with CAB will recognise the CONVERTING IMAGE 
message in the window. To reduce this to a minimum follow these easy 
tips:- On a ST, use medium resolution, or high if you have a high res 
monitor, for on-line browsing. Set all your fonts to the SYSTEM FONT. Have 
background images turned off. When you go back to view the pages off-line, 
change to low resolution to get the benefit of the sixteen colours, and 
use vector fonts (if you have them). On a FALCON, use 16 colour mode with 
images displayed in grey scale for viewing on-line. Change to 256 colour 
with colour images when viewing off-line.

Set up your home page to read your HOTLIST, you will find it as 
HOTLIST.HTM in the CAB folder.

** HOTLIST.GIF here **
** caption **
My HOTLIST displayed as my HOME PAGE
** /caption **

When preparing to go on-line, load CAB before dialling, STiK 1.11 and 
above allows CAB to be loaded before you enable it. Use CACHE_ED or your 
HOTLIST to get the pages loaded from your CACHE where you want to start, 
then dial out and off you go. Don't forget to quit CACHE_ED before you 
logon, otherwise it will keep popping up in front of your pages.

Whilst on-line, don't be worried about dropping the phone line to stop and 
read a page or two that you have downloaded, dial out again when you have 
finished reading and carry on.

When on a HOME PAGE, and you want to try out the links to see if they are 
of any use. Hold down SHIFT while you click on the link. This opens 
another window in CAB and loads the new page into it. When you want to go 
back to the HOME PAGE, just close the window, and voila, there it is.

** WINDOWS.GIF here **
** Caption **
 Hold down SHIFT while you click on the link. This opens another window in 
CAB and loads the new page into it
** /caption **

If you are moving to a page that is in your CACHE when you are on-line, 
hit the STOP button as soon as the link you want to use is on screen. 
Remember that you have to hold down the STOP button until you see it press 
in before it will work.

Be careful which EXTERNAL VIEWERS you have connected while you are 
on-line. The loading of programs like Speed of Light to view large images 
takes a long time. It is better to set .JPG .GIF .ZIP .LZH .MPG .WAV .AU 
files to be copied by SDCABPRG.PRG to another folder and then go back and 
view them off-line later.

** EXTERNAL.GIF here **
** Caption **
A sample of my on-line external viewers
** /caption **

Use XURL to extract URLs from text files. This saves writing the URL down 
and then typing it in (no typing mistakes). XURL puts all the extracted 
URLs into a HTML page so that they can be clicked on, and off you go.