Whenever you get a new program to learn it can be a little overwhelming; sometimes the learning curve can be pretty steep, other times it just looks like it until you get the basics down. Here are some tips that will help you to get a basic knowledge of just about any new program.

1. Use to learn the Help menu – the quickest way to get to it in virtually any program is by hitting the F1 button. This may seem easy, but more often than not people don’t even think about looking here before they call for help from someone else. Most people learn by doing something themselves – you’ll become a better user of your computer if you begin here. (Windows and most Linux distributions have this as well; minimize all of your windows, click somewhere on the desktop and hit F1. Macs may have this feature as well, I’m not sure though – can someone confirm or deny this for me?)
2. Google it! You’ll be surprised what you can find out there. If you’re trying to figure out how to move a Textbox in MS Word and can’t find it in the Help file (it’s probably there too) just go to Google and type:
   

   Microsoft Word move textbox

   I will virtually guarantee that you’ll find your answer in the first two or three links. When I’m trying to figure out a program or a feature for someone else, this is where I’ll go to find the answer. (Soon you’ll realize that I’m a huge fan of Google on the whole).

3. Go to the website. If you click on most programs Help menu, there will be an About InsertProgramNameHere option that will tell you about the program and where the webpage is that you can go to for more information.

That’s it. Those are the three most basic things you can do to learn any program better. Good luck!

Last week we talked about Firefox and why (I believe) it is the best general web browser available and got it downloaded and installed for you (hopefully). Today we will talk through some of the menus in the menu bar.

If you have everything installed and nothing else going on, your screen should look something like the image above with normal web browser menu names displayed. Let’s walk through them and I will explain some of the items that might require it.

File
New Tab – Like we talked about last week, one of the advantages of Firefox is its tabbed browsing capabilities. Where you would have opened a new window before now you should open a new tab. You can do that by going to File -> New Tab or hitting Ctrl+T.

Open Location – All this does is take your cursor to the location bar at the top of the page where you type in the webpage you want to go to.

Close Tab – It closes one tab at a time, rather than closing down the whole of the Firefox browser.

Import – This is for importing bookmarks that you might have from another browser or saved as a document.

Edit
About the same as the Edit menu in just about every program.
Note: In non-Windows versions of Firefox this also contains the Options menu which is covered in the next post in the Beginning with Firefox series.

Find in This Page… – When you have a lot of text in the page you are viewing and you want to find something specific.

Find Again – Looks for the next instance of the search you just executed.

View
This is the first one with real power to change your ongoing browsing experience.

Toolbars – Toolbars are the “bars” at the top of your browser that add functionality to it. The menus that we’re looking at now are a toolbar, below that is the navigation toolbar and your bookmarks toolbar. In this sub-menu you can turn on or off toolbars that you have installed and you can customize them as well. If you click customize you’ll see a window that looks something like the image to the left.

Here you’ll be able to add buttons to your toolbars that are available in the menus or you can rearrange items. For now all I’d suggest you do is click the “Use Small Icons” box (unless you have bad vision). My favorite “hack” using this box is that you are able to drag the Location Box and the Search Box up onto the Menu Bar and give yourself that much more screenspace by disabling the Navigation Toolbar (I’ll write about this later.)

Sidebar – Like your toolbars, but here you can look at all of your bookmarks or browse the pages you’ve recently visited; and it’s on the side.

Status Bar – This is the bar at the bottom of your screen which gives you relatively vital information such as the location of the link that your mouse is over. Plug-ins that we’ll add to Firefox in the future will also display info here. Keep it checked.

Text Size – If you have bad vision, this will be your aid on pages that have small text. The newest version of Firefox that should be out by May 1 will actually enable you to enlarge the whole page to view it better!

Everything else in the View bar should probably be left alone if you don’t already know what it is. The only other thing that might be useful is the Fullscreen option which hides all the toolbars except for your tabs and makes the most use of your screen size.

History This one is pretty self explanatory, you can look through your browsing history here too.

Bookmarks Everything here is pretty self explanatory as well (if you ignore the thing about Add-ons which we’ll talk about in a later post), there are just a few things that I want to note.

Bookmark All Tabs… – You know how to bookmark one page a time, this will allow you to bookmark everything that you have open right now. Say you have been researching a school and have a bunch of tabs open about Podunk State University click this and save them all as links in a folder in your bookmarks.

Subscribe to This Page – We talked about Feeds/RSS a little bit last time. This is the simplest way to subscribe to a page (remember to look for the RSS Feed Icon – read more about it in the Wikipedia article on RSS), if you click on it now it will allow you to bookmark the future updates for CruTech. (If you decide to do this choose the options of LiveBookmarks and place it in your Bookmarks Toolbar.)

Bookmarks Toolbar – This is the toolbar at the top of your browser that should contain bookmarks that you use virtually every day or feeds that you want to keep up with. Right now you probably just have the “Getting Started” and “Latest Headlines”.

Tools – Let’s hold of on this one, there is as much there as this whole post. Next week.

Help – This is your best friend on any new program. Whenever you’re trying to figure out how to do something in a program that you’re not familiar with use this menu (or just hit F1) to bring up the help box… it’s very helpful.

For Internet Explorer Users – If this is you, check this one out, it’s a few articles in the Help box that may help you adjust to the changes that Firefox will bring.

That is all for this week. Take some time and explore some pages in the Help box to learn more about FF. Next time we’ll explore the Tools menu and the Options box.

As we start to explore ways that technology can be something that actually makes our lives in ministry easier, it makes sense to start with the “elemental things” – the basics.

Whenever I am asked to take a look at someone’s computer there are a few things that I take the time to advise them on – anti-virus programs, memory usage, storage space maintenence (cleaning and backing up) and getting the most for the least out of quality free programs. The top three free (open source) programs in the world are Linux (an operating system – think Windows or OSX), Apatche (an internet protocol – don’t think about it) and Mozilla Firefox (a web browser – see, you know what that is).

While Linux and Apatche are probably not something that we’ll ever cover on this blog, Firefox will be a staple of its content. Firefox is (arguably) the best web browser available and we’re going to take some time today to talk about why that is and we’ll get into the basics of getting it for your own machine.

Firefox is based on the now defunct Netscape browser, it has been developed by an active community of programmers who have developed it into a the most expandable and powerful web browser available. It’s currently on the verge of releasing the newest version of the program – Firefox 3.0.

I would like to run down a list of things that have convinced me that Firefox is the current best choice to use when browsing the internet, many of these reasons can be found on the Firefox site itself as well.

Tabbed Browsing – This was actually the feature that first “tempted” me away from Internet Explorer. In the old days web browsers has one window and if you wanted to look at another site you had to open a whole new window. Starting with Netscape and continuing on now in virtually every browser they introduced tabs which allows you to have multiple windows open at a time all organized in the same place. It has literally changed the way I surf the web, I can be reading an article and click on a link in it and not have to worry about hitting the back button when I am done to go back to what I was reading.

Embedded Search Bar – I’m sure many of you have installed toolbars that have searchbars in them so you can search easily from any page. Well, this has the feature too, but it’s part of the basic program and you can add just about any search to it from the big guys like Google and Yahoo to a search engine that searches every Campus Crusade for Christ page. Now, again, IE had added this aspect, but Firefox has always done it better in that it will even allow you to create (or “roll”) your own search engine for any page you’d like.

Web Feeds (RSS)/Live Bookmarks – So, one of your supporters has a blog and you like to read it on a regular basis but it gets annoying when you have to go to it every day and the updates are rarer than you’d like. Now think about today’s weather, and the news, and your students’ blogs, and your brother’s online photo album… it becomes a lot of sites to visit every day. Feeds are a way of looking quickly and knowing who and what has updated and whether or not you need to go and look at the new content. Firefox allows you to bookmark feeds and it will update them as the site is updated. All you need to do is browse through your bookmarks to know if your nephew has been potty trained yet (or may be your students as well). We’ll talk about Web Feeds more later when we talk about GReader.

Pop-Up Blocker – It blocks pop-ups unless you say otherwise. It’s pretty easy.

Phishing Protection – Some emails you get from “eBay” are not safe because they’re not really from eBay and they’re not really linking you to their site; same with your bank, Amazon, etc. (And the emails about “free V14Gra”) Hackers do a really good job at making the site they link to look A LOT like the real site and when you log in to the fake site, they now have your username and password… and perhaps your credit card and address and everything else. Firefox knows what to look for in these sites to warn  you that they are not real, it can protect you from identity theft.

Open Source Means Secure – Who are the best people to protect against hackers? Hackers. The same reason that major computer companies host “hacking competitions” every year to hire new IT employees is why Open Source programs are safer than proprietary ones – the people making it know where to look for security holes and they know how to fix them.

Spyware Protection – When a program tries to run or install, it asks you. If you say no, the program doesn’t download and your computer stays safe. It will ask every time. Simple enough.

Add-Ons – Here is the other advantage of the Open Source movement. Anyone can make it better. The same people that are building the browser for everyone to use also know that there are some uses that a lot of people want but not nearly everybody. The fact that the source code is open makes it possible for people to create Add-Ons that add functionality to the browser – blocking advertisements, notify you when you get email, change your keypad shortcuts, correct your misspellings, help you to share files, etc.

Web Standards Compliance – This will mean very little for people who do not work with internet technology much. It means that when a website is coded according to internationally accepted standards of web design that it will look exactly the way it is supposed to. The reason that some sites work in one browser and not another is IE’s historical ignoring of these standards.

Getting Firefox

Firefox is available for just about every Operating System on the market. From Windows 95 to Vista, OSX and any Linux build out there. There are even versions that you can install on a USB thumb drive and take your bookmarks and preferences with you!

Point your current antequated browser to www.GetFirefox.com and click the link that looks like this (it will recognize your Operating System – it probably will not say “for Linux i686″).

Next, save the file onto your computer wherever you usually save your install files (we’ll talk about keeping your desktop clean later) and follow the instructions on the page that just loaded – it will load instructions that are specific to your system.

Once you get it installed start it up (I would suggest saying “yes” to making it your default browser), import your bookmarks, etc. and read through some of the guides and tutorials that will come up on the first page that loads. (If the first page that comes up doesn’t say “Getting Started with Firefox” the head to that page here.)

Now you’re on your way to a new Internet experience! Next time we’ll talk about getting the most out of your Firefox install.  

Tags: firefox, internet, web browsers, tabbed browsing, search engines, web feeds, rss, bookmarks, phishing, pop-ups, open source, spyware, web standards