• editor's note
• news
• business
• support & services
• hardware review
• feature - HTML tables
• competitions
• entertainment
• site scan

Home » Customers » Iinews » iiNews July

editor's note

Some of us have a morning routine, a ritual to shoehorn our brains into the day ahead. Mine usually involves a bacon sandwich, and trawling for headlines from news sites like www.bbc.co.uk, www.soccernet.com and www.digg.com.

As I skipped through the news this morning, HP sauce all over my keyboard, I wondered how interested I'd be in these wide and varied headlines if they were more than a mouse-click and two seconds away. Would I, for example, care as much about Big Brother, the Pope, Guantanamo or water on Mars?

Probably not.

The web is the ultimate channel surf, millions of simultaneous newscasts and ten-second rides. It's selfish and indulgent, but for me that's the key... plenty of news and the right to pick and choose.

On that note let me introduce one of our biggest iiNews editions yet, filled with product news, how-to articles, reviews and competitions. Have a look through at your own pace; see if anything tickles your fancy.

Welcome all, thanks again for being with us this July.

news

Broadband and Naked plans upsized
That's right - we've brought you even more bang for your buck, by increasing monthly download quotas to most of our Residential Naked DSL and Broadband plans. The best part - this upgrade is completely free!

If you're already on one of our Naked or Broadband plans eligible for the upgrade, you won't need to lift a finger to enjoy more download quota. In fact, we've already taken care of everything for you.

If you're not signed up or want to see how quota limits have changed, check out our Broadband plans or Naked DSL plans.

New iTunes TV downloads - quota free
iTunes has recently introduced TV downloads! Great news for TV buffs, as iiNet is the first and only ISP which allows you to access iTunes content quota free.

Next time you're shopping around iTunes for the latest music downloads, take a look at what TV shows, music videos, concert clips and exclusive remix videos are on offer too. Episodes are downloadable for $2.99 (inc. GST), as early as one day after it airs.

NASA TV
Ever wanted to know what happens behind the doors of one of the world's greatest space agencies? Look no further than the iiNet Freezone. Thanks to the good people at NASA, you can now glimpse into the world of aerospace LIVE from NASA TV - the space agency's own television network which you can access without affecting your download quota.

Watch live coverage during missions (including Space Shuttle, robotic missions, and international launches) as they're broadcast, catch highlights at the end of each day, follow daily mission excursions, experiments and the progress of work on international space stations.

Jump on board and explore all the content available here.

iiNet 1000 Hour Day Expedition update
Our adventurous friends Chris and Clark in the Arctic have now reached the half-way point of their epic 100 day expedition. Their hard-fought progress has been filled with highs and lows, with plenty of surprises from Mother Nature, topped off with some disappointing equipment failures.

Want to leave the boys some words of encouragement? Drop a note via their blog, they certainly appreciate our support. You can keep an eye on how far they still have to travel.

business news

Maximise your business' web presence
Last edition we talked about why an online presence for your company makes a lot of business sense. With more people turning to mouse-click Google for information, we're seeing more and more slabs of Yellow Pages doubling as makeshift monitor stands.

As an extension of your business (and often the first point of contact for your customers) your webspace needs to make a positive impression. A good web designer or developer can help you do this while helping you to maximise your site's online potential. Sadly in reality, however, hiring a web expert is a luxury most small businesses can't afford.

To help you out, we've asked one of our web design gurus, Jessica Kaitse, for some top tips to see what you can do to make the most of your site's online presence. Jess says:

Get vocal and blog
Instead of a "news" section on your website, start a blog. By doing this, you can talk about your business and also any topics relating to your business. You can also submit your blog/site to various blog tracking websites like Technorati and also social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg and reddit. Plus, the more frequently you update your blog, the more it will be recognised and bookmarked by people who visit your site.

Appearances count
Hand-in-hand with decent content, great design goes a long way. Make sure your contact details are easy to find, on the front page, and not tucked away.

Keep it simple
Large blocks of content can make your site clunky and hard to use. Keep it clean, easy to read and dead simple. If you need to share a lot of information, try making it more readable by using lists or dot points.

Spread your link
Think of ways you can spread the word about your website's address. You can include a link to your site in your email signature or the signature of any forums you post on.

Think of the Search Engines
Search engine visits will most likely account for a large percentage of hits to your site. So, paying attention to basic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques will help your website get more attention. The main thing you need to do here is ensure that all your pages, links and images are properly titled. By doing this, you'll improve your site's visibility on the web. Want to learn more about SEO? Give Googling a go or read more here.

Nobody likes to wait
Make sure your site loads quickly by not bogging it down with large files. If you have photos you want to put on the site, it helps to resize them first.

Check and double check
It's just common sense - spell and grammar check your site. Making sure your site's information is up-to-date and accurate increases its standing as a reliable source.

Jessica Kaitse is an Associate Web Designer, Courtney Popham is a Marketing Assistant. They both work for iiNet and sit within throwing distance of each other.

support & services

Broadband for Beginners
We've had a lot interest in our popular 'Broadband for Baby Boomers' workshops from people who, well, aren't baby boomers. That's why we're changing the name of the workshop to 'Broadband for Beginners' and opening the program up to anyone who needs help getting acquainted with the internet.

Our August 'Broadband for Beginners' workshops are fast approaching. Held at our Adelaide Terrace office in Perth, these workshops have helped introduce new 'surfers' to just some of the secrets of the internet.

Offered in two modules, workshops will cover:

• Module 1 - If you're brand new to the internet this workshop is for you. Topics include general information about the internet, finding information, online shopping, local entertainment, online radio, and video sites such as YouTube
• Module 2 - A follow-on from Module 1, this workshop is for people wanting to find out even more about what the internet can offer. Topics include online banking, travel and booking holidays, communities and networking, online music stores such as iTunes®, and internet security

If you're keen to sign up, you'll need to note down our next workshop dates:

• Wednesday 6 August (Module 1)
• Wednesday 13 August (Module 2)

Both sessions run from 6pm to 8pm and are delivered by iiNet staff. To register, email sponsorships@iinet.net.au with your name, contact phone number, email address and workshop preference (Module 1 only, Module 2 only, or both Module 1 and Module 2).

Help! My Internet is broken!
Having problems with your internet? If you're new to the scene (regardless of your age), our new 'My Internet is Broken' workshops might just be right for you.

Rolling out in August, these PC focused workshops will be kept small and intimate. Attendees will be walked through a number of commonly encountered internet issues, coming away with a basic and clear understanding of how to resolve them.

We'll be running our first 'My Internet is Broken' workshop on Wednesday 20 August from 6pm-8pm, with help from our friendly iiNet staff.

To register, send us an email at sponsorships@iinet.net.au with your name, contact phone number and email address.

hardware review

Netgear HD/Gamer 5GHz Wireless-N Networking Kit
Over the last few months, I've been working on a wireless solution to, well, set my home up for the web. Being both opinionated and thorough, I've had to do a decent amount of homework - picking my way through a sea of hardware.

And, our winner? Netgear's HD/Gamer 5GHz Wireless-N Networking Kit. With a name like that, I was sure it would come packed with fashionable blue LED's and a bucket load of hype.

Many people are aware of the differences between wired and wireless home networking - one basically needs cables and one doesn't. This difference became especially relevant 3 months ago when I moved into a new apartment, where drilling holes and running cables was a definite no-no.

Wired networks are generally everyone's first choice because they're more secure. Set-up cost is usually a lot cheaper and you can use a switch to ensure your bandwidth isn't monopolised by housemates or misused by dodgy neighbours. Lastly, it's fast - 100+MB fast, fast enough for pretty much anything.

That said, the entrance of wireless on the networking scene has been welcome. Wireless avoids most reach problems and generally looks a lot tidier than having cables running everywhere. As its popularity continues to grow, we're seeing the price of wireless networking gear becoming more and more affordable.

For me to even consider any given wireless equipment, it needs to pass through one key test - I need to be able to pass a signal from my ADSL router to the room where my PC lives. This is no mean feat considering the direct line from the access point and the PC's is interrupted by a laundry filled with large metallic appliances and several reinforced concrete walls.

To make matters worse, being in an apartment block of people around my age (and apparently close to my own interest in technology), means I can detect around 14 other wireless access points on any given night. This pretty much makes it harder to receive wireless signals because of all the extra noise.

My new solution? The Netgear HD/Gamer Kit. Out of the box, you receive 2 devices which are effectively both wireless routers on their own. One is configured as an access point (like any other wireless router) while the second device is configured as a bridge (basically a big external boxed up wireless card, with 6 antennas).

Setting it up was surprisingly easy. It involved:

1. Connecting the bridge to my PC; and
2. Connecting the access point to my ADSL router

Before I'd even had a chance to start looking at networking settings - magic, it just connected.

In terms of signal, the Netgear HD/Gamer Kit operates on a different band to most consumer wireless devices, making it less likely to suffer from interference and noise. At the distance I'm running the system, I receive about 150-ish MB of speed which allows me to transfer about 1GB of data to other machines on my wireless network in around 2-3 minutes.

All in all, I've been quite impressed with this device. It's small, light (about the same size of a hardback novel), stable and secure, and doesn't sport blue flashing lights.

Dane Nattrass is an iiNet Systems Engineer, with a very nice hat.

feature - HTML tables

Now we're cooking with gas. Last month we checked out some basic HTML for text formatting, this time round we're going to wade into something a little more involved, and learn to build a table in HTML.

What is a table?
Sidestepping furniture jokes, an HTML table is a way of structuring your content in a 'row and column' layout, exactly the same way you use tables in Microsoft Word. Building a table in HTML is a useful skill and one of the more complicated aspects you can say you've learned (soon enough).

For the most part, you'd use a table in HTML wherever you need to represent information in a consistent tabular structure. It's not unheard of for people to bend the rules a little and use tables for general layout (setting images and text), but there are much better ways to do those things, which we'll cover in the months to come.

The story so far
So we've done a bit of work with tags. We know that tags commonly come in pairs, with a start tag and an end tag, like this:

We also know that tags can live inside other tags, as long as they don't overlap. So while this is okay:

...this is not so flash:

Armed with that knowledge, we should have enough to get over the line this month. So let's have a look at what we're about to do:

cell 1	cell 2
cell 3	cell 4
cell 5	cell 6

Simple enough, right? We're going to create a basic table, with three rows and two columns. That gives us six 'cells' to place content in (3 rows x 2 columns = 6 cells). Now let's look at the parts that make up an HTML table.

Anatomy of a table
In short, a table is composed of cells, arranged into rows. Cells, rows and tables can all be represented by tags, so for our table above, we're looking at three row tags, each with two cell tags inside it.

Table tags are easy enough, they're simply written as <table>. Table rows are written as <tr>, and table cells are written as <td> (which is short for 'table data'). This is what it looks like, when we flesh out the table above:

That might not look so straightforward, so I'll talk you through it.

From the first line down, we start by opening the table with a <table> tag. While it's open, we start a table row with a <tr> tag. Inside that one, we start and finish two data cells with <td></td> tags, then close the row with </tr>. We do that again for two more whole rows, then close the table with a </table> tag.

Now the plain English version: we started a table and put three rows in it. In each of these rows, we put two cells. Then we closed the table off, giving us a three-row, two-column layout.

To show you how this works, have a look at this diagram:

The blue border represents the table tag. It surrounds the rows and the cells, the same way the <table> tag does in the code. The dotted red borders are row tags. They surround only the cells, the same way <tr> does in the code. The green boxes are cell tags. They live inside the rows, the same way <td> does in the code.

Now we're just going to change the <table> tag at the start to say <table border='1' width='400'> to give it a border and some width, then throw it all inside our html template from last month:

Copy that into Notepad, and save it as 'table.html'. You should be able to open that file with your browser and see the end result.

A couple of tweaks
Here's a few things you might like to try out, to get the hang of how tables work.

Adding another row
Adding a new row is simple - all you need to do is copy a full row from the code, and paste it in the code wherever you'd like the new row to exist. Remember that HTML works from the top down, so the first <tr> tag will be the first row, the second will be the second row and so on. For reference, in our above table this code is a complete row:

Adding another column
This one gets a bit trickier. Because there isn't anything like a 'column tag', we can't just duplicate one neat chunk of code to add an extra column. Instead what we need to do is add an extra cell in each row for the new column, which would look something like this:

The trap people sometimes fall into is not knowing which <td> tags represent which columns. Columns are counted in order, so the first column will be the first <td>, the second column will be the second <td> and so on.

So column 1 of the whole table is made up from the first <td> tag in each row.

If we put a new <td> ahead of other <td> tags in the same row, we bump all the <td> tags after it one column across. Feel free to add cells into your table.html file now, see how it all works. Try adding and removing cells to see what it does in your browser (you have my permission to break it).

Merging cells
Here's the big one, this is where you'll need to be on your guard. To merge cells in HTML, we use two tricks: rowspan and colspan. Rowspan allows us to span cells across multiple rows, and colspan does the same across columns. We use colspan like this:

See how we've put colspan="2" inside the td start tag? That means this cell will live in the space that two cells would have lived in otherwise, across two columns. That code above will actually still show a three column, two row layout, but the first cell will span two columns.

Keep in mind that when you've spanned a cell across two columns like this, you don't need to write any code for the second cell - it's already done. That's why the code above only has two cells, even though there are three columns. Cell 2, above, actually sits in the third column. Try it and see.

Lastly, let's have a quick look at rowspan. The same rules apply here as they did for colspan, except we're working across rows now and need to keep a close eye on things. Here's an example of how we'd use it:

That tag with rowspan='2' now spans down into the second row. See how a rowspan in the first row affects the number of cells in the second row? That's because we've occupied space in the second row with a cell started in the first row.

It's a tricky concept to grasp, so I'd suggest having a play around with it to get the hang of things. As a final challenge, see if you can understand how this next example works - a colspan and a rowspan in the same table:

For a bit of a hint, copy it all to a new html file and see how it looks in a browser.

Pulling it all together
This month, we've learned how to structure content in a tabular layout, and mucked around a good deal with rows and columns. What we've looked at is one of the more intricate aspects of composing basic HTML, so if you've come this far we're probably due for a high-five.

The journey continues next month. As always your questions and feedback are welcome at iinewsfeedback@iinet.net.au.

competitions

entertainment

two minute games review - Alone in the Dark
I've been copping a bit of stick lately for being a bit too critical, too harsh in my reviews. Hey, I don't disagree - while there's a sort of sad perversity to one who wields such trivial power, I stand by my guns as a gamer for the people. I'll play the ball as it lies (and reserve the right to moan about it all the way back to the clubhouse). As politely as possible then, let's talk about the new Alone in the Dark.

I hated this game.

Now hate is such a strong word, a word I reserve for special things like early morning runs, elevator conversation, or people who line up at Apple stores. For Alone in the Dark however, I'll drop the H-bomb with merry abandon: occasionally a game is so flawed in design I can't help but wonder what a game tester actually does, and why they're so frequently bad at it.

Let's put this in some sort of rabid context: Alone in the Dark is a mildly scary action game built around a foul-mouthed amnesiac, as he crashes out of a New York apartment complex and into demon-infested Central Park. It's billed as a 1st and 3rd person thriller, shooter, racer, platformer and puzzler - and without question, this over-diversity is the crux of the problem. AitD is aching to do all of these things really well, it wants you to gasp in wonder at its climbing puzzles, it wants you to enjoy the 'freeform' melee and the fire-centric combat. Sadly, it stumbles at every hurdle.

Par exemple - in the opening scenes, you find your protagonist being marched to his own execution, eyes bleary from a nasty bit of interrogation. Click the right stick to blink and clear your eyes of blurry build-up. Now do it again. And again, and again until you lose interest in the novelty of controlling your eyelids and watch the rest of the scene through the eyes of Mr Magoo.

In the ensuing moments, you'll flee a burning building, dotted with zombies and vague platform puzzles. A good deal of the time, you won't know the solution to a particular problem until you've staggered into the wrong end of it, so expect a bit of hearty replay and yellings of 'what, ho' at the TV screen.

It's here that we discuss movement and player control in general, to my mind the one aspect of the game that could have saved the title from my dustbin. Character movement and turning are horribly unresponsive and slow, most apparent when your enemies are leaping at you from the sides. The combat is also dire: swinging blunt instruments with the thumbstick should be fun (think Dead Rising or EA Fight Night) but AitD even manages to balls that up so badly I still don't know what constitutes a successful swing. Fix these two things, and you've potentially got yourself a game.

Instead, you could ignore that suggestion and throw more crap into the pan. Why not introduce an innovative 'live action' inventory system, whereby your character slowly turns out his jacket pockets while demons take his face off? How about strangely frequent abseiling missions? All the fun of climbing with the added hilarity of falling cars. Why not top it off with a couple of rudimentary driving levels, where one wrong move in your generic bum-heavy car means starting the level from scratch?

There are numerous innovations in AitD, clever snippets of new gameplay that would make a fitting entrée for an otherwise sturdy game engine. Mushing so many ideas together hasn't made this a winner though, as the core dynamics and the natural flow of the game just aren't there. The only innovation I enjoyed was the game's in-built ability to 'chapter-skip' to the next scene.

I'll be frank - I didn't play this game out as much as I should. Every time I picked it up to give it one more round 'for a fair and even-handed review' it swiftly had me shutting the console off and going for a sulk. If the fist hasn't connected yet, let me be blunt: I love games, this isn't one.

site scan

Bored? Give these sites a go. Our first two features have a high potential hilarity index. While we're not encouraging you to click away during precious work hours, they're great for a bad case of the 'afternoonies'.

www.myheritage.com
MyHeritage, an online genealogy and facial-recognition service has a neat little application on its site. The 'Celebrity Collage' application lets you upload one of your own photos, which then runs through a facial-recognition scanner, and matches you up to your celebrity twins. Results range from ego-boosting to downright side-splitting.

www.taaz.com
For the fashion conscious and style savvy, Taaz offers up the latest in beauty tips and hot trends. What we're more interested in however, is the free online 'Virtual Makeover' tool. Upload one of your mugs and see what a new hairstyle or makeup can do for you. Alternatively, do what we're doing - upload someone else's photo!

www.faceoftomorrow.com
As our global village continues to become a smaller place, some are starting to ask - "what will people look like tomorrow?". Face of Tomorrow attempts to find this face by taking photographs of real people, from all around the world, and compositing their faces to create a typical face. What we get is a new person - a mix of all the people in that city.