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editor's note

Last month's how-to article on using iinet webspace struck a positive chord with a few of our readers - some for simply demystifying FTP, others for the promise of similar tutorials to come. We're going to do our best in the coming months to keep this ball rolling and leap a few of the common technical hurdles for making your own personal 'dent' online.

This month's how-to looks at some basic concepts for using HTML to build a simple webpage, which turned out to be a bigger subject than I really expected. I've cut my losses (and my pride) and decided that basic HTML probably needs two or three articles alone - so this edition we'll build up a bit of momentum, then continue the banter into July and August.

Riding shotgun on our educational bandwagon this month is a run-through for making use of your bundled VoIP account. We see a fair amount of customers with active VoIP numbers going unused, when cheaper calls could literally be a switched cable away.

There's plenty more happening this June, and three brilliant giveaways this month. Site scan also pushes a handy selection of gift shopping sites, if for no other reason than shopping is, well... fun.

Welcome to June at iiNet, let's get stuck in.

Niaal Holder
iiNews Editor

news

Heritage Perth Hi-Tech Trail
In a world first, iiNet has helped Heritage Perth launch an innovative new historical trail concept - combining history lessons from the past, with mobile technology of the present.

Saying adios to the traditional maps, guidebooks and pamphlets, the Heritage Perth Hi-Tech Trail brings tourism into the digital age, by promoting a more active and engaging experience. The trail takes travelers on a trek through 10 WiFi enabled heritage sites, allowing them to download free text, audio and photos about each building straight to their mobile phone (or any WiFi enabled device, like a PDA or laptop) along the way.

Heritage Perth's trail caters to people of all ages and levels of technological know-how, while offering visitors the freedom to explore at their own pace.

If you'd like to see what the trail has on offer, visit www.hptrails.com.au.

iiTalkpack
This month, we've added a new offering to our range of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) options. iiTalkpack is a VOIP service that includes all your local and national calls for just $20 per month. If you're looking to reduce your household phone bill then this product might just be right for you.

You can find out more about iiTalkpack, otherwise our Sales Team would be more than happy to talk you through the details on 13 19 17.

Broadband for Baby Boomers

The next round of 'Broadband for Baby Boomers' workshops is just around the corner. Our popular workshops introduce participants to some of what the internet has to offer in two modules:

• 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 it's 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 join in, you'll need to note down our next workshop dates:

• Wednesday 2 July (Module 1)
• Wednesday 9 July (Module 2)

Both sessions run from 6pm to 8pm and are delivered by iiNet staff, at our Adelaide Terrace office in Perth. 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).

business news

Take your business online
You may have noticed that more and more businesses are buying up online 'real estate' (webspace) and establishing websites. While some of us are still happy to let our fingers do the walking, most of us find it more effective to let them do some mouse-clicking instead.

With this in mind, giving your business an internet presence makes a lot of sense. Being online can give businesses a competitive edge and help even the smallest company reach out to more customers, without draining the bank balance.

First things first, you'll need to sort out a domain and some webhosting. iiNet Business offers domain registration (your own address on the internet) along with a range of website hosting services to help you launch your business online.

You can speak to someone from our Business Support Team on 13 24 49, who'll be happy to go through the ins and outs, or read up more on domain registration and website hosting.

VPN is here!
Our Virtual Private Network (VPN) for businesses has taken off. VPN's give businesses the ability to share information and services across a secure network, without the hassle of installing complex infrastructure and equipment themselves.

Want to find out more? Speak to our Business Support Team on 13 24 49 or read up more on VPN.

support & services

Tech Tip: Making the most of your VoIP - with Michael Inglis
While more people use VoIP now than ever before, we still see a good deal of people using their landline number, even though they have a perfectly good VoIP service lying around. As with any other new technology, you might feel like a fish out of water at first but once you change a few habits, you'll never look back.

The first thing to consider is what you have plugged in and where. Most people leave their main handset plugged into their landline, which means that when they pick up to make a call, they're charged at normal landline rates. Try plugging the handset you're used to into the VoIP socket in the back of your modem or, better still, if you have a cordless phone system plug that in and make the savings two, three or more times over.

Plenty of people hang onto their landline number simply because it's the number they're used to - it's the number everyone calls them on which is perfectly understandable. If this sounds like you, you might want to try diverting calls from the landline to your VoIP number. By doing this, people can reach you on both numbers, with all your incoming calls being channeled through to the one handset - simple.

Another thing you might want to look at is the list of all the bonus features you get with a VoIP number. Voice mail, caller ID blocking and call return will each set you back a few dollars per month with most landline providers but with VoIP, they're just three of the services we throw in for free.

So what about the call quality? This is one of the most common questions we get asked from people unsure about making the switch. The short answer here is that, even speeds at the lower end of the broadband are more than sufficient to handle VoIP calls.

That said, there are still a couple of things to bear in mind. While the calls don't take up a huge amount of your bandwidth, they do have to share the connection with any computers you have connected. If you have kids downloading music and video while you're trying to make a call, you might notice the quality drop every now and then.

One solution here is to keep an eye on how many things are sharing the connection. But if you're using one of iiNet's Belkin routers, there is one function you can enable to do this for you. Quality of Service (QoS) allows you to set aside a portion of your connection specifically for VoIP - so if your Internet connection is the freeway, your VoIP line has a bus lane so you never have to worry about peak hour traffic.

If you want to try this out, give our Support Team a call on 13 22 58 and we'll help you walk through the process.

security watch

Phishing alert
Straight off the back of last month's phishing article, we've received reports that a fraudulent email is making its rounds to some of iiNet's VTown customers.

The subject line reads "Please protect your Vtown.com.au account from being closed" and asks customers to reply to a bogus email address, supplying their surname and password, to prevent closure of their account.

A copy of the email text is below:

If you receive this email, delete it immediately. iiNet will never ask you to confirm your password via email. If you receive an email that asks you to do so, always check with iiNet support first by calling us on 13 22 58 or emailing a copy of the email to support@iinet.net.au.

If you did reply to this hoax email we recommend that you reset your password straight away by visiting Toolbox or by calling our Support Team on 13 22 58.

feature - HTML basics

Last month, we had a good look at the ins and outs of your iiNet webspace - uploading, downloading and viewing the contents online. This month, we'll take the first steps into understanding HTML, to really take advantage of our space on the net.

What is HTML?
HTML is the building block of the Internet. Most webpages are built using HTML in some form or another. It's not a computer programming language, nor do you need to be a programmer to understand it - in fact, it's dead easy once you get stuck in.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Breaking that down, HyperText is the way we move about the web via text links (hyperlinks). Markup is what we use to tell browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer how to treat text and other such content - similar to how you tell Microsoft Word to make text bold, or place an image. Finally, we call it a Language because it's a set way of 'speaking' to web browsers, letting them know how to present our webpage.

To wrap that into a ball, Hyper Text Markup Language is the means by which we tell a browser to present text and image content, amongst other things. Without this language, our webpages would be a big chunk of unformatted, plain text.

What we're going to look at this month is how to present and style basic text in a webpage using HTML - we'll look at more complex HTML next month, but for now let's get acquainted with the basics.

What makes up an HTML document?
A basic HTML document is a single file, comprised of a 'head' section (where we outline attributes of the document, like its title) and a 'body' section (where we put the content we'd like to display on the page). A very simple HTML document might look like this:

There's a lot to take in there, so stick with me. All those words inside angular brackets are what we call tags, and they define areas of the document to be certain things.

For the most part, they come in pairs - one tag to start the element, one tag to end it. What this means is anything between the start tag and the end tag takes on the characteristics of that tag. So anything inside paragraph tags becomes a paragraph, and anything inside heading tags becomes a heading.

Let's look at an example. Here's a paragraph tag:

The paragraph tag is represented by a 'p' inside angular brackets (we'll look at other common tag abbreviations later). The end tag is the same as the start tag, it just has a leading '/'. This works for most common HTML tags, such as this for bold text:

and this for italic text:

When you save these lines in an HTML document, they will display in the webpage as paragraphs, bolded text or italics as you've set out. You can even combine tags, to generate other effects, like this:

In a web browser, this might look like:

here is some bold, here is some italic.

The trick here is to note that both the bold and italic tags sat inside the paragraph tag. In HTML, you'll find this happens a good deal - it's often referred to as nesting tags to have one sit completely inside another. The only thing to watch out for is overlapping tags, where one tag starts inside another, but finishes outside, like this:

Notice that the bold tag started inside the paragraph tag, but ended outside. While this won't cause too many errors right now, it's a good habit to keep your tags completely inside or outside other tags. We call this a parent-child relationship, the parent being the outside tag and the child on the inside.

The parent-child relationship becomes important for defining the 'structure' of an HTML page, which is the way we order our HTML tags so they are easily readable. The best way to do this is to use new lines and indents (sometimes called 'white space'). For example, we could write four HTML paragraphs like this:

But it would be much more sensible to break them up into readable chunks, like this:

This is just a tidy way of presenting our content and tags in such a fashion that we can clearly see what is going where. Web browsers will ignore new lines when they read the HTML, so use them as often as you like.

How can I see it working?
Now that we're familiar with tags, let's prepare a basic HTML document. Open up a text editor, like Notepad, then copy the code below into the empty document:

...then save the document as 'test.html' (it's important to add the '.html' file extension to the name, otherwise the browser won't treat it as an HTML document). Don't worry about the <html> and <head> tags for now, we can leave them as is.

Once you've done this, go to your browser and choose 'file', then 'open' test.html from wherever you saved it. You should see the page presented nicely, without all those tags, but with varying font sizes and bolded text.

Feel free to go back into Notepad and change anything inside the two tags, as this is where your browser gets your content from.

Here's a few tag elements to get you started:

<h1>	this is a large heading size
<p>	this is a paragraph tag
<strong>	this is for bold text
<em>	this is for italic text
<u>	this is for underlined text

There's a whole lot more to learn about HTML, which we'll get to over the coming months. For now, here's one final trick to get you on your feet:

If you feel like giving it a shot, this <a> tag (known as an anchor) allows us to turn plain text into a hyperlink. By itself, an <a> tag won't do much - but if you add in a web address as above with 'href', which is shorthand for hypertext reference, whatever text sits between that and the end tag will become linked text, like this:

this is a link

Even though you start the <a> tag with an 'href' attribute, you only need to close with the </a> tag, you don't need to type out the rest.

Pulling it all together
What we've covered here is a very basic look at text formatting in HTML. There are HTML editors available for download that will often prepare the code for you, which is handy, but it's always useful to have a grasp of what's going on under the hood.

Next month, we'll take it up a notch, and look at a few other HTML elements to add to your webpage. If you have any questions or suggestions about this article, feel free to email them through to iinewsfeedback@iinet.net.au.

competitions

Survey winners
A huge thanks to the many customers who responded to our Naked DSL survey last month - the response was overwhelming! Each and every response provides us with useful information to help us make our products even better.

We're pleased to announce the three lucky customers who won a prize for their efforts. Congratulations Veronica Hosking from Dee Why NSW, Jan Karpinski from Morley WA and John Dimoff from Safety Bay WA.

entertainment

two minute games review - Ninja Gaiden 2 (xbox 360)

Playing Ninja Gaiden 2 has broken my brain.

Never have I loved and hated a game in such equal portions, that I was actually enthused about re-playing levels that made me put my foot through the telly just a moment before. It's like having Claudia Schiffer round for tea, only to discover she insists on throwing all your furniture out the window and setting fire to your rug - sure, you'd prefer she didn't do that, but can you argue with that smile? Come on, you never needed that couch anyway. There's a good lad. Oh look there goes the bed.

This, in a nutshell, is NG2: a gorgeous and enjoyable romp, cut with some absurd and irrational moments of absolute frustration. While the expansive levels are great fun to traipse through, the frequent boss battles are quite the opposite.

While I can't argue with a game that prides itself on traditional difficulty, there are occasional moments in NG2 where I felt as though victory was beyond my ability to survive with my sense of reason intact. Most of the boss battles seem to require death two or three times over before an appropriate strategy can be cooked up, some of them even kill you as a reward for winning.

Ignoring the boss fights, Ninja Gaiden 2 is terribly good fun. Your indefatigable ninja hero is nimble and responsive, his weapon proficiency providing the cornerstone to the game's pleasures. Straight and bloody combat makes this game what it is: perfectly rendered, fluid martial arts motion with tens of moves per weapon, and plenty of weapons to find. Beating the Shinto out of an oncoming army with the lunar staff or the sickle-and-chain is seamlessly violent hedonism. Flinging tonfa around for the first time had me giggling like an embarrassing 28 year old.

If you've played the original Ninja Gaiden, you'll recognise a few details. Rapid blocking and countering, weapon upgrades and wanting to throw your controller across the room. NG2 hasn't mucked with this formula too much, however a notable addition is the system of maiming and 'obliteration': if in the course of combat you happen to take off your opponent's leg or arm (this happens a lot) you can initiate a coup de grace, to ensure his head is relieved of its body with swift abandon. When you're whirling your scythe at pace, trust me - limbs go flying. Sometimes they even stick to walls.

While the game itself is downright stunning to behold and the levels great fun to hack through, I simply cannot stress enough how unpleasant some of the boss battles are. Across the 14 chapters, each boss fight (of which there are waaay more than 14) was in some way chaotic, brutish and ridiculous. True, some of them had predictable patterns and habits, but many were just plain silly. The end boss 'showcase' for chapter 14 defies tolerance.

I don't want to paint it as a bad game per se; it really is quite the opposite. If you fancy some old-school action, expose yourself to this title sharpish, for it is a shining modern example of action gaming. The boss fights however, ensure I just don't feel the urge to play it through a second time around.

site scan

It's been one of those marathon birthday months for us in the iiNet office, which means more cake, more parties and more gifts. All fine and dandy if you're on the receiving end, not so easy for those on the buying end.

To help make the burden of giving a fraction easier, we've done the hard work for you and dug up some great shopping sites.

www.boxedup.com
The ultimate shopping wish list, BoxedUp takes window-shopping to a whole new level. As users pick their way through a plethora of fancy gadgets and new toys, they'll have the option to add items to their own 'things I want/need' list to share with others. Seriously takes the pain out of buying.

www.latestbuy.com.au
With a humble beginning as a novelty store, the good folks at LatestBuy now offer an extensive mix of quirky and playful items. Here you'll find such gems as Tengu (the virtual USB lip-sync & expression specialist brick), the Flying Alarm Clock and, for a bargain $29.95, Battling R/C Sumo Wrestlers.

www.thinkgeek.com
If you happen to be a geek, have friends who are geeks, or you're just chasing something geeky - this is the site for you. Enough said.

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sales@iinet.net.au

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bizsupport@iinet.net.au

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