Surf's Up

AOL

New Terms of Service go into effect July 15 - Here's the low down and how you can protect yourself.

America spams members with product and service offers. They've created the Marketing Preferences area to let you know more about this "serivce", and to provide you with the option of not receiving such offers.

Some examples of the types of spam include:

- - Software

- Long distance phone service.

- Products that carry the AOL brand, such as the America Online Visa Card.

You can choose not to receive these offers by telephone, e-mail, U.S. mail, or pop-up screens. To do so, just click on the appropriate button to the menu that is displayed when you go to KEYWORD Marketing Preferences, then follow the instructions provided. You can also choose to remove your name and address from the mailing lists AOL provides to other companies by clicking on the button labelled "U.S. Mail from Other Organizations".

They also provide information about services that the Direct Marketing Association provides to reduce the amount of advertising mail and phone calls that you receive.

Mail Preference Service
If you want to reduce the amount of national advertising mail you receive at home, send your name and address to the Direct Marketing Association's Mail Preference Service (MPS):
Mail Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 9008
Farmingdale, NY 11735-9008

After a few months, the MPS will reduce the amount of advertising mail you receive. You will continue to receive mail from companies with which you do business.

Names remain part of the MPS for five years. After five years, you will need to register with the MPS again.

If you continue to receive unwanted mail after a few months, the Direct Marketing Association suggests that you write directly to the mailer to request that your name be removed from the mailer's list.

Telephone Preference Service
If you want to reduce the amount of national advertising calls you receive at home, send your name, address, area code and telephone number to the Direct Marketing Association's Telephone Preference Service (TPS):

Telephone Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 9014
Farmingdale, NY 11735-9014

After a few months, the TPS will reduce the amount of advertising calls you receive from national marketers such as credit card and magazine subscription companies. Some local organizations and charities may not participate.

Names remain part of the TPS for five years. After five years, you will need to register with the TPS again.

If you continue to receive unwanted phone calls after a few months, the Direct Marketing Association suggests that you request your name be removed from a company's list when they call.

To CANCEL YOUR AOL ACCOUNT
Thanks to loyal listener Ralph for the following info:

Last week a woman inquired about stopping her AOL account. I too am sick and tired of AOL's strong-arming and have canceled my account. To fellow listeners of "Surf's Up" :the procedure is to go to keyword "cancel" while logged on to AOL. They will provide several options to cancel. I have chosen to call the toll free number and tell them exactly why I no longer desire their service (number: 1, 888,265,8008). My reason: security-or, lack of; I have been spammed countless times and enough is enough, plus (to Webula), the mail controls have never worked for me. I continue to get mega-emails stating "I've missed your last...", or "why didn't you write back..." yada, yada". Calling them may directly may be the best, fastest way. That way one gets his/her current billing status.

I hope this might help your/us listeners, and although I am a microsoft lemming, continue the good work and advice (I am looking into "Red Hat Lennix" so, all may not be lost! LOL).

Ralph

Screwed Up Images in AOL

You know how you can be looking at a great web site then go to aol and find that the images have a line, bar or split in them? Well, here's the reason. (Even though we've been saying it all along, this is another opinion.)

Recently saw some discussion about what AOL can do to images. I found a reference and an interesting quote:

From HTML Writer's Guild Discussion List > For example, what appears to work well in a Netscape browser on a UNIX > workstation connected to your web site via your office local area > network (LAN) may be totally useless for AOL members > accessing the same pages using Microsoft Internet Explorer via > dial-up.

see:
http://webmaster.info.aol.com/BrowFrameSet.html

And yes some of the worst rumors are true.

They do run images through a special lossy compression to produce smaller images to go into their cache I guess. I'm just trying to figure out how they can improve on some of the images that I have crunched down in terms of colors (and browser safe colors) and size. Many of the images I pushed down until one more change and the colors turn to crud, so I would guess that what AOL see's of my work if they enable compression is that crud. (to put it politely). It might be a good idea for some sites where people don't struggle over making pages download in a reasonable amount of time, but for sites that take the effort to create images that are optimized, the results must look dreadful, and the sites that don't give a hoot will have the images come out somewhat more reasonable looking.

I have no idea, since no one in this area has AOL. (AOL's POP is a long distance call currently where I live).

Interesting in depth information about how the caching works and how to optimize the header of your page to work well with the AOL proxy caching. They even provide the methods of calculating caching.

Anyway, if one is designing for AOL, this is a very through discussion of how to best optimize a site for AOL.

later... Jim Tom Polk

In the Las Vegas area fax 702-363-6230 for advertising information.