[log in to unmask],Net wrote at 00:52 on 18/02/98  
about "ePulse".


I hope you enjoyed the article.

GP-UK is a high performance system for us sophisticates - (but 
surely you don't read and delete _on-line_?)  so the time of access 
is short but somewhere back in the past somebody spent a while 
setting it up, and you invested time in getting to know your OLR and 
e-mail client.

Using a Web browser to generate messages into a forum is a slow and 
intrinsically on-line activity which I would steer clear of.  
A constructive suggestion, which I shall therefore make to the 
editor of e-Pulse, would be to put in a mailto: link for each forum. 
 Thus allowing the sophisticates to either capure the internet 
address of the forum, or generate an e-mail at the time of seeing it 
and without slowing down browsing.
The First Class software which the Devon Medical Information 
Resource uses allows either of those entries to a forum or web page.
The only disadvantage is that unless one limits mail into the forum 
to known e-mail addresses, spam may get in .

e-Pulse was running fast enough last night when I demonstrated it 
and various other bits of internet to a practice in Plymouth, but I 
agree it is not a fast site, I suspect that interest is at a peak, 
and if it continus to be well used then perhaps they will do what 
all providers have to do and use a wider connection.

One suggestion I routinely give people bothered by the World Wide 
Wait and follow myself is to run two three or more copies of the 
browser, (actually I use Opera whose default behaviour is to oppen 3 
browser windows) and thus one can load several pages from the same 
site, or better browse several sites each in a separate group of 
windows.

Oh, and turn the pictures off.  e-Pulse has more images in its pages 
than I would put in a site, and therefore whatevr speed the site 
works at, the telephone line imposes a bottleneck.

Of course, once you have the pictures, it will load rapidly next 
time if your cache is correctly set.  Opera has a clever switch that 
allows a particular window to either load all images, or show only 
those images already in cache, or not show them at all.
Like frames, images are rarely necessary, in fact rarely useful, and 
although an image may be worth a thousand words, it too often takes 
a thousand times as long to load as well.


--- OffRoad 1.9r registered to Adrian Midgley


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