|
Follow-up on comment by Joe Hartman made to Bob Thompson:
You wrote to Bob Thompson...
I saw this on Bob's page and thank you for the comment. Between the
four of us, I think we can provide a good variety of content, and compensate
for any individual's periodic down-time.
About web page updates. I notice the same effect sometimes, mostly
on Tom's site (like this morning), but my take on it is that it is somehow
server related, as if the server is at times serving an old cached copy.
It is clearly related to particular host sites, but oddly sporadic, and only
occasionaly browser dependent. Forcing reloads sometimes helps, sometimes
not, maybe as often as it is browser dependent.
Attempting to set forced update in the meta tag is about as effective.
Bob suggests cached requests at proxy or ISP, but I find it difficult to
see how this can be so selective or sporadic for particular sites.
Whatever the cause, and it seems pretty mysterious at present, it is
a real pain for a web author trying to publish timely updates. Readers notice
it quickly when dealing with daily-updated sites like ours, but I wonder
how many other sites show the same lack of updated serving without it being
immediately apparent.
Joe Hartman answered at length (relevant parts quoted below), and
yes, I am still interested in feedback from users about
Outlook, and will continue to be so for some time.
(Note that Jerry Pournelle
is collecting "annoyances" on Outlook in the hope of influencing future versions,
so there is your chance to contribute to that effort as well --
email link to Jerry).
Don't know if you are still looking for opinions on Outlook but I use
Outlook 98 for my e-mail package at work and like it. I have tried Netscape
Mail (4.5) for about a month (after using Outlook 97/98 for a year) and hated
it, Eudora Pro for a day but could not easily figure out how to set it up
to check three different ISPs at the same time and Pegasus Mail which I used
for a couple of years.
I used Pegasus Mail because it was free (I use NewsExpress for Usenet
groups) and I do not get enough e-mail to justify buying a package. I do
not use Outlook for scheduling yet (still prefer a paper calendar) and have
a very powerful computer at work so in my work environment I have only one
real complaint with Outlook. The only problem, actually more of an annoyance,
I have is between Opera and Outlook. If I click on a mailto link on a web
page Outlook responds with a "The command line argument is not valid. Verify
the switch you are using". To get around this I copy the link, paste it into
Outlook and delete the mailto: section. I also do not use Word as my editor
because we ran into some problems at the airfield where I used to work with
respect to http links within the document. This was a year ago and that is
about all I can remember about this problem.
My biggest complaint with Outlook comes from home where I use it and
a Shiva account to connect to my Exchange server at work. Since I had to
set it up for work I went ahead and used Outlook to check my ISP and a second
work account that support pop and smtp. Since I only have the equivalent
of a Pentium 90 w/64k it takes 60-90 seconds to bring the program up (could
have been the number of messages I keep) and sometimes takes an exceptionally
long time to get new mail over a 56k modem (usually connected at 46-49k).
This was not consistent but seemed to happen the first time I checked mail
each day. This bothered me enough that I have switched to the newest version
of Outlook Express (from IE 5.0) because I very rarely check my work account
and was tired of waiting on Outlook.
I used to use Pegasus mail at home mostly because it was free but
switched to Outlook because I already used it at work and had figured out
how to use a lot of its features and really liked the rule feature. I also
liked the fact the Outlook Express could import all of my messages from Outlook
98 although it seemed to have some trouble with the contacts I finally did
get them imported as well. I was a little disappointed with the beta of Express
because it seemed to take forever (2-3 minutes) to check a long message for
html links. This problem seems to have gone away with the released version
and I have been happy with Outlook Express.
Joe also had this to say about the webpage update problem:
Tom and I went through a discussion on this a couple of weeks ago but
my problem with Tom's site went away after I started using Opera rather than
IE. I don't know if this is related to the browser switch or if his ISP has
changed something. I have never seen the problem on Jerry's or your page
and prior to this week has not seen it on Bob's.
Interestingly, Bob Thompson mentioned today that he has seen the
same effect (lack of visible updates) on occasion when reading my pages.
I have further comments, but it is late, so I will defer them and my replies
until the morning (my time).
|
Mail
your comments to:
bo@leuf.com
