Offline Browsing: A reasonably priced solution

Vishnu K. Mahmud Contributor Jakarta

In the U.S., people pay a flat rate of about US$20 per month for unlimited local phone calls in addition to another $20 per month for unfettered Internet access. No download limitations, no per-megabyte charges, no time limit. In Indonesia, on the other hand, we get the double whammy. Not only must we pay by-the- minute telephone charges, but the hourly Net costs as well.

In the wake of increasing prices by telephone company Telkom, more and more people are cutting back their time spent online to defray costs. Unlike General Packet Radio Service, where you are charged by the amount of data downloaded and uploaded, telephone and Internet charges are priced by the amount of time spent online, whenever you are downloading a file or reading a virtual newspaper. Needless to say, idle time (when the computer is not downloading or uploading, just waiting for the next command) can be rather costly.

Here are a few tips to help you utilize your online time wisely. You should download all that you want to view in one go, log off the Net (and telephone), then leisurely read all your websites without incurring the expenses of idle time. This is called Offline Browsing, where you are actually surfing the Web while being disconnected from the Internet.

Of course, some links may not work since you are viewing a page that has been cached or stored on your hard drive. For "external" links (pages that are not located on your computer), you would have to access the Internet again.

The simplest form of offline browsing can be done using e- mail. Many news websites (such as CNN or Satunet) offer an e-mail option where the news can be delivered to your in-box for free. You can sign up for this feature and receive condensed daily e- mails with the latest news.

This may pale in comparison to the dynamic and constantly "breaking news" nature of the Net, but for those who just need the latest daily instead of hourly news, this feature is a winner in terms of costs and time spent. Note: This works best with e- mail clients located on your computer, not with Web based e-mail providers. We're trying to cut down our access time. By downloading our e-mails to the computer, we can read them offline.

If you are a member of a Web discussion mailing list (such as an e-group), you may want to aggregate the e-mails prior to dispatch for your in-box. For example, Yahoo Groups has a facility that will collect all the e-mails of the day within the group and merge them into one combined message. This is preferable instead of having 3-dozen e-mails, each with their own taglines, banner ads and graphical formats.

Unfortunately, utilizing this method does have its drawbacks. Non-text e-mail attachments from individual messages will not be included in the consolidated group e-mail so you would have to access them individually from your Yahoo Group homepage.

There is also a website that specializes in bringing the Web to your e-mail address. Web2Mail (web2mail.com) offers a free service for delivering a website (or a page from that site) complete with images and hyperlinks should you wish. Remember, the larger the e-mail, with text, music, etc., the longer it will take to download to your computer. Signing up and setting the websites you wish to be delivered to your e-mail address is as simple as filling in a form.

For those who can allocate a little more time online and computer-processing power may consider obtaining programs to bring the Web to them. Offline Explorer and Teleport Pro are but a few programs that will "capture" a website completely (HTML, JavaScript, images and all), store them on your hard drive for later viewing. Make sure your hard disk has space, though!

These programs collect and download the websites in real time so it may take some time to complete compared to the e-mail option whose content has already been collected by the Internet site ready for delivery). Some programs can even be automated to connect online routinely and grab the latest snapshot of the website at set intervals.

You can search for these programs in CNET's download.com with the key word "offline browsing".

These are but a few tips to help save money and time online. As a heavy Internet user, I read the news from five countries, comics from 12 sites and computer journals of three networks. Using these techniques have helped me to reduce the amount of time spent online while increasing quality time reading. After all, the Internet is supposed to bring knowledge and information to the user without bankrupting you.