January 2003

With over half a million websites dedicated to Robert Burns, the searcher is spoilt for choice.  This year’s Burns Night was probably best served by www.robertburns.org which offers every imaginable resource and useful links within Scotland.  One of the most beguiling is to www.scotwebshops.com/ekilts where an e-kilt could radically change your image, as could checking out the site’s 543 references to ‘haggis’. 

Sir Henry Raeburn’s portrait of the Reverend Robert Walker serenely skating his way across Duddingston  Loch is the all-pervasive image used by the Scottish National Galleries to captivate the occasional visitor to Edinburgh.  To see it online, go to  www.nationalgalleries.org/index.asp to prepare for your visit.  This website lists information about the National Gallery of Scotland, where the picture is exhibited and also about the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Dean Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Scottish National Photography Collection.   Easy to navigate and comprehensive in its coverage, this website ensures that the visitor can prepare for an interesting visit to the city of Edinburgh.  A larger version of Raeburn’s picture is available at www.abcgallery.com/R/raeburn/raeburn8.html for a free download to your screen.  

The Catholic Church in Scotland is equally well served.  ‘Welcome to Catholic Scotland’, reads the banner headline to their website at www.catholic-scotland.org.uk  and there follow a list of resources.  These include information about diocese, parishes, religious communities, youth provision and so on. A link takes the visitor to a list of Mass times in the Scottish Highlands.   From a further link at the bottom of the home page, you can click and read the Scottish Catholic Observer, which is also available at www.scottishcatholicobserver.com  a site with a good clean design that gives free access to the paper.  The final Catholic resource which merits a visit is the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund at www.sciaf.org.uk/ a site which uses photographs and text to great effect.  To reference these sites at speed, visit www.cathport.com where worldwide resources are available only two clicks from your screen.  Alternatively, visit www.laviniabyrne.co.uk where these reviews are stored and easy to search in the section called Tablet reviews.  Readers’ contributions both for Cathport and for this column are always welcome.  Email me on lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk to send your ideas for inclusion.

Travelling to Scotland is easy with the no-frills airlines such as those provided by sites such as  www.justtheflight.com/ and accommodation can be found through www.bedbreakfast-hotels.co.uk/hotels/hotel_search.asp?country=Scotland while coach travellers can visit www.gobycoach.com/ for full information about national routes.  The official site at  www.edinburgh.org will supply all you need to know about events and restaurants, as well as how to search for your Scottish ancestors.  Enthusiasts of architecture will enjoy the elegant site at www.archiseek.com/guides/scotland/edinburgh/ where you can visit the department store Jenner’s without being tempted to shop.  In any case online shopping at www.formans.co.uk/index2.htm will bring the best possible smoked salmon to your very own front door. 

On a lighter note, visit the ‘Gadgets for God’ section of  http://ship-of-fools.com to find a truly unexpected present.  That Bible belt will hold up the most intransigent of trousers.  Maybe the Reverend Robert Walker wore one to skate his way across Duddingston  Loch.  

October 2002

Ireland’s internet profile is fascinating.  The most obvious example is the The Irish Times site, modestly entitled www.ireland.com where the day’s newspaper can be read online and other resources are available to subscribers.   This site represents ‘second-generation’ internet access, with  individual or corporate fee-paying subscribers now having to pay for the news service whilst the rest of us can log on for free.  For a random run around Dublin’s national museums and galleries, try www.cultureireland.ie where they are listed and the current exhibition of Jules Breton’s work is not to be missed.  At www.cultureireland.com the net is widened to include shops and pubs and all the things that a visitor might need during a brief visit to the capital, while www.local.ie/ takes a broader sweep and gives information for the whole country.  The website at  http://islandireland.com is a dream venue, giving full information about every aspect of contemporary and historical Irish cultural life.  One not to miss.   To check out a telephone number in Eire go to www.goldenpages.ie  which is more accurately a yellow pages service. 

Other weighty considerations are addressed by www.trocaire.org which is the Irish Catholic Agency for World Development.  This is an excellent and varied site with a wealth of information from around the world.  More locally, another first-rate site describes the Wexford Festival at www.wexfordopera.com listing this year’s programme and giving details for 2003.  At www.skoool.ie there are a selection of educational resources which repay attention from children and their parents alike.  And finally an unusual route for examining hopes for peace in the North Of Ireland, a lovely site at www.linenhall.com which takes the searcher to a public lending library which, according to Seamus Heaney, has done much to ‘promote   enlightenment and to represent the promise of a better future for all its citizens’.  

Church sites in Ireland include the Bishops Conference’s admirable site at www.catholiccommunications.ie where links helpfully take visitors to a variety of resources.   I notice though that if the Church is about the community of the faithful, it is a shame that this site opens with a picture of a building.  Contents-wise ten on ten, but think about it: the visual message of the internet is as important as that of television and there is a limit to how many bricks and slates (which could be anywhere, though I assume that this is St Patrick’s, Maynooth) a searcher can bear.   A far more Irish feel is given by the new Jesuit-sponsored site at www.catholicireland.net/ which has a crackerjack ‘look’ and quality information to match.  Now inevitably one of its links is to the highly acclaimed and successful www.sacredspace.ie where design and content blend totally successfully to give prayer resources to go.  I have reviewed this site previously and have no hesitation in recommending it once again as it goes from strength to strength.

Other links to ‘soulsearching’ and ‘getting married’ demonstrate that the designers are totally on top of the internet plot.  These new sites cater for all honest inquirers and are written in language that would be accessible to people who might also be regulars at the most famous of all Irish locations:   www.guinness.com which is notorious amongst web addicts everywhere as a gem of a site.  If you are planning to design your own website or to have one designed for your community or congregation, visit this site to get a grip on the potential of the internet.   The section called ‘grain to glass’ is a lovely piece of narrative and a model of its kind.   As a final accolade to the stout and another idea for your own website design, consider the resources at www.guinness.com/guinness/en_ZZ/doing/downloads/0,6533,125540_126145,00.html which are free for you to download.   What would be your church’s equivalent to that?

September 2002

CATHPORT

After sex and health, religion is the third highest component on the internet.  With over twenty million Christian websites of every shade and persuasion, seven million Islamic ones and a couple of million Jewish sites, the religious searcher is spoilt for choice.  Type an innocent word into your search engine such as ‘Fatima’ and you find yourself visiting the whole spectrum, since at least 149,000 hits will be recorded.  These range from Our Lady of Fatima websites through Muslim sites, such as the Khaney-e Hazrat Fatemeh Zahra benevolent fund, to American college students home pages, all put together by girls called Fatima.   The result: even an internet enthusiast like me has to acknowledge that there is an enormous amount of religious rubbish online, along with the good stuff, and that it takes hours to search for what you really want.

How then are we to navigate a path through all this information?  Above all, how is it possible to search at speed? When it comes down to Catholic resources in particular, there is a new answer to this question.  Cathport.  Or, more accurately www.cathport.com a Catholic ‘yellow pages’ sponsored by The Tablet. 

Cathport was launched in London on 26 October and now it is up and running on the internet for all Tablet readers to visit and enjoy.  I have worked on it for several months, editing its contents, and have enjoyed collaborating with Guilherme Altmayer from The Tablet’s publicity department who is responsible for the design.  This aspect of the website is, of course, hugely important because on the internet, ‘look’ is all. 

This is not to say that contents goes by the board.  But how to order the contents of a Catholic internet site?  There are many different options.  To go down an alphabetical route, for instance, is to secure ‘abortion’ a poll position and to re-enforce the prejudice that all the Catholic Church is concerned about is sex.  On the internet the range is vast.  Many Catholic websites choose an entry point or home page that invites you to click on a picture of Our Lady, or the Pope.  Some play saccharine hymn tunes.  Others offer points that score you for true orthodoxy, with traffic lights that signal red, orange and green markers to enable you to choose your preferred ‘go’ point.

So what is Cathport’s entry point?  A homepage that has an equally powerful theological underpinning.  For even a website can have a theology and, as Avery Dulles taught us in his Models of the Church, there are competing understandings of what constitutes the Catholic community.  Cathport takes the worldwide Church as its model and seeks to identify and explore the websites that show how local or national Churches function.  So a map on the start-up or home page takes searchers to internet sites in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Canada, Europe, Ireland, Latin America, USA, UK and, of course, the Vatican.  Within these there are lead references to local Bishops conferences.  Some of these are outstanding.  The Hong Kong website would be a case in point. 

Then, of course, there are the Aid agencies because these do some of the most critical work of the Church in its truest Catholic sense or identity.  They, in turn, can be relied on to point the searcher further afield – to local projects, of course, as well as national and international ones.  CAFOD, Caritas International, The Catholic Institute for International Relations are all listed, as are Catholic resources that point to theological and biblical research institutes, along with Catholic and other universities, as well as religious congregations.  The Cathport page which points to ‘Catholic Resources’ offers a range of websites that open the world of the internet to spectacular points of reference.  Ecumenical links are present at every point.  The vision of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor to the internet who wrote about its value as a creator of community has been amply fulfilled.

Cathport offers just that, a portal ensuring access to top-quality Catholic information available across the broad spectrum of the internet, an opportunity to surf the religious ‘housetops of the world’.  Access www.cathport.com  and these resources be no more that two clicks away from your screen. 

August 2002

Where music and the internet meet, the sky’s the limit.  This month’s review concentrates on a variety of liturgical resources which are available online.  The Royal School of Church Music keeps its seventy-fifth anniversary this year and the website at  www.rscm.com lists a host of resources.  These range from information about choral scholarships in leading cathedral music schools to short courses for amateur organists and choir directors.  The American equivalent is at www.rscmamerica.org  while Australian readers should try http://rscmaustalia.org.au for materials and further links.  At www.nnpm.org.uk the National Network of Pastoral Musicians lay out their wares.  This is an unassuming site for a thoroughly worthwhile organisation.   Their commercial outlet at www.decanimusic.co.uk is a kind of liturgical Amazon, offering specialist musical supplies from a wealth of sources: they sell books and music from The Liturgical Press, Pueblo, LTP, the RSCM, Oxford University Press, Cassells, Novello, Stainer & Bell, McCrimmon Publishing, Mayhew as well as acting as the UK distributors for Oregon Catholic Press (publishers of the St Thomas More music) and G.I.A. Publications.  It is also the distributor for some music from Taize and liturgical books from Pastoral Press.  All in all, a liturgical cornucopia.

Other ecumenical Church music links are available at www.pldi.net/~murrows/denoms.html or try the Churches Initiative in Music Education at www.chime.org.uk which lists a series of other useful contacts.   These are top-quality resources for Church musicians, with sound clips as well as sheet music.

Now for some more seasonal sites: if you are bound for the coast or searching on the beach front, try www.seasideawards.org.uk to check out facts about British beaches.  These vary from how to get there to sand quality to their Blue Flag status, or level of cleanliness.  I checked out Weston-Super-Mare and was greeted by six smiley faces indicating that this is considered a nice old-fashioned and reliable resort.  No mention of the mud-flats when the tide disappears towards Steepholme and Flathome, however.  Otherwise visit www.goodbeachguide.co.uk which examines water quality as well, check out  www.beachwizard.com a pan-European site compiled by surfers for surfers.  No mention of Weston there, I’m afraid, a proof that the information is provided by people in the know.

If walking in the British countryside is more your thing, go to any of the excellent countryside sites that are springing up.  The very best is available at   www.walkingbritain.co.uk a site that is bursting with information, maps and stunning photographs.  Any of these would make a screensaver.  Remember to place your cursor over the image, right-click on your mouse and you will told how to save the image as a ‘background’ file.  Or go to www.walkingpages.co.uk or www.ramblers.org.uk as both of these supply top quality information about clothing, gear, kit, maps – and local transport.  Be warned though, the Ramblers Association walks are for the truly dedicated.  I chose the armchair route and visited the gorgeous pictures at www.seecambridge.com compiled by a local photographer who is a wizard with a wide-angle lens.  Internet work at its best.

If staying at home is more your thing as well and if you enjoy crossword puzzles, do not miss www.anagrams.net or the mischievous www.wordsmith.org/anagram to work out  impossible teasers.   Random gaps can be filled out at http://ull.chemistry.uakron.edu/jumble.html where you need to follow the Crossword Puzzle route rather than Scrambled Words.

And finally, a site for the image hungry.  At http://hepweb.rl.ac.uk/ppUKpics/pr_pow.html a ‘classic image from the world of particle physics featuring discoveries, people, experiments, or images that are simply good to look at’ is displayed each week.  Lovely idea, lovely site.  Send me suggestions please at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk or visit www.laviniabyrne.co.uk to use the back copies of these reviews which are archived there.

June 2002

My prayer request was listed as number 10419 when I visited the Carmelite Monastery of the Sacred Heart at St Croix Valley, Wisconsin at www.pressenter.com/~carmelit/index.htm which is a delightful website.  Prayer sites such as these proliferate online and - as I discovered when I went to the British De La Salle Brother’s site at  www.prayingeachday.org - people visit them in their millions.  The links that religious in particular are forging with a global constituency confirm my sense that the Internet genuinely is a world wide web and that the Church is beginning to realise its potential for mass communications.  Imagine becoming an online oblate or a net novice.  The possibilities are endless.  With the blessing conferred by the Pope on the Internet on 12 May this year, they now have official sanction.  Go to 
www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=search&StoryID=947953 to read all about it. 

A reader wrote and set me a useful task:  “So far I don't seem to have found anything (apart perhaps from things like the CAFOD site and, maybe, Sacred Space) that looks likely to really 'fire up' young people. I have in mind both senior primary and secondary.”    I checked out the CAFOD site again and was pretty fired up myself because www.cafod.co.uk has had a face lift and its youth provision is good.  Sacred Space, it is true, is not geared to youth, but at www.sacredspace.ie it remains an invaluable prayer resource.  At www.catholic1.com/page2.htm there are free resources which include preparation programs for the Sacraments and Internet-friendly graphics.  By and large, however, the ‘home-schooling’ movement has cornered the market on providing Catholic educational resources online.  An example can be seen at www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/6823/mercy.html which indicates pretty clearly the kind of Catholicism being preserved by this movement. 

All a long way away from the petition which is taking shape at www.proconcil.org to be sent to the Pope requesting a Third Vatican Council. Already signed by a number of Bishops, notably from Latin America, it represents the democratic character of the Internet.  Its value as an archive meanwhile is demonstrated by a wonderful collection of sound clips at www.bbc.co.uk/voices/index.shtml where you can listen to voices from the past such as Stevie Smith or the late Basil Hume along with a host of other celebrities.  I had gone to the BBC website to look for more religious resources for the young, intending to check the GCSE revision resources at www.bbc.co.uk/learning/library/religion_and_ethics/index.shtml when I got distracted by the sound archive.  At the revision site you can take a series of multiple-choice tests which examine your knowledge of all the living faiths as well as learning potted versions of their histories.  A perfectly pleasant way to while away time, and informative to boot.

Top quality school assembly material is available online at  www.assemblies.org.uk a free service provided as part of its outreach by www.spck.co.uk namely the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.   To understand how the law stands on religion in public schools in the USA, go to the Anti Defamation League’s site at www.adl.org/religion_ps/prayer.asp  for a full treatment of the issues.  For information about alternative resources try www.iona.org.uk/wgrg an excellent shop window for the Wild Goose group.   The Greenbelt site at  www.greenbelt.org.uk/festival likewise has a host of resources and links.  I particularly liked the one that took me to www.humanclock.com - a slightly daft project which I will not attempt to describe.  Visit it for yourself.

Finally, for one of those batty sites at which the web excels:  at http://members.aol.com/Jesusimages you will find an amazing variety of pictures which give the idea that Jesus is always with us a whole new meaning.  Perhaps you could turn them into colouring sheets for your Sunday school.

Further emails recommending sites to me will be welcomed at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk

May 2002

“It’s Google on steroids!”  That is the claim made by Tom Loosemore, the head of applications at BBCi about the new search engine launched by the BBC this month.  “We made sure it had the most UK relevance”, he went on to add.  So now, when you log on to www.bbc.co.uk you arrive immediately at a page which will enable you to search the world wide web, as well as the BBC’s own provision.  I was so impressed that I promptly made it my default homepage.  The top page is slower to load than www.google.com or www.google.co.uk but the contents are immaculate and the search engine works like a dream. 

North American readers meanwhile, might prefer to test drive www.teoma.com which is more USA-friendly.  This site has been on trial for some eight months and is now fully operational.  Results are sorted into three categories: results, resources and refine, so that it is possible to categorize what you are searching for and save time online.  As Teoma was is owned by Ask Jeeves, the future looks bright for this new site.   Google, the well-tried favourite for most searchers, is fighting back by offering additional features such as www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html and www.google.co.uk/language_tools?hl=en which enable users either to plot how other people are searching - by identifying the most popular sites overall -  or to link non-English sites to a translated version.  At the moment the languages listed range from Afrikaans to Welsh.  A service which will grow and grow, alongside Google’s picture gallery which you can access by clicking on the ‘images’ button on its homepage.

If you want to travel in the USA www.google.com/help/features.html#maps offers a superior location finder, while the UK’s Automobile Association continues to provide free route planning at www.theaa.co.uk with a wealth of further services.  A website I have already reviewed, www.multimap.com  has branched out into aerial and historical photographs of a variety of locations in the UK as an addition to their excellent map service. 

  If - like Mark Shuttleworth, the South African computer multi-millionaire who was able to pay for an extra-terrestrial holiday - space is your place, but you have a problem raising the 14 million dollars you would need for the fare, then go to NASA’s amazing site at www.nasa.gov for access to its Space Observing System.  Here lovely pictures are available for downloading either as emails or as screen savers.  Otherwise choose www.space.com where you can learn about ‘backyard astronomy’ or choose images from the new Hubble Space Telescope’s library as wallpaper.

Compared with these stunning sites, the front page of the Vatican Observatory’s website at http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/ makes a poor showing.  Persevere though, and you will find planet pictures and an interesting history of the Observatory at Castel Gandolfo and its present location at Tucson in the Arizona desert.  I particularly enjoyed the profiles of the present-day Jesuits – the spiritual heirs of Francis Xavier and Mateo Ricci – who run it.   Finally, for a local, virtual experience of space travel, go to www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/weight/ to find out how much you would weigh on Mercury, Mars, the Moon or Venus. 

So who is the patron saint of space travel?  I went to www.catholic-forum.com/saints/indexsnt.htm for more information.  Here I searched the alphabetic listing and got caught up in the closest reference, to a patron saint for Spanish air crews.  (‘Space’/’Spanish’, if you see what I mean.)  They gave me Joseph of Cupertino, Our Lady or Loreto and Therese of Lisieux – all of whom might double up for space in case of need, I suppose. As they were also listed for ‘aircraft pilots, aviators, flyers, air crews, aviation, Belgian air crews, Spanish air crews, aviation, flying’, I wondered about their availablility for the likes of a Mark Shuttleworth.  Personally I would go for Elijah and his fiery chariot, but Old Testament or, as we say these days, Hebrew Scriptures saints do not get listed.  Despite the omission, this reference site to patron saints is a wonderful resource.  You will find a saint for every cause, and a cause for every saint.

Please email me with further recommendations for review at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk - and enjoy surfing.

April 2002

Six different individuals in California have applied for driving licences in the name of Jesus Christ.  This alarming fact and others like it are available at www.uselessfacts.net a real Saturday afternoon website for those of us who do not like watching sport or studying the form at, for example, www.fifaworldcup.com or www.sportal.com and who enjoy browsing the weird and wonderful side of the Internet.  Otherwise try www.threes.com a directory of things that come in threes – including disasters - or www.funtrivia.com/trivia.html which claims to be ‘the world’s largest source of Bizarre and Utterly Trivial Information about almost everything’.  More serious information is available at www.guinnessworldrecords.com which is an interactive website that guarantees the quality of what it offers by acting as an extension of the reputable Guinness Book of Records.

Meanwhile  www.findarticles.com and an Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy at www.utm.edu/research/iep raise the quality stakes, as more and more newspapers are restricting access to their resources to networks of subscribers.  Oxford University Press have announced that they will offer free access to their most amazing Internet project yet, through universities or local public libraries.  If your local public library subscribes to the service, then you can visit the site at www.oxfordreference.com where it offers millions of facts, figures, dates and quotations ‘to dwarf any book in history’. 

Now for news on the email front.  If, in addition to your usual email address, you have a Hotmail account for use when you travel abroad and dart into Internet Cafes to access your correspondence, then visit www.hotmail.com for access to a new extension to their service.  Hotmail users have been bothered by the fact that it only makes 2 Mb of space available to them free of charge, so that you have to delete material you might wish to save.  Now, for £19.99 you can buy a year’s subscription to 10 Mb, which means space for about 2,500 emails.  That may sound like an improbably large number of emails, but consider the fact that in the U.K. alone in the month of January this year, 550 million emails were transmitted, whilst the Royal Mail dealt with a mere 258 non-business letters.  This information comes from the Internet measurement company NetValue, which also notes that nearly 13 million people use emails in their homes, receiving 39.1 emails each month and sending an average of 12.3.  And for those who enjoy trivia, note that the first email ever was sent in 1971 by the computer engineer Ray Tomlinson who invented the use of the @ symbol format.

Readers who have emailed me at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk have offered a variety of sites for review and I welcome all contributions.  This month too the question of Mass times has been aired.  A correspondent writes about the North American site at www.masstimes.org noting that ‘the Mass times website should be listed in every parish bulletin in the U.S., but it is not.  The donor couple set up a foundation (based in Key Largo, if I recall correctly), under the auspices of the Archdiocese of Miami and with the approbation of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.  I do not know how many hits the site receives annually, nor whether their toll-free telephone mass-time locator has as many hits.’  Another reader has drawn my attention to a spirituality site, namely the U.K.’s  www.retreats.dircon.co.uk which, he says, is ‘an interesting way of doing things because it is seems one of the few groups, possibly the only one that offers retreats rather than pilgrimages abroad’.   Visitors to London might enjoy www.st-james-piccadilly.org which is described by its authors as ‘a website we have designed to speak to those who might find church life rather unappealing!’   Or else visit the Anthony de Mello website at www.spiritwalk.org/demello.htm for further resources.

Foodies might like to try the newly-launched site at  www.schwartz.co.uk or www.agrobiologica-rosso.it for quality information about herbs, spices and, in the case of the Italian site, the most wonderful prize-winning olive oil.  An e-card from the Schwartz site enables you to send a recipe to your nearest and dearest, whilst a bottle of olive oil from Sicily would make a most memorable present. 

March 2002

Slightly chilling news from the USA.  There is a website called   www.findagreatchurch.org which claims to have ‘a user-friendly state-by-state listing of some six hundred "Excellent" Catholic and Protestant churches throughout America.   Included are each church's name, address, phone number and web site, as well as a summary of the church's best programs and practices.  The web site is designed for travellers, people new to an area, and all spiritual seekers.’  Each of these "homes for the spirit" has common threads uniting them, a study found. ‘These were churches where the religious experience was authentic, newcomers were welcomed, and community service was sincere and abundant.’   

Why do I have a problem?  Possibly because grace is freely given in the Catholic tradition.  It does not have to be merited by authentic religious experience.  So much for ‘justification by faith alone’.  In the new digital age, I tremble if justification has to be earned by a half-decent web presence.  Having said that, ‘findagreatchurch’ is a neat idea if it represents an attempt to put Catholic Directories online and to help visitors to locate Mass times without troubling the local priest.   

As the internet grows and grows, searching becomes the name of the game and, alongside the old favourites  www.google.co.uk or www.ask.co.uk as well as the international sites at  www.altavista.com and www.northernlight.com (my own personal favourite), I welcome the appearance of  a splendid new metasearch engine at www.vivisimo.com  which is well worth a visit.  I have already drawn the attention of Tablet readers to www.thehungersite.com and it continues to go from strength to strength.  The organisers of this charity site have now removed the restriction which only allowed you to visit once a day, so it is worth setting it as your default homepage.  Log on and do good all in one.  Other charity sites are available at  www.shopethical.co.uk or www.onevillage.org  though these have even more of an commercial slant - albeit an ideologically sound one - which they plug unashamedly.  For further exploration of the issues involved, go to  www.christian-ecology.org.uk for information.  It offers something for everyone, with pages in Welsh, Italian, French and German.

For a cluster of worthy causes, try the wholly admirable  www.oneworld.net or the stiff, unwieldy site of the United Nations Development Programme at www.undf.org as both offer a helpful overview of global development issues.   Meanwhile – for those whose Lenten discipline involved a food component - detailed information about how we eat and who we are is available if you search   http://envirolink.netforchange.com for information about what we consume.   For drink, try www.teatrail.co.uk or www.scotch-whisky.org.uk where a wealth of resources are put online for our delectation.  

A Tablet reader has emailed me at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk to tell me about the stunning site at http://classics.mit.edu/ a top quality archive of Greek and Roman texts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  This site is very user friendly and repays a lengthy visit.  All you need in the way of world literature is available at  the University of California at Berkeley’s site at  http://netlibrary.net/WorldReferenceOBL.html or for a glance at the East, go to a site which calls itself ‘Haiku for People’ at www.toyomasu.com/haiku and start creating.

Refuge at last for those of us who cringe every time we see ‘potatoe’s and apple’s for sale’.  There is a site at  www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/Users/Martin/APOST/Apostrop.htm which is designed to be a home for abused apostrophes!  Other funnies this month include a seasonal site at www.rabbit.org/easter/index.html which will teach you ‘bunny basics’ as well as the cruder ‘rabbit facts’.   Electrifying!   At the other end of the spectrum visit www.virtualchocolate.com/easter/index.cfm  for an egg surprise and please continue to send me your own contributions to this column for review.

February 2002

With the euro in place across the channel, a virtual trip to France is in order.  The colourful site of the French Bishops Conference at www.cef.fr gives a good sense of the Church there and its local resources.  It also gives snippets of information.  Did any of us know that the Pope has travelled the distance between the earth and the moon three times or, put differently, gone the equivalent of twenty-nine times round the world during his ninety-five pastoral visits to some one hundred and thirty countries.  An achievement which puts most of our own travels into the shade, let alone those of Jules Vernes’ hero, Phileas Fogg.

Visitors anticipate good gastronomie when they go to France.  A virtual experience of ‘la cuisine française’ will be less disastrous for the waistline than the real thing.  For food, go to www.receptionfrance.com a bi-lingual site where excellent recipes are demonstrated by a variety of French chefs who take us on a trip around their restaurants and reveal the secrets of their kitchens.  Meanwhile the website at www.aurestaurant.com works like a dream.  The visitor is invited to select a town or village and then is led immediately to a list of local restaurants with printable maps.  If you prefer to stay at home and watch theatre on television, then the memorable series ‘Au Theatre ce Soir’ introduced by Pierre Sabbagh is available as a browsable archive at www.autheatrecesoir.com with its repertoire of  400 plays.  Or try www.victorhugo.culture.fr for a celebration of the bicentenary of Hugo’s birth.

An excellent French news service is available at www.voila.fr which also serves as a search engine, offering either the whole world wide web or a francophone version.  Other French search engines include www.nomade.tiscali.fr/  or www.wanadoo.fr  as these are the home pages of service providers and mini-market places where the euro operates as a passe-partout.  Finally, for a history of the rise and fall of the franc, http://sceco.univ-poitiers.fr/hfranc will put you in the picture. 

The web appears to welcome the euro.  So an explosion of sites: the Universal Currency Converter at www.xe.com/ucc will give you the latest exchange rates as will www.x-rates.com/calculator.html while tourists may well prefer www.thisismoney.com/tourist.asp or even Thomas Cook’s service at www.virtual-bureau.com where next day delivery of the new currency is guaranteed in the UK.  Order online or discover more at http://europa.eu.int/euro which will take you to the European Commission’s information service.  If you have a modern keyboard the euro symbol will come supplied.  Otherwise try the all-embracing site at www.microsoft.com/windows/euro.asp to upload the appropriate software to a PC.  Mac users will no doubt resent this link, as they do my comments about right clicks.  Tough, or, as we say these days, “vous êtes le maillon faible”.   To tell the truth, I do not take sides; I just happen to use a PC with Microsoft software.

Meanwhile, beyond the eurozone, there are a host of sites that are worth visiting.  For instance, www.fairtradeonline.com is an excellent example of one of these.  It brings the alternative world of ethical shopping to your screen.  Oxfam and Traidcraft have linked up with Yahoo! to bring fairly-traided crafts and food to the e-market place.  At www.cafod.co.uk readers can still find the resources that will enable them to find out more about the developing world and how to respond to disasters.  At www.thehungersite.com internet giving has become a state-of-the-art experience.

Finally, for Lego lovers, The Bible, brick-by-brick.  At www.thereverend.com/brick_testament you will find Bible stories in the form of toy brick animations.  The commentary is faintly irreverent at times, but the idea is fun.  Ditto with www.ship-of-fools.com which describes itself as ‘The Magazine of Christian Unrest’.  Go there to place a vote in a bogus poll for the new Archbishop of Canterbury.  Talking of which, do not allow yourself to be diverted accidentally to the section of the site called, ‘The Mother of All Beards’.  And never forget the wonderfully daft http://freespace.virgin.net/d.rowett/archive.html for an entertaining account of life in the Diocese of Bolsover. 

I continue to welcome your own contributions.  Email me with them at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk for the enjoyment of other Tablet readers.

January 2002 

A bid for the internet ‘Site of the Year’ has already been placed. The British government’s Public Record Office has put the results of the 1901 Census of England and Wales online at www.census.pro.gov.uk where the flow of traffic has astonished everyone.  Designed to cater for fourteen hits a second, the site went down on its launch day because it was receiving one hundred times as many.  Once the site becomes more generally available, it will prove an invaluable resource to those of us who are interested in genealogy, with an added bonus.  Not only can you trace your ancestors but also you can trace the previous occupants of your present home.  As mine is within a former mental hospital, I look forward to building up a profile of its inhabitants, which the census defines, rather brutally, as lunatics, imbeciles and feeble-minded.  Nowadays we would probably call many of them single parents or ‘the elderly’.

For more generalised information, try the trusty old warhorses at the Mormons’ site: www.familysearch.org where more than two billion names are now online.  This site has improved vastly since I first reviewed it over twenty months ago and is now a serious international research tool of considerable stature.

The alumni and graduate site as www.friendsreunited.co.uk had a more controversial launch when they first went online, as some of the students listed there chose it as a means of ‘getting back’ at their teachers by denouncing them and their evil or tasteless habits.  The site’s intention is more innocuous.  I liked the ‘School Memory of the Day’ which appeared when I visited:  “Canterbury Cathedral For Sale, Anybody remember when some Kings students tied 4 sheets together, spray-painted For Sale on them and hung them from the top of Bell Harry Tower?"  Boys will be boys.

For a wealth of further references, go to www.cyndislist.com which has nearly one hundred thousand links to other genealogical sites.  This is the product of five years unstinting work of one Cyndi Howells and a model of its kind.  Set aside a good chunk of time for your visit and you will be amply rewarded.  I was astonished to find that over twenty-five million users have visited this site, a feat which speaks for itself.

If you prefer researching museums and like to do so from the safety of your own screen, then there are three to go to:  www.24hourmuseum.org.uk will search heritage and museum sites all over the UK, while www.artguide.org lists details of public art collections. At the 24 hour museum, I particularly enjoyed following the link to Alice Liddell’s site at www.aliceinoxford.net which is newly online.  For material from further afield, www.museumnetwork.com has basic information about 33,000 galleries and museums worldwide and www.whatsonwhen.com will fill in the details about their activities. ‘Religion’ is listed along with their other topics, such as ‘adventure’, ‘bizarre’,  ‘food and drink’.  They list festivals month-by-month- as well as by faith tradition.  Holiday ideas for free!   If memory lane is more your thing, then www.rockmusicmemorabilia.com sells reproduction programmes, posters, sheet music and T-shirts to remind you of your misspent youth.  Do not be put off when sites such as these museums or galleries and their shops ask you to register to visit them, but read the small print carefully and check the appropriate boxes if you do not want to be put on their mailing lists.

No review this month would be complete with a reference to the two major films of the moment.  The official Harry Potter site at http://harrypotter.warnerbros.co.uk  has been upstaged by the work of a fifteen-year old girl, Claire Field, whose own personal www.harrypotterguide.co.uk has had to be protected from the wrath of Warner Bros by press criticism of their attempts to take her over.  And it goes without saying that www.lordoftherings.net seeks to deliver the ultimate online experience.   Be warned though, there are more than 200,000 Lord of the Rings sites online.  Happy surfing!

Please continue to contact me with further recommendations at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk and I will do my best to review your suggestions for other Tablet readers.

December 2001 

If you already have a Father Christmas outfit (available from the astonishing site at www.santa-claus.com in a deluxe, five-piece suit, including beard and boots) and only lack the team, try out www.corecom.net/~reindeer/sale.htm for your own reindeer at $2,500 a go.  Religious presents are available from the many Catholic online stores, such as www.catholicshopping.com or http://us.catholic.net/extlinks.phtml?cat=1   or try the jewellery at www.vaticanjewelry.com for that last-minute special gift.   I heartily recommend the 81 ideas for seasonal recipes at www.recipesource.com/holiday/christmas/indexall.html to while away the hours before Midnight Mass.  What would Alphonse Daudet’s parish priest  have made of this wonderful selection?  

Now, what of the most un-welcome of gifts, namely a computer virus?  If  you think that you have one, activate your anti-virus software, go online and get hold of the latest patch.  If you have no anti-virus software, buy some immediately, before you lose all your friends.  A software site such as www.dabs.com will supply you by return at favourable prices.  A reader emailed me this helpful letter, which I offer on as  model of good communications:  ‘I hate to have to tell you but your system has been infected with the BadTrans virus.  There are several clues:

1)      If you right click on your e-mail address below, you will see that an underscore _ has been added to the beginning of it. This isn't obvious (especially when it's a hyperlink) but is a characteristic of the virus.

2)      The Subject line was simply Re:   Again you wouldn’t have known this but it is a clue for future defence and identifying where you got the virus from. (Note: you may not know the person - the virus also seems able to mix up e-mail address-books - where it gets its information)

3)      There was an attachment. This usually has  .pif or .scr at the end - but the virus seems able to get round that too now!  The virus does not need you to open the attachment - simply opening the message is all it needs.

I have declared my hand as a fan of the BBC’s website and, as a license-fee payer, believe that it is a legitimate extension of my enjoyment of radio and TV and an excellent source of quality information.  So I registered concern when another reader wrote to note a worrying development:  ‘You might want to take a look at www.bbc.co.uk. They have revamped the front page but in so doing have relegated Religion and some other genres to the realm of "other categories".  In the box to the left which gives direct access to programmes there is not one religious programme. (And they have the category horoscopes under teens!) The explanation is that the categories will reflect the current programming priorities... and I thought we were coming up to Christmas and religion was important!’  I know that this concern is shared by a leading member of the BBC’s religion and ethics department as they ‘worry about Religion (and Arts too) remaining in a less prominent place than horoscopes and recipes’.

 I welcome these emails from readers at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk and encourage you to read The Tablet’s internet reviews online at www.laviniabyrne.co.uk/ where you can click on all the active hyperlinks and save the bother of typing them in. Also may I please remind you to keep sending URLs for  The Tablet’s new internet portal.  Religious communities in particular, please note this request.

By the way, if you are wondering what else to do on Boxing Day, and if you didn’t like your Christmas presents, go to www.webswappers.com where you can indulge in a few gentle swaps.  Or go to the four-word film review at www.benj.com/fwfr and invent a fun new game to describe your own Christmas viewing or even the sermons you have heard.  British readers will appreciate why I did a search on Casablanca:  ‘Best film ever made’, and – more laconically - ‘Gets girl.  Loses girl’.  Why, oh why is it not on the schedule this year?  Still, have a happy Christmas afternoon.

November 2001

If you are a news junkie –and I am – then www.thepaperboy.com is for you.   This website gives access to state-of-the-art reports from a worldwide variety of news sources.  People complain about globalisation, yet they want to know about what is happening where and how and when.  We live with the dilemma presented when first we sent up a spaceship that would be capable of filming our planet from the outside, as it were:  a spaceship that would present our world as a bluey-green marble in space.  Subliminally this set up an aspiration which the internet is uniquely able to meet.  For now that we know what we look like from up there, we want to know much more about what is happening down here.  The world is our oyster and we want to explore it.  We also want to exploit it.  So the ugly idea of money creeps in.  Not surprisingly, www.thepaperboy.com  is a subscription service.  All the dilemmas of being a global community and a global enterprise are re-visited on the net.   I still recommend this as a news-service site because the resources are unique.  But check out the aid agencies at www.cafod.co.uk and www.christian-aid.org.uk too. 

I had intended this to be a ‘use your right-mouse button’ review because I frequently sit down with people at their screens and realise that they are not using the right-hand button on the mouse at all.  Likewise ‘ surgeries’ for family and friends reveal that most people fail to scan and clean up their hard drives  or to organise their files into neat folders.  They then wonder why their systems crash or ‘go slow’.  With the approach of Advent, why not dedicate a day to computer housework as a spiritual discipline?  I do not say this lightly, for while you are watching your hard disk de-fragment – it takes forever - you can think about de-fragmenting your own inner workings.  You can reflect on the need to order your own spiritual and emotional files into neat folders and to organise your soul.

But back to right-hand mouse clicks.  Your mouse is your ally.  When did you last renew yours?  Does it have the capacity for right-hand clicks?  If not, go out and replace it.  You can use the same computer for years at a time.  But change your mouse often.  This way you can defy repetitive-strain injury.  If necessary, have more than one mouse and ring the changes.  (Shades of Hickory-Dickory Dock, I fear).  To search the web with only a left-hand click is to use the internet with one hand tied behind your back.  For the right-hand mouse button is a sensational tool when you are online.  If you find a beautiful image, right click and you can save it to a file or set it up immediately as your default screen image.  Or you can email it to a friend or print it.   To explore images, visit www.google.co.uk and select its ‘images’ service.  Type in a word such as ‘panda’ or ‘pope’ and you will receive top-quality pictures or try out www.artguide.org which lists treasures from the U.K.’s public galleries.  Alternatively go to your preferred search engine and type in “pope and .gif or .jpeg or .bmp” and all will be revealed because these URLs will access all available images.

I have just planted my over-wintering broad beans and onions so no wonder that I have turned up the exhaustive http://plants.usda.gov  where a right click will enable me to save the text file to a file on my hard disk.  The beauty of this process is that it enables me to read long files offline and so to save on telephone bills.  Once again, I can right click to cut, copy and paste text or to send it to friends via an email.

The value of these routines is that they save on your hands.  We were not designed for computer use so we have to compensate by devising strategies to protect us.  Meanwhile, if yours are hurting and you are desperate, try a work-out at a Christian Aerobics site such as www.sportsmusic.com/chris1.htm which will help you lose both pounds and dollars.  Globalisation - in its worst sense of exploitation - or what!

OCTOBER 2001

Next time you are tempted to think that the internet is intrinsically evil, think of this email, sent to me by a reader.  She tells me about ‘a web site set up by a Lake District postman. He takes wonderful photographs each day and puts them on the site. Every day is different and is the first page I go on each evening. I find the pictures very inspiring and the international emails uplifting.’

www.lakelandcam.co.uk is the name of the site and it repays a visit as the images are stunning and hugely relaxing.  Imagine the joy of delivering ‘snail mail’ or good old-fashioned letters in that part of the world.

Another listener contacted me to say something about my comments on ‘the authority of sites’, especially those which emanate from British universities.  In a previous review I wrote that they are easily recognisable as they carry the legend ‘ac.uk’, identifying the ‘academic community’ from which they come.  ‘You mention the .ac.uk extension as being trustworthy.  You may know by now of the problems with this.  I no longer use my Hotmail account because it was inundated at the beginning of the year with mails offering pornography from what appeared to be universities of Portsmouth, Southampton and Huddersfield.’  Southampton University has acted on this  and emailed my correspondent to say, ‘Our investigations have revealed that we are both victims of "collateral spam". In other words, although the email appears to have come from the University of Southampton (soton.ac.uk) the address has been forged and was in fact sent from an account with an Information Service Provider in the United States and with no association to the University.

Regrettably, this is not the first time that we have both been victims

I put these two emails side by side as they illustrate so clearly that however morally neutral the overall internet system may be, it ‘bears man’s smell’.   I would go further and examine the double-edged power of emails . The intemperate or immoderate email, or the downright offensive one as illustrated by the case of the British ‘spin-doctor’, Jo Moore can be as pernicious as any pornographic website.  Just because the medium is instantaneous, we need to remember that emails do not always require rapid-fire responses.  The secret lies in creating a ‘pending’ folder alongside your ‘inbox’ and ‘outbox’ folders or even one called ‘calm down before answering’.  Additional folders are great, especially if you keep their contents on the move by filing them in designated folders once you have replied to them. 

I have two such folders, one called ‘Tablet’ for your general recommendations to me at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk and another called ‘Portal’ for your helpful additions to the Tablet’s ‘Catholic Portal’ which is to be launched before Christmas.  Contributions to the former include the exhaustive and strangely moving www.catholicoutlook.com/ which came with an enthusiastic endorsement from a reader: ‘I just thought that I would tell you about a great website. It's called "Catholic Outlook - a Protestants' guide to the Catholic Church". As a lapsed Catholic, I find it truly inspirational and am now re-evaluating my situation.’  Or the more understated: ‘I came across a particularly promising site the other week.  www.textweek.com.  It's a preaching and prayer resource which follows the RCL.  Many good things.’  RCL stands for the Revised Common Lectionary and this is a thoroughly useful resource for preachers and students alike.

The Catholic Portal project is exciting but the end product will only be as good as the material I find online or which you forward to me.  So I find it exciting to receive emails from Dar-es-Salaam to Toronto, from Rome to Melbourne and am extremely grateful for readers’ help.  Please keep them coming

This month’s other sites include www.britishcheese.com which requires no comment and, if you are up for an ‘Old Testament Text Adventure’, upstage Abraham at a daft and innocuous site named www.princeton.edu/~ahutgoff/otadventure.html where I was told that ‘Answering questions that you have not been asked is a sign of dementia.’  I have been warned.

SEPTEMBER 2001

What is a portal and why are portals becoming essential to efficient internet use?  A portal is a gateway, offering access to a variety of resources on the internet by listing and ordering their URLs or addresses.  It  provides ‘information about information’ by managing it carefully, making lists and catalogues and directories.  So an effective internet portal gives privileged access to a distinctive stream of information, making it a unique resource.  Rather like the ‘Yellow Pages’ a portal does not answer questions, it tells searchers where to go to find the answers for themselves.  This means that it is more like a library catalogue than a shelf full of books.  How appropriate then that The Tablet is involved in a project to put a major Catholic internet portal online. It is to be called Cathport and will be available for use by Christmas.  Those of you who already use the ‘lists’ supplied online at www.thetablet.co.uk know just how good and varied they are and can expect something of the same calibre, though much, much bigger.

The new project is already proving really exciting and many Tablet readers from all over the world have begun to contribute to it.   These are people whom I have been able to approach by name, as they have already supplied URLs for the review pages.   They emailed me at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk  and gave me information about sites they use regularly and enjoy.  If the Cathport Project is to a major resource for internet users, it has to be prepared collaboratively.  That is why I am asking readers who enjoy these monthly internet reviews to take a good look at their ‘favourites’ or ‘bookmarks’ and to email me with promising material.

In considering what to have on the Cathport site, there are serious questions to think about.  A Catholic portal is an internet gateway onto: a teaching Church which offers dogmatic certainty as well as the space for theological speculation; a hierarchical structure with its centre in Rome and a local presence in national Churches; a community of the faithful who are engaged creatively in their homes, workplaces and parishes; a network of schools, colleges and universities; religious congregations; aid agencies; spirituality centres and retreat houses; press services, especially those which are online;  liturgical and devotional resources; ecumenical contacts, and so on.  The material we put online will have to reflect this richness and diversity.  That is why your help is needed because you have specialist information based on your personal use of the internet and knowledge of the Church in your own country and diocese. Most of the Catholic portals which are already online have had to rely on the inventiveness of the individual who has designed them.  In the case of The Tablet’s project, a much more international and collaborative resource is envisaged.  I anticipate rich pickings from this appeal and look forward to receiving your emails.  I will keep readers regularly updated about Cathport until it is launched. 

So which other sites have attracted my attention this month?  A reader emailed with splendid spirituality resources:  ‘First a site which gives you all the psalms and readings for the right day for the Office, even allowing for geography and time zones: http://www.universalis.com/cgi-bin/display/England/100/aboutus.htm#info  And second, the Irish Dominican site is a wonderful resource of readings and commentary: http://homepage.tinet.ie/~popesquay/’ adding, ‘As a p.s., the best site I know for finding a fact (or checking a spelling) quickly (linked together dictionaries, encyclopedias etc): http://www.xrefer.com’  Another reader identifies what she calls, ‘a site which is actually a very positive landmark in the somewhat bleak landscape of environmental websites’, namely ‘www.evuk.co.uk  which highlights the potential of electric vehicles to solve many of our current environmental problems.  Contrary to popular belief, electric vehicles are now equally fast as petrol fuelled vehicles, and there are now cars that run on compressed air being produced in France (they spew out cleaner air than they suck in, thus being a welcome addition to city streets).’ 

On a lighter note, try www.village-bakery.com for bread and cakes to kill for. Oh, and another portal: www.tutorialfind.com will supply you with state-of-the-art information about how to use your computer and its software more efficiently and teach you how to make the ultimate paper model airplane. 

JULY 2001

Now www.teachwithmovies.org sounds like an unlikely site, but for parents of children who are already bored with the summer holidays, it could be an answer to prayer.  Before visiting the video store, check out your options.   The site’s purpose is to ‘enhance a common frame of reference and advance children’s moral and emotional intelligence’.  I liked its recommendation for The Wizard of Oz, a film which, it assured us, is good at friendship and self-esteem.  An astonishing project which demonstrates the power of the internet as a force for good.

I hate reviewing bad sites, but Tate Modern – which I love in its real time manifestation at Bankside - is badly served by its web presence.  It lacks the huge sense of discovery and the buzz you get when you are led through a museum which prides itself on a thematic, rather than a dateline scheme for hanging its work.  So go to www.tate.org.uk if you must, and then on to www.iwm.org.uk to check out the Imperial War Museum ,or www.nhm.ac.uk for the National History Museum, to see how well it can be done.

At www.rosettaproject.org a totally different museum experience awaits you.  The Rosetta Project aims to protect the six thousand extant languages which are used on planet earth.  To this end it has had 1147 of them - to date - put online with their versions of a unique text, namely the first three chapters of Genesis from the world’s most-translated book, the Bible.  A Tablet reader gives me other useful information about scripture-based sites.  He writes to say that ‘The Bible and Interpretation site has a number of items of interest’, including a report on the political side of biblical archaeology at
www.bibleinterp.com/articles/robinson.htm and the search for the historical Pontius Pilate at www.bibleinterp.com/articles/pontiuspilate.htm or the recent explosion in interest in the search for the historical Jesus at www.bibleinterp.com/articles/jesusresearch.htm - all these articles are fascinating.

To submit your own favourites for review, email me at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk and to read these reviews online, so that you can avoid typing in the URLs, go to www.lavinabyrne.co.uk where the complete collection is archived.  

I have recently been exploring www.cd-wow.com which, if you want to buy a CD, is cheaper than its obvious rival at www.amazon.co.uk or, if you live outside the UK, www.amazon.com both of which cater for compulsive online book-shoppers.    Over-fifties may enjoy going to a specialist website at www.over50s.com which is designed to be user-friendly to those of us who are interested in news, health, travel, home and garden as well as searching out invaluable advice about using the internet.  Other concerns can be investigated at www.servista.com which will enable you to find out how to save money on your utility bills if you choose to pay for them online

If you are seriously adventurous, have designed your own website and are wondering about how best to signal its presence on the internet, go to www.jimtools.com which will send your information to forty-six search indices and 144 directories.  All this for free.  I repeat my suggestion about a good counter: try www.thecounter.com to chart the progress of your website. 

For serious shopping, go to www.ethicalconsumer.org or www.greenchoices.org or www.getethical.com pr www.cat.org.uk where you will find shops that care about the environment, human rights and consumer boycotts and make a powerful case for the idea that how we shop matters.  They sell everything from food to fridges and are a useful reminder of the power of the world wide web to override our lazy prejudice that ‘nearest is best’.   

Finally, if you are pushing off to God’s own country for your summer break, visit www.wannabeinireland.com which is a lovely, fanciful site.  For God’s wonderful railway, meanwhile, look no further than www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk where Isambard Kingdom Brunel is no doubt turning in his grave.  If you are travelling further a field, then www.megaconverter.com will be your bag.  It converts anything from your home currency or avoir-du-poids into just about anything else.  A riot. 

JUNE 2001

On the internet, the tourist season is always open.  Visit Big Ben online at  www.virtual-london.com  for practical information about the clock, its history  and workings, as well as the London Eye and a host of other attractions.  Other, more specialist sites include www.westminster-abbey.org and www.westminstercathedral.org.uk for church watchers, or www.royal.gov.uk/palaces/bp.htm for an insider’s view of Buckingham Palace and a DIY tour.  Fans of the Shipping Forecast and those who prefer to get away from it all can go to the delightful site at www.lsgb.co.uk  for instant access to the little-known Lighthouse Society of Great Britain.  A school’s section provides a virtual tour of Eddystone Light and a wealth of detail about the coastline. 

To discover more about the birds in this particular habitat, as well as inland, try www.rspb.org.uk which is the official site of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.  This site now offers us the results of the Big Garden Birdwatch scheme, which have recently been analysed.  “We received data from over 29,000 gardens across the UK and more than 48,500 people took part in the counts, of which 12,500 were children. Thank you to everyone who contributed.  Gardens across the UK have been watched, some 90% from England, 4% from Wales, 4% from Scotland, and 2% from Northern Ireland.  Over 90 species were recorded. The most unusual garden visitors were waxwings, kingfishers, lesser spotted woodpeckers, hawfinches, mandarin ducks and ring-necked parakeets. An amazing 4% of gardens recorded wintering blackcaps! “

These sites make learning attractive.  Others have valuable information but dress it up in strictly text-based clothes:  for references to contemporary philosophy, critical theory and postmodern thought, try  http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/postmodern.html  while the Jacques Maritain Centre at Notre Dame University gallops away with Thomas Aquinas and the history of Scholasticism at www.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/thomism.htm and
http://www.ntgateway.com//journals.htm  lists a splendid collection of journals with appropriate abstracts.  This site is maintained by Dr Mark Goodacre of the Department of Theology at the University of Birmingham.

If you run a site is like any of these, or if you have your own website and would like to be able count the number of visitors who trawl through your pages without too much fuss, go to www.thecounter.com where you can log on to a free product which will count your visitors for you.  You activate this service by inserting a piece of code into the html (hypertext mark-up language) version of your site.  It will be supplied to you online and comes in  a variety of guises, one of which is totally invisible to those who visit your homepage.  Weekly reports are emailed to you which give complete details of the traffic to your site.  All in all a thoroughly worthwhile addition to the ‘bells and whistles’ department.   

My own website at www.laviniabyrne.co.uk offers the complete collection of these Tablet reviews online.  To save the time it would take you to type in any of the URLs suggested here or in previous reviews, log on and then click and go from the reviews page to gain instant access to the site of your choice.  Email me with further suggestions for this column at lb@laviniabyrne.co.uk or visit The Tablet’s own site at www.thetablet.co.uk to catch up with the news, views and reviews.

To conclude: Catholics for a Changing Church have called my attention to their  website at www.c-c-c.freeserve.co.uk where we are reminded that the internet is ‘wide open’ and so the perfect medium for the discussion of ideas.  For more of these try the extensive and rapidly-growing site at www.womenpriests.org which appears in eight different languages.    To relax, go to www.chartreuse.fr where the monks who make the elixir have designed pages which carry cocktail recipes, cooking suggestions and a quiz, but not, of course, the recipe for their historic drink.  That secret is known only to three of their number.

MAY 2001

Campanologists, look no further:  www.do.ic.ac.uk/~fb/ringing will bring bell ringing into your very own home.   Experts at reading URLs, or internet addresses will be assured by the provenance of this one.  Take it apart and what do you get?  An academic source, namely “ac” the academic community which brings British universities online.  North Americans would find the same reassurance from the suffix “edu” which is the equivalent umbrella in the States.  In this particular case, the letters “ic” are another clue.  This URL links the reader to Imperial College in the University of London.  Other universities and colleges in the UK are equally easy to identify, once you have cracked the code.  Even where they reflect specialist interests and indicate that these sites are the work of an amateur or enthusiast, they still carry the weight of the academic institution which allows the material online.

Other weighty institutions continue to flourish on the net.  At www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/world_religions you will find quality information about the world’s great faiths as well as a searchable online Bible and, in the collection of audible clips, the “Our Father” in 365 languages and dialects.  One to watch, as it can only get better.  A particularly useful link is to www.catholic.org.uk which offers an extremely good news service and a précis of articles from the British Catholic press.

A reader with an academic bent writes to tell me of his concern “to bring happiness into learning”.   This quality is “sadly lacking in one of my favourite subjects, namely maths”, he adds.   To this end he has developed a site called www.spelga.co.uk which carries games and fun activities with a mathematical orientation.  Do not be put off by the graphics as the site gives good resources for parents and teachers alike. 

Another reader emails me to say, “I have just stumbled across a very beautiful feature on the National Gallery website called ‘Painting the Passion’. The address is: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/news/index_easter.html where the pictures are of course memorable, but the cool, clear and direct descriptions of the theological and narrative significance of the pictures is also impressive.”  Again the URL demonstrates that this is an authoritative site from a reputable source.  Another artistic site carries none of these tags or labels but still merits attention because its purpose is so worthwhile.  At         www.memorialsbyartists.co.uk there is information about commissioning memorial stones, especially in the event of unexpected and especially tragic death.  This site is beautifully designed and carries haunting images.

Recording the existence of the living can be an equally meritorious task.  If you want to search for the email of a friend or colleague, whether within the academic community or beyond its bounds, there are many different sources.   These are known “people finders” and range from www.bigfoot.com, to www.emailfinder.com or www.friendsreunited.co.uk or www.peoplesite.com or www.whowhere.com to www.people.yahoo.com  at each of which you will be invited to type in details and hope for the best.

In search of an academic qualification to go?  The Universal Life Church at   www.ulc.net will ordain anyone online and sells degrees.  A doctorate in divinity costs £17.14.  Alarming to find two boxes, one of which says, “ordain me” and the other “reset form”.  Bogus or what?  As in real life, the ulc site has a schismatic competitor at www.pulc.com namely the Progressive Universal Life Church.  Scary or what?  On a more credible note, a final offering from a reader.  At www.courtyardcards.com you will find photos and cards of the British countryside. Most of these are stunning images from the north west of England.  What makes this site different is the fact that the pictures are accompanied by an internet map with references, so that you can find the walk to go along with the card.  If you like the view, hike what you see – and send on ideas to your friends.  A novel way of opening up the countryside.

APRIL 2001

Revision time is on us again.  For GCSE candidates in the United Kingdom, online help is at hand at  www.bbc.co.uk/education/gcsebitesize where the material has been prepared by teachers and examiners.  The list of subjects is highly impressive and extends from traditional ones like English and French to business studies and IT.  As well as revision pages the site sports interactive tests which are marked immediately.  Go there to while away time assessing how up-to-date your own knowledge is, as well as to resource yourself to help your children.  Channel 4 also runs an educational website at www.homeworkhigh.com which is particularly user friendly.  Only four subjects are covered at www.gcse.com - namely English, Maths, Physics and French - but the material is top quality, as are the graphics.  The site makes an interesting claim: “GCSE provides a framework of assessment for practically all abilities, so our pages are suitable for O-level, Standard Grade, US High School and GED students, and students attending secondary schools in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Eire”.

A reader has sent me a raft of useful websites for academic use.  Many of these relate to the Dead Sea Scrolls but carry links to other scripture sites.  For instance, try the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the University of Jerusalem on http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il and Fordham University’s  astonishing Internet Ancient History Sourcebook.  Its home page has an extensive selection of links, study guides, and articles about the ancient Near East and ancient Mediterranean worlds, as well as some public domain translations of classical texts and is available at  www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/asbook.html  For a neat Biblical timeline and help in understanding the development of Israelite religion or Judaism, try www.drury.edu/faculty/ess/values/hebrewscriptures.html and for an impressive collection of more general religious texts, including non-canonical Christian texts go to http://davidwiley.com/religion.html  Classy  bibliographies are available at a Canadian site: www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~lipton/biblio.html for researchers involved in the academic study of religion.  Finish off with a few jokes from the Beth Tikvah congregation in Montreal:  www.bethtikvah.qc.ca/humour.html

 Two other religious sites are worth noting.  The Virtual Religion Index describes itself as an "index . . . designed as a tool for students with little time. It analyzes & highlights important content of religion-related websites to speed research. Hyperlinks are provided not only to homepages but to major subsites, directories & documents within. Our purpose is not to circumvent tours of worthy sites, but to cut down the time spent on surfing, click-throughs, and sorting of gopher searches."  The site, at http://religion.rutgers.edu/vri/ is quite simply astonishing and there is enough material there to keep a searcher happy for hours.  So too with www.beliefnet.com which carries its learning lightly by supplying quizzes and games as well as a wealth of slightly whacky information.  A fun site to visit.

There are now a variety of sites which supply food for the body rather than for the mind. The winner of the Food Association’s Best Internet Retailer in the Organic Food section was the Fresh Food Co at www.freshfood.co.uk which has a full range of meat, fruit and vegetables, as well as miracle beeswax cleaning products.  Three other sites at www.simplyorganic.net and www.organicsdirect.co.uk or www.westcountryorganics.co.uk broaden the choice.  For organic beer, cider, champagne and wine try www.organic-oxygen.co.uk which provides free delivery on all alcohol. 

Sport sites are many and varied.  For facts about cricket there are several five-star sites.  They range from  the splendid world-wide coverage at www-uk.cricket.org which carries a ball-by-ball commentary, to the nicely named www.334notout.com which specialises in the history of the Ashes.  India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh feature at www.clickcricket.com which also carries fitness and coaching tips.   For a stream of live scores go to   www.cybercricket.com which will bring them to your screen in a discrete format that can live alongside the rest of your work.  The fastest site of all is www.cricmania.com while www.wisden.com <