What?
This document is a guide of how to Not Suck on the Internet. It's kind of like a Netiquette guide with a few of my own little personal tips mixed in. Anyway... read, learn, and most importantly, don't suck.

How To Not Suck With E-Mail
EMail--unarguably the most often used application of the Internet--is a powerful tool, when used effectively. However, when you suck it up you immediately begin to kill its effectiveness. Annoying people isn't a good way to get your message across. Read the following tips on using email the way it should be used:

Quoting
The process of including part of a person's original message text in your message (quoting) is the thing most often screwed up in email. Keep in mind the following tips:

• AOL people! Turn off "AOL Style" quoting and turn on "Internet Style" quoting. I'm not sure how you do this, but my AOL friends have said it's an option somewhere. AOL quoting is really stupid looking, wrapping the text in << and >> marks.
• Text wrapping. Set your text wrapping to a maximum of 76 characters, perhaps even 74. You have to keep in mind your messages may be replied to back and forth several times and you don't want each line to start wrapping onto a new line if the size of all the > > marks gets too wide.
• How much to quote? If you're only replying to one part of a message, only quote that part. There's nothing worse than searching through several pages of quoted text only to find one little phrase like "uh huh" or "yeah" in the middle of it all.
• Strip stupid headers. Remove stupid headers your mail client throws into reply messages. Subjects are good, To: & From: are good, Dates are good. However, if there are 50 people on a Cc: line, who cares? Strip 'em so people don't have to scroll/page so far to read the meat of the message.

Attaching Files
The first rule when attaching files is simply this: Don't. You usually don't need to attach files. If you do, though, just make sure you're aware of the following:

• Most people download attachments. Most people's mail clients are, sadly, setup to download all the mail from their server onto their local disk. AOL members and people using IMAP mail servers instead of POP are lucky enough to pick & choose what they download. However, don't count on this. This brings us to our next point ...
• People don't want to download 37 of your summer vacation photos. Put them on the web and mail people a link to them. By looking at your webserver access logs you'll see that, indeed, only 3 people went to see the pictures anyway.
• Files are bloated by email. Want to mail your friend that really cool 52 MB video file you just downloaded? You drop it onto your mail client to send it to him/her and notice that, whoa, it's 71 MB now! Why? Your original file was an 8-bit file and it's being converted to 7-bit so it'll be safe traveling around all the world's email systems. ZIPing it won't help either. Zip files are 8-bit files to, as is nearly everything. If you need to mail a big file, don't. Put it somewhere where you friend can FTP it down or download it over the web.

Other important e-mail tips

• Subjects. Subject lines are good. Be as descriptive as possible while also being as short as possible. Don't write something stupid in the subject, it'd be better just to leave it blank. And also, never change the subject on a reply... that's real annoying.
• Learn your mail client. Unless you're on AOL, you have tons of choices of mail clients, the programs you use to read your mail... Eudora, Netscape Communicator, Outlook Express, Outlook 98, Pegasus, pine, elm.... you name it. Some suck at some stuff, others suck at other stuff. The point is, they all suck at something. Figure out which one you like and get good at using it.
• IMAP. If you're constantly traveling between computers, as I am, you may find IMAP to be of interest. It lets you read and manage your mail all on the remote server, including moving messages between folders. IMAP isn't a program, it's a protocol, or a way to talk to mail servers. You have to find some good mail clients that support IMAP. Personally, I use pine on the Unix side and Outlook 98 on the Windoze side.

How To Make Non-Sucky Web Pages
Have a website? Does it suck? If so, apply the following style guidelines:

• Animations and Java applets are cool when used effectively. However, don't make your website just a massive collection of animated and blinky shit. Trust me, people have seen it all before. Seeing it all in one place isn't any more impressive. Besides, animation brings people's eyes away from the text, where you usually want it.
• <CENTER> is annoying. Don't make your whole website centered, nothing could be more lame. Some AOL and Geocities page makers must do this for you automatically or something because a lot of AOL and Geocities people have terrible pages, largely because of this one factor.
• <BLINK> is even more annoying. I thought <BLINK> had ended back in 1995 or so but I still see it around sometimes. Don't use it. It's retarded. People will leave your site. With animated GIFs, people can at least press STOP and let their eyes rest to read your text. With blinking text, there's no way to stop it. Noooo!
• Background picture interference. If you have a background image, or some weird color, make sure it does not affect the readability of your text. People don't want to hit "Select All" just to read your site.
• Consistency. Common fonts, colors, and layouts give the visitor a feeling like they're "in" the site, not just bouncing around a bunch of randomonly thrown together pages.
• HEIGHT= and WIDTH= tags. Make sure you put HEIGHT= and WIDTH= attributes on your <IMG> tags. By doing so, you tell people's web browsers how much room to allocate for the images on the page which enables them to load the page immediately, without having to wait for the images to fully download first. Would you rather have your users sit and putz around for 7-10 seconds or would you rather they immediately see your website text and have them see the images gracefully load in as they download?
• Banners, counters, and Link Exchange. They're pointless. Nobody cares. Banners waste our time and I doubt you're making more than a few cents per month. Counters are pointless... they either say that your site is popular (which we'd already know if we were visiting there often) or they say that your site is lame, if you have no hits. Judge your traffic by your feedback, not by a stupid inaccurate number. A more accurate way to track usage would be to look at your webserver access log, if you have access to it.
• Navigation. Try to make it easy for people to get around your site. Try to have a nice site map and an easy way for people to go "up" a level on your pages and "side to side" within the area they're currently at.