Forum Outposts

The Geometry Forum Newsletter

Winter 1995, page 1

The Geometry Forum News Gateway--A Newsreader for the World Wide Web

Our last issue discussed the WWW. Now you can read news on the Web using the Forum News Gateway a server that talks to one or more news servers and sends back news articles as hypertext markup language (HTML) pages to web clients like Mosaic, MacWeb, or Netscape. Like traditional newsreaders, it lets you subscribe to groups and keeps track of what you've read. Unlike other newsreaders, it lets you post and view HTML.

Using the Forum News Gateway, you can exchange public messages with graphics, mathematical writing, and links to other documents and Internet sources. The Gateway's development is funded by the National Science Foundation. The software is copyrighted, but we're permitting free use with no restrictions.

From the Forum News Gateway server running on our Forum computer you can explore reading news using this URL (Uniform Resource Locator:

http://mathforum.org/forum.news.gateway.html

From this page you can read about it, fetch a copy, and try it out.

With a forms- and authentication-capable Web browser you can read articles posted to our geometry newsgroups and to our local testing newsgroup, where we've posted some articles in HTML. See what it's like to read news on the Web. When your site sets up its own copy, you'll have full access to all the newsgroups available on your local news server(s).

Since we don't have the computer power to support your full newsreading activity, we've limited this copy of the server to allow access only to mathematics newsgroups. You could similarly limit the choice of newsgroups at your site to provide a curricular focus on mathematics, social studies, history, art, or whatever special interest groups your school needs, and to reduce the potential of the Internet to overwhelm students and teachers at first viewing.

The Forum News Gateway was originally developed to enable our users to post and view multimedia articles. We support a community of mathematicians, and they can't communicate effectively without graphs, sketches and diagrams. Additional advantages include:

a consistent newsreading interface that is browser-independent.
personal preferences stored on the server, allowing access from any networked machine.
control by the service provider of the selection of newsgroups available via a particular URL. This can be especially helpful to the education community.
simultaneous access to multiple news servers.
some additional features, like Kill and Highlight.

If you're new to the web, you can download a Mac Web browser to explore the World Wide Web from our FTP site: FTP to mathforum.org and look in the directory /software/workshops.

Questions? Write us or call 1-800-756-7823.

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Sarah Seastone
December 30, 1994