Before discussing sites to visit, I’ll cover a few important items that couldn’t be squeezed into last month’s article.

Multiple ISP Accounts: With Windows 95/98, you can easily have more than one ISP dial-up on the same computer. This lets you evaluate a new ISP before cancelling the old one, or provides a second account so you can still access the Net when your main provider is down.

Email: Eudora has an excellent pro version, but it does cost a bit. For a list of all available email programs, go to http://www.winfiles.com/apps/98/mail-clients.html.

The latest rage is free email. For a list of the many free services, do a search in Yahoo for “free email.” The most popular is Hotmail (http://www.hotmail.com/), which was recently acquired by the Microsoft empire. These services pay for themselves through ads which are directed to users according to personal profiles given at sign-up. Advantages of free email are that it is accessible world-wide via browser, your email address stays the same as you change ISPs, and it allows family members or company employees to have their own personal email addresses. Although confidentiality is stressed, I don’t like the idea of these big corporations having my personal profile and having all my email correspondence going through their system.

Software Bonanza: Go to http://www.tucows.com/canada.html or http://www.download.com for loads of software. Be careful, though. This could be a huge time-killer. The few well-proven, most popular programs are often (but not always) your best bet. I suggest you get at least the Adobe Acrobat, Real Audio/Video and Winzip programs (all free).

Why is all this in The Interim?

While developing LifeSite, I’ve been shocked at how little pro-lifers with computers and Internet accounts understand their computers and the Net. There’s an obvious need for technical advice and basic Internet info. I’m hopeful the columns have been meeting some of that need. For instance, after reading in the first column that she needed a 56K modem, my mother went out and bought one. She’s delighted with the big improvement over her old 33.6K modem. Now she wants to replace her small, fuzzy monitor with a 17-inch unit. What’s this world coming to when grandmothers are developing such techno-sophistication!

There is Life on the Internet!

In the last few years there has been a huge leap in the number of informative pro-life, pro-family and religious sites on the web. Campaign Life Coalition and The Interim have found the web to be an amazing, indispensable source of up-to-date and accurate information on our issues. As well, the web allows us to bypass the media shutout we have endured for so many years and to present the truth to anyone on the Net, not only in Canada, but around the world.

To start, go to our LifeSite, at www.lifesite.net. Browse through all the elements of Lifesite, such as past and current issues of The Interim, CLC National News and Lifesite Daily News. There are key federal and provincial legislature votes, the Linda Gibbons story, video clips of the March for Life, and more. Then click on “Links to Other Sites.” Many of the links we list have links to many other sites—a whole universe of good folks out there with wonderful and often very useful information to relate!

Pro-life political, educational, and service organizations are all there, along with beautiful photos of children in the womb at http://www.prolife.org/cpcs-online/fetal.html. The legal history of abortion in Canada, statistics, and lists of all federal and provincial politicians and their addresses, phone, and fax numbers and e-mail addresses are available in seconds. During elections, all candidates and many of their positions are listed. Canadian pro-life sites are listed at http://home.istar.ca/~vandee/index.shtml.

On the news scene, we receive honest news (finally!) via excellent services such as Lifesite Daily News and The Interim at http://www.lifesite.net/, Pro-Life E-News at http://www.interlife.org/, Alberta Report athttp://albertareport.com/23arhome.htm and the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute athttp://www.cafhri.org./, among others.

Excellent religious sites are Catholic World News at http://www.cwnews.com/, the Vatican athttp://www.vatican.va/, The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada at http://www.efc-canada.com Catholic Insight at http://www.aracnet.net/~catholic/article.html, EWTN at http://www.ewtn.com/, CatholiCity athttp://www.catholicity.com/, and Promise Keepers Canada at http://www.promisekeepers.ca/.

There is much, much more—home schooling at http://abidingweb.com/hsc/, pro-family organizations, and all kinds of specialty sites. I often use Canada 411 at http://canada411.sympatico.ca/ to find the phone number for anyone in Canada. At http://www.westminster.ca, you can find postal codes for any place in Canada or the U.S.