10 Steps to making a Living Online

By: Nicholas Dobson

Building the foundation blocks of a successful business online in 10 simple steps!

The material is a good read for Internet Marketing 'newbies' who want to master the fundamental steps first before doing anything advanced yet.

On-Line and Off-Line

10 Steps to making a Living Online 

The terms on-line and off-line have specific meanings with respect to computer technology and telecommunication. The concepts have however been extended from their computing and telecommunication meanings into the area of human interaction and conversation.

In computer technology and telecommunication, on-line and off-line are defined by Federal Standard 1037C. They are states or conditions of a "device or equipment" or of "a functional unit". To be considered on-line, a device must be at least one of:

• "Under the direct control of another device"
• "Under the direct control of the system with which it is associated"
• "Available for immediate use on demand by the system without human intervention"
• "Connected to a system, and is in operation"
• "Functional and ready for service"

while a device that is off-line is not (e.g. it has "its main power source disconnected or turned off", and is "off-power").

One example of a common use of these concepts is a Mail User Agent that can be instructed to be in either "on-line" or "off-line" states. One such MUA is Microsoft Outlook. When it is "on-line" it will attempt to connect to mail servers (to check for new mail at regular intervals, for example), and when it is "off-line" it will not attempt to make any such connections. The "on-line" or "off-line" state of the MUA does not necessarily reflect the connection status between the computer on which it is running and Internet. The user may have the computer itself on-line, connected to Internet via a cable modem or an ADSL connection, but may wish for Outlook to be off-line, so that it makes no attempt to send or to receive messages. Or the computer may be configured to employ a dial-up connection on demand (whenever an application such as Outlook attempts to make connection to a server), but the connection may be an expensive telephone call from the particular location in which the computer currently happens to be (such as a hotel room) and the user may not wish Outlook to trigger making that call every 5 or 10 minutes to check for mail.

Another example of the use of these concepts is in the world of digital audio technology. A tape recorder, digital editor, or other device that is "on-line" is one whose clock is under the control of the clock of a "synchronization master" device. When the sync master commences playback, the "on-line" device automatically synchronizes itself to the master and commences playing from the same point in the recording. Whereas a device that is "off-line" uses no external clock reference and relies upon its own internal clock. When a large number of devices are connected to a sync master, it is often convenient, if one wants to hear just the output of one single device, to take it off-line, because if the device is played back on-line all synchronized devices have to locate the playback point and wait for each other to be in synchronization. (For further related discussion, see MIDI timecode, word sync, and recording system synchronization.)

A third example of a common use of these concepts is a web browser that can be instructed to be in either "on-line" or "off-line" states. The browser only attempts to fetch pages from servers whilst in the "on-line" state. In the "off-line" state, users can perform offline browsing, where pages can be browsed using local copies of those pages that have previously been downloaded whilst in the "on-line" state. This can be useful when the computer itself is also off-line, with connection to Internet expensive or impossible. The pages are either downloaded implicitly into the web browser's own cache, as a result of prior on-line browsing by the user, or explicitly by the browser being configured to keep local copies of certain web pages, which it keeps updated when the browser is in the on-line state, either by checking that the local copies are up-to-date at regular intervals or by checking that the local copies are up-to-date whenever the browser is switched to the on-line state. One such web browser capable of being explicitly configured to download pages for offline browsing is Internet Explorer. When pages are added to the "Favourites" list, they can be marked for being made "available for offline browsing". Internet Explorer will download to local copies both the marked page and, optionally, all of the pages that it links to. In Internet Explorer version 6, the level of direct and indirect links, the maximum amount of local disc space allowed to be consumed, and the schedule on which local copies are checked to see whether they are up-to-date, are configurable for each individual "Favourite" entry.

See also: WWWOFFLE

Offline browsing known as "Offline favourites" was removed as a feature in the most recent version of Internet Explorer 7, which only now supports single web page saving, but not browsing or storing an entire site offline.

Similarly, off-line storage is computer storage that is not "available for immediate use on demand by the system without human intervention", i.e it is storage that is off-line.