Remember the first time you drove a car, and the first time when you drove up the ramp onto the highway? For some it was an exhilarating experience, for others, sheer terror. Now it's years later and it's happening all over again, except this time it's not a car and the on ramp is not paved. The purring motor you hear is the cooling fan on your Pentium's CPU. (If you can hear that, it needs replacing). Like the highway of life or Highway 400, the Internet can be a rewarding drive or filled with danger at each intersection. A wrong turn can lead into areas of darkness. How do you find a good site and avoid the bad ones, when do you start?
When you surf the net, you generally get around by doing searches using key words or following popular indexes like "Yahoo" If you type a key word such as "Christianity", this will bring you to an assortment of sites which, once inside those, you are in a safe haven, really nothing to link you to the unsavory areas of the "net". Another way to type in a known address into the address box and hit "enter". Once you visit a site you like, bookmark it so that at another time you want to get to it you can go straight there from the bookmark.
Recently I worked on producing a site for Calvary Community Church. I am glad I don't design WEB pages for a living. It has taken 27 hours of painstaking work to update the developments which you see there. A real web artist would laugh, I'm sure, but they work for money, not for love. This is considered a safe site for children and teenagers as it provides no links to any place you wouldn't want them to be surfing. It is fully interdenominational and provides a good overview of the real issues that we face every day. As much work as it was, the finished product was worth the effort, it is now one of the safest sites on the net. I will give you the address so you can view it: Http://www.barint.on.ca/rcsmith/calvary2.html.
Also it can be accessed from the Home Pages of Barrie Internet (who graciously donated the site to make it the first "Cyberchurch" in Central Ontario. If you are wheelchair bound you can take in a sermon or two as it is literally transcribed word for word into a "sermon on the net" hypertext link.
The internet is not evil as some would have us think but is merely a tool which can be used for good or bad, like a hammer or a nail gun. With Internet we have the opportunity to be in contact with people everywhere and anywhere in the world. As of this writing I have been in contact with a number of local area chuches that are intending to use Barrie Internet as a form of communication for their members. I sure hope they make them an interesting place to surf as well. They will also be accessible from the Home Page of Barrie Internet.