* RESOURCES

- TOOLKITS

ABMA Toolkit: This has all of the programs you will ever need to
function in ABMA. Uploads, downloads, decodes, all of it. The Toolkit
comes in 12 separate pieces that I refer to as volumes. Each volume
is "stand alone", meaning that each one can be downloaded and used
independently of the others (unlike the segments of a post).


- LINKS (URLS)

The following is a collection of links. They point to web and FTP
sites where you can obtain most of the software that is contained
in the ABMA Toolkit. These links were last checked completely
on 1 February 2000; some of them have been checked since then.

To a new ABMA participant or a new Mac Usenet user, some of these sites
are more important than others. If you are new to this game, then be
sure to spend some time browsing around at the macorchard.com web
site, which is probably the best single source for links to Mac
Internet software. Also, as we mentioned earlier, the ABMA FAQ web
pages contain important information that you need to know.

With most of the following URLs for downloading software, a specific
version number is included in the file name itself. After mid-2000
(or whenever this section of the Guide is likely to be obsolete),
in order to make sure that you get the latest version of the software,
you should use your FTP client to check the directory that's given
in the URL, rather than using the entire URL directly. For instance,
as you'll see from the list below, YA-Decoder can currently be
downloaded from
ftp://mirror.apple.com//mirrors/Info-Mac.Archive/cmp/ya-decoder-302.hqx

(or any other Info-Mac archive, using the same directory and file
names). However, at some point the file "ya-decoder-302.hqx" may
be replaced with a later version, so you should just check the
"cmp" subdirectory on the server for the most recent version, and
download that. For commercially distributed software like StuffIt,
of course you can always use a web browser to go to the vendor's web
site, and get information there about the latest version and how to
download it.

When downloading software using an URL that contains a specific file
name, remember that even if the URL has an "http:" prefix rather than
"ftp:", you can still paste that URL into Anarchie to download the
file painlessly, in a single step. Often this will be less trouble
than using a web browser. In Anarchie, just press Command-E or
Command-H and paste the complete URL (copied from the list below)
into the resulting dialog box.

The files whose names end in ".bin", such as some of those from Mac
Orchard, are MacBinary-encoded 8-bit binary files; you'll probably
need to download these with a real FTP client like Anarchie or Fetch
or NetFinder, using binary (image) mode rather than text mode, and
decode them with StuffIt Expander or MindExpander or MacBinary III.
Trying to download those files using a web browser may or may not work.

ABMA FAQs:
http://www.voicenet.com/~edtyre/
[Be sure to read the FAQs here!]
http://abma.dhs.org/
http://www.skuz.net/macfaq/
http://www.skuz.net/macfaq/abma/abmasg.html
[This Guide in HTML]

Users of ABMA who are coming in through AOL should read this:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/6214/aol.html

Newsreader links:
http://www.macorchard.com/usenet.html
[All about Mac Usenet s/w]
http://www.newsreaders.com/mac/clients.html
[General Usenet s/w]
http://cae.ese.ogi.edu/pub/network/newswatcher/
[Newswatcher page]
http://mac.tucows.com/blueberry/newsmac.html
[Mac newsreaders]
http://www.best.com/~smfr/mtnw/
[Simon Fraser's MT-NW home page]

General downloads:
http://www.macorchard.com/
[The best Mac Internet s/w site]
http://www.versiontracker.com
[Lots of info about Mac s/w updates]
http://www.download.com
[CNET.com Mac downloads]
http://www.zdnet.com/mac/download.html
[Ziff-Davis Mac s/w D/Ls]
http://mac.tucows.com>

----- Newsreader downloads:

YA-NewsWatcher 5.0.1 (needs a Power Mac and Mac OS 8.5 or later):
http://www.macorchard.com/ya-nw501.sit.bin
http://cae.ese.ogi.edu/pub/network/newswatcher/ya-nw.5.0.1.hqx

ftp://the.ausmac.net/pub/mac/Communication-SW/ya-newswatcher-501.bin

YA-NewsWatcher 4.2.6 (needs a Power Mac and Mac OS 8.5 or later):
http://cae.ese.ogi.edu/pub/network/newswatcher/ya-nw.4.2.6.hqx

ftp://the.ausmac.net/pub/mac/Communication-SW/ya-newswatcher-426.bin

YA-NewsWatcher 3.1.8 for Power Macs (needs Mac OS