Webbed for a wet Irish summer

There's plenty of exams and things elsewhere in this week's supplement, so I've decided to steer away from academia and provide a quick run-down of how you can use the Internet before and during the holidays to plan your summer travel, look for jobs here at home, organise those all-important parties, prepare for university, broaden your mind or just while away those rainy summer days.

Travel: Student travel specialist USIT has an excellent site (www.usitnow.ie) with all the information and advice you'd expect from that organisation, especially on summer jobs and accommodation in the US. By now all the airlines, ferry companies, tour operators and most travel agents have reliable websites. You'll find them easily enough through a search engine, or check out the travel section of Irish Internet directory NiceOne (www.niceone.com).

When you're abroad, webbased e-mail is a great way to keep in touch: www.hotmail.com and www.yahoo.com are the most popular. If you find yourself in a town with an Internet cafe but no Irish pub, you could visit a chat room at an Irish website. The well-known Virtual Irish Pub (www.vip.ie) is an obvious choice here.

For travelling in Ireland, www.hostels-ireland.com and www.camping-ireland.ie will help you find low-budget accommodation.

Summer work: If you fancy working abroad over the summer, recruitment is currently a big growth area on the web, with sites such as Top Jobs on the Net (www.topjobs.ie) carrying ads for jobs abroad as well as in Ireland. For summer jobs in Ireland, check out www.nixers.com, which specialises in short-term and part-time employment. Flunk.Net (see Site of the Week) has a new Jobseeker section.

Preparing for third level: If you're starting college in the autumn, there are several sites aimed at you, with expansion and improvements promised for before the summer is out. At CollegesWeb.com, for example, you can browse through information on college life, look for accommodation or second-hand course books and try to learn something through discussion forums.

If you're heading to college in Britain, student sites over there are flourishing, the main ones being www.student.co.uk, www.studentuk.com and www.studentonline.co.uk.

Partying: For those post-exam parties the Brew Crew (www.brewcrew.ie) is an small but innovative Dublin company providing draught beer at your party, with mid-week specials for students. Party Zone (www.partyzone.ie) offers tips and solutions for party organising. And for those summer barbecues, there are some fascinating sites which show you how to mix cocktails - just do a search for "cocktails".

Sport: With Euro 2000 starting shortly, soccer fans can count down the days at some of the web's many soccer sites. Football 365 (www.football365.com) has up-to-the-minute news and plenty of fun. Launching this week is a Euro 2000 section in the Irish Times soccer site, World Football (www.ireland.com/sports/soccer). Fun: Despite the early hype, the web wasn't and still isn't primarily an entertaining medium, but boy is there some enjoyment to be had among all the useful and informative stuff.

One of the most entertaining - and in a way educational - sites is The Onion (www.onion.com), which satirises the mainstream US news media. It's been going for a few years now and has several imitators, but no rivals - the rest are just turnips. Educational in more of a spatial-relations sense, but mostly just good fun, is www.sodaplay.com. This one can't be explained: it has to be seen to be believed.

If you find yourself in employment this summer, you must visit P45 (www.p45.net), an off-the-wall Irish site devoted to making office life less dull, with features, discussions and jokes all relating to work and how to do less of it.

Finally, despite everything I've written here in the past six weeks, my advice is that if you're still young, you should spend the summer surfing waves, not websites. The Internet can complement your real life, but shouldn't take it over.