Bill Pannifer finds Eccles cakes for expatriates, visits a shrine to Father Ted and ends up behind bars in America

Homesick site: Planning a trip to the States? British In America (http://www.opendoor.com/BritishInAmerica/Brit.html) offers remote access to the home comforts you swore you'd never miss. The site gives details of cable channels showing EastEnders, and of New England cricket clubs, as well as more serious stuff about voting, tax, immigration and where to get Eccles cakes in Santa Monica. A UK press section includes that online synthesis of popular journalism The Anorak. With its emphasis on "anywhere you can get a decent pint or cup of tea, watch football, and good pub grub", it's doubtless a useful service to our 1.4 million expatriates, though more hits may be garnered from US anglophiles. Britons may wince at the cultural definitions on offer, but it's comforting to know that, thanks to the Net, it is possible to obtain Marmite and Hobnobs by e-mailing credit-card details to an address in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Pastoral site: Channel 4's disgraced-priests-in-exile sitcom, Father Ted, is spawning an assortment of fan pages. The Craggy Island Examiner (http:// www.geocities.com/Paris/2694/craggy.html) is faithful to the tone of the programme itself - spiky in its its anti-clericalism and disarmingly daft overall - but adds the true disciple's devotion to detail and intolerance of schismatics: rival pages are linked under "People We Don't Like". There are images of the Fathers Ted, Dougal and Jack, a sound sample of someone being told to "fup off", plots for every episode, and even the theme music in guitar tablature form. The latest addition is a link matching priests and peccadilloes, from the silver-haired conman Ted himself to Father Jack, the irascible alky whose lines are limited to cries of "Arse!", "Drink!", "Girls!" and "Feck!" Much more fun than C4's site for the series, John Arundel's "official/unofficial/ official" construction should become a point of pilgrimage for the clerically challenged.

Lockup site: Inmate Classified (http://www.inmate.com/) allows guests of the US correctional system to establish their own home pages, with smiling portraits instead of institutional mugshots, autobiographies, and details of supposed crimes. The tone of these varies, from tragicomic - "I am in prison for sales of narcotics and robbery, most of which I did do" - to tales of FBI entrapment impossible to verify or to discount. One can only be sympathetic, though, to someone doing 25-to-life for car theft, under the the "three strikes and you're out" policy.

Visitors can e-mail prisoners, but it's a one-way process: recipients must respond by ordinary post. Most of the inmates are seeking female companionship and somewhat poignantly stress their marriage-mindedness and willingness to to go straight. With its prison-bar background graphics and voyeuristic come-on - "Find out what makes them tick, their dreams, their remorse ... see if their image still fits the Hollywood standard" - there's much emotional pain on display, as rehabilitation meets the bottom line with rather questionable results.