A Mike Life – The Life of Mike!

Moving to the Web: Part 4

// August 3rd, 2007 // fun

You can view the previous entries by going to the Moving to the Web category.

Part 4: Miscellaneous Gadgets and Tools

Bookmarks

There are a lot of bookmark places out there, but I use Delicious. It’s actually Del.ico.us to be correct. But basically this is a website that you can store all your bookmarks online so you can access them from anywhere. You tag your bookmarks to help categorize them, much like you do in Google Mail or Google Reader. I’ve used this a few times when I wanted to find the site I use to view radar images of storms, and I forgot the name of it. I logged onto Delicious and found it pretty quickly, although I need to organize them better.

It also imports your old bookmarks from your browser and will even integrate with Firefox to allow you to tag places while you surf and even have a sidebar with your Delicious bookmarks in it. You can share your bookmarks and also view ones that others have shared. It’s pretty nifty.

Backups

There are a few backup places online, but I’m using Mozy right now. It gives you 3 gigs of online storage for free and when you install it and run the program, it creates a little mapped drive in your Windows Explorer which acts like anything you have on your computer, like a hard drive, thumb drive, CD, etc. You can click on it and explore the stuff you have backed up online.

You can then access that from anywhere, but the main benefit is that it’s not on any local computer or in your house, so if anything does happen, like a flood or fire, your important data is safely online.

Documents

This recommendation is a bit shaky as best, as least for the Word Processor side of things. Google Docs is pretty amazing in that you can store, create and share spreadsheets and documents online. You can write documents, stories, resumes and access them from anywhere. Your spreadsheets are the same way.

I have a financial spreadsheet I uploaded to Google Docs and now I can access it anywhere, to make sure I’ve paid bills, etc. I’ve also created some spreadsheets for fantasy football, which you can publish online for the world to see and it was very, very handy.

Their document answer to Word isn’t the greatest yet. Your margins aren’t set like in Word, so they end up as wide as your screen, which doesn’t work for my school requirements on papers.

Still, the ability of both of these to be accessed wherever you go is pretty amazing and free.

Calendar

Google also has a Calendar tool that allows you to keep your entire schedule on their site which I haven’t tried yet.

Well, I think I am forgetting some vital part of moving your life to the web and if I remember anything, there will be more posts on the matter. And if new things are created, I will pass those along as well!

I hope this has all been beneficial to you guys and that some of you have found it useful.