Over the past few months I have been looking at opportunities to making my life easier and taking advantage of a rich digital experience. Being envious of Apple Corp. “.Mac” service, I wanted something similar for the PC, but for free. What I was looking for was something with simple webpage for myself that I could have a blog on, reliable email, an online photo gallery, functionality to do video casts, and have the availability to do online storage.
For a while now I have been using google’s services. I have used Gmail, Google’s free email service since it has been available. They offer 2GB of space, and excellent way to archive emails, and its also very easy to find old email’s with built in search functions. With Gmail, on my own personal laptop, I use Mozilla Thunderbird. I really like to use Thunderbird for its unique junk filtering, and it makes it easy for me to save emails into nice little folders. Plus, I hate web-based email. So I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird, and being that it already had a simple setup for gmail built in, I was already to go.
Google also offers a service called Blogger. It’s very basic, but its all I need. It allows me to blog with very little hassle, and makes it very easy for syndication. They also offer multiple templates with which, you can customize to your own liking.
Picasa is another service offered by google. It sorts all my photos and organizes them for me. I can also quickly export my photo albums to the web, and it also allows me to implement them right into my blog. Its very simple, and organized, and that makes me happy.
With video casting, I just use Google Videos. Being that Youtube.com is now owned by Google, they make it very simple as well to upload my videos, I can also keep videos private, or allow them to be in the public searches.
Another thing I forgot to mention was a function to do Calendars. Guess what, Google offers that too! I can also share my calendar with friends, and even designate certain people to add or change my calendar. With the added functionality of Mozilla Sunbird with the “Provider for Google Calendar” extension, it makes Google calendar a true 100% collaboration tool.
If I also wanted to have group discussions, Google has that as well.
As for the online storage… that was a bit tricky, but I found a way for google to take care of that as well. I originally tried using “Box.net” for my online storage, but they disabled webdav support, and being that I wanted to just drag and drop files to a drive in my drive list, Box.net wasn’t working anymore. I also tried XDrive, which they offered free space, but their desktop software, in my own opinion, was quirky, and didn’t connect all the time. I had heard originally at one time when Gmail first came on to the scene, they were going to offer online storage. So far google has failed to come up with something with their own brand name. I am still trying to get a hold of somebody at Google for an interview to see if and when they are planning to have this online drive going, but I am having very little luck. I did however find a 3rd party solution allowing me to use Google’s online storage space to hold my files. I did a search for GMailFS which I found a shell extension that would allow a drive to show up in my drive list. A WORD OF WARNING!!! I would setup a second GMail account for this if you are planning on using them for online storage. It has been reported that people have had their accounts suspended for indefinite amounts of time because they have misused their service. So, create a second account similar to the original and you should be safe. I don’t see any problems if you are loading just documents (and other small files) to your Gmail Drive, I wouldn’t use it as a full-blown method to store all your data. Just as a nice backup tool, that’s all.
Well, that’s my little tidbit on how to make your life a little more digital and organized. Thanks to Google.
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