What are internet utilities?  For my purposes, I’m calling them online services that help you do work of some kind.

For instance, file sharing is a popular one.  I’ve chosen to use Dropbox for mine.  I don’t typically share my files with anyone but me, but since I operate on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone, it’s nice to have access to critical files everywhere I go with internet access.  And, if I don’t have internet access where I’m going, I can synchronize my Dropbox folder on the device I’m taking with me.  With a free account, you get 2G of online space, but you can earn more free space for certain things. One of those things is if a friend (or anyone) signed up through your link (like this), you’ll earn a free gigabyte of space, and they will earn free space, too.  Through the various incentives, I was able to increase my free space from the initial 2G to 8G.  That was fine until this morning, when I ran out of free space (I’ve had an account for three years or so).  I finally upgraded to the Pro version this morning.  Think of it as a virtual USB drive.  There are other similar services out there, but I’ve been very comfortable with Dropbox.

A new service I’ve added in the last week or so is a mailing list manager.  There are several available. The most common ones I’m aware of are MailChimp and Aweber.  Mail Chimp has a number of positive features.  It’s speedy, for one.  Their best feature is they are free, which is valuable if you’re just starting to build an email list on a budget.  Unfortunately, they won’t let you include affiliate links in their mailings.  For that reason, I went with Aweber, which, unfortunately is not free and is a sluggish when it comes to responsiveness.  They’ve been pretty easy to work with, though, and I’m fine-tuning my form and messages.  You may have noticed the new sign up form on the upper right sidebar.  I don’t plan to send out too much mail.  Initially, I’m looking at a monthly newsletter, but I may also be offering other things of interest to readers.  Feel free to sign up and join me on this adventure.

WordPress is another internet utility of sorts.  It’s a blogging platform, but it can do so much more.  You can build a complete web experience with WordPress as your foundation.  It’s similar to Blogger but much more robust.  If you don’t have your own space on the web to work with, you can use WordPress.com.  But if you do have your own space, I highly recommend what’s called the self-hosted version available from WordPress.org.  WordPress is pretty easy to install, but your hosting provider may make it even easier by allowing you to install it from your Control Panel, taking most of the mystery out of the process.

If you already have a website, give Google Analytics a look.  Search on “google analytics” for the current site.  I’m still getting the hang of how it works.

What are some internet utilities that you use?  Why do you like them?