What are internet utilities?\u00a0 For my purposes, I’m calling them online services that help you do work of some kind.<\/p>\n
For instance, file sharing is a popular one.\u00a0 I’ve chosen to use Dropbox<\/a> for mine.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/a>), you’ll earn a free gigabyte of space, and they will earn free space, too.\u00a0 Through the various incentives, I was able to increase my free space from the initial 2G to 8G.\u00a0 That was fine until this morning, when I ran out of free space (I’ve had an account for three years or so).\u00a0 I finally upgraded to the Pro version this morning.\u00a0 Think of it as a virtual USB drive.\u00a0 There are other similar services out there, but I’ve been very comfortable with Dropbox<\/a>.<\/p>\n A new service I’ve added in the last week or so is a mailing list manager.\u00a0 There are several available. The most common ones I’m aware of are MailChimp<\/a> and Aweber<\/a>.\u00a0 Mail Chimp has a number of positive features.\u00a0 It’s speedy, for one.\u00a0 Their best feature is they are free, which is valuable if you’re just starting to build an email list on a budget.\u00a0 Unfortunately, they won’t let you include affiliate links in their mailings.\u00a0 For that reason, I went with Aweber, which, unfortunately is not free and is a sluggish when it comes to responsiveness.\u00a0 They’ve been pretty easy to work with, though, and I’m fine-tuning my form and messages.\u00a0 You may have noticed the new sign up form on the upper right sidebar.\u00a0 I don’t plan to send out too much mail.\u00a0 Initially, I’m looking at a monthly newsletter, but I may also be offering other things of interest to readers.\u00a0 Feel free to sign up and join me on this adventure.<\/p>\n WordPress is another internet utility of sorts.\u00a0 It’s a blogging platform, but it can do so much more.\u00a0 You can build a complete web experience with WordPress as your foundation.\u00a0 It’s similar to Blogger but much more robust.\u00a0 If you don’t have your own space on the web to work with, you can use WordPress.com<\/a>.\u00a0 But if you do have your own space, I highly recommend what’s called the self-hosted version available from WordPress.org<\/a>.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n If you already have a website, give Google Analytics a look.\u00a0 Search on “google analytics” for the current site.\u00a0 I’m still getting the hang of how it works.<\/p>\n What are some internet utilities that you use?\u00a0 Why do you like them?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What are internet utilities?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I’ve chosen to use Dropbox for mine.\u00a0 I don’t typically share my files with anyone but me, but since I operate on …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-stuff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15442,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6517\/revisions\/15442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}