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Experiment: Offline Internet entrepreneur
Please help me to setup my experiment.
I want to eventually travel and work from anywhere, which means I won’t always have an always-on high-speed Internet connection, something that I’ve had at my disposal for well over a decade.
How can I do what I need to, without being connected 24×7 as I am today?
With the exception of online radio, all I really need to do on-line is write, upload and test code, read and write blog posts, and e-mail. Everything else on the Internet is just distraction, eating up precious hours of my life that could be spent, um, living.
To prepare myself for being able to do this, I am going to do an experiment and see how long I can go without having a persistent Internet connection.
Here’s my theory for this experiment:
Writing, uploading, testing code
Right now, I do a lot of my coding with VI and terminal emulation. (I had given up coding, leaving it to programmers I hire, and I should go back to that.) Until I do give up programming again, I can setup my laptop with everything I need to run my code locally and just upload it when it works.
What do you recommend as the best platform for coding, debugging and testing PHP/MySQL software on my Windows XP laptop for distribution on a LAMP platform? (Free or commercial.)
Writing blog posts
There are various free and cheap Windows software packages for writing blog posts and automatically uploading them when you are connected. I don’t have to do it directly in WordPress online as I am right now.
Links to blogging software: Smashing Magazine
Any suggestions on the best one to use, again for Windows XP, free or commercial?
Reading blog posts:
With RRS aggregates, whenever I’m connected, more news can be downloaded than I can read in a day. And really, most of the blogs I read I don’t really need to read anyway. But, they are good for inspiration here and there.
I know nothing about this. Any suggestions for Windows XP software that will automatically download blog posts when I connect? How about forums as well?
E-mailing:
The time management skills taught in “The 4 Hour Work Week” mandate that I only check and respond to e-mail once or twice a day.
I currently get my mail from gmail, hotmail, and my own webmail on my domains. I could continue to do that, but I’d be happier if I could do it all offline and upload it, while still being able to access my email from any computer. Perhaps an IMAP connection for my work emails with Outlook, and continue to use online accounts as they are. Thoughts on the best solutions?
So the only Internet I need is a single trip a day to an Internet-enabled cafe. While I check and respond to emails, my code and blog posts can upload, and the blogs I read can download.
The benefits of this are that without an Internet connection, I won’t be distracted by constant e-mails coming in or long instant messaging conversations. Instead, if I’m at my computer, I’m being productive, and I won’t have the option to just while away part of my life aimlessly surfing, learning things that I’ll forget the next day anyway. And, I get a nice social break once or twice a day at the cafe around the corner when I do connect.
It will be an interesting experiment to see if I can go without the Internet. Your feedback will help me get started, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
Thanks!
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September 10th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Let me know when you get all of this figured out… I should probably set up something similar on my laptop.
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September 17th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I am on the road at clients every week.
In terms of Email, here is what I found worked very well for me.
My domains are registered and managed (I have several) at GoDaddy. I originally used their EMail but found they had some filters on my EMail that was causing bouncebacks to key clients of mine. Their response to my queries was that they could not do anything about it. So I started looking for other options.
I found that I could host my EMail for free through Google. I first tried it with one of my non-critical EMail accounts. Required some setup to link to my Domains at GoDaddy. You get the regular GMail interface along with their SPAM filtering that I have found excellent - almost no false positives. That gives me my Online Access that I can check on the road. And it is easy to hook up to Outlook or your favorite Offline EMail Editor.
For my critical Email, I elected to pay the $50 per year to make sure I could have some phone support if needed. Advantage of the paid option is that it includes the use of Postini. This is a Google Property that does further Spam and Virus filtering. You get a daily email from Postini, that tells you what they filtered out. If you recognize an email that should not have been filtered, single click and it is delivered. Postini also has an option to whitelist and blacklist.
Gmail also has the option for forwarding all GMail accounts to one account if you have several so that you only need to check 1 account.
Must say this has worked very well for me and is a whole lot more reliable than the GoDaddy email.
Hope that helps
Paul
[Reply]
October 6th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Hi John,
A few things…
Writing, uploading, testing code:
I program in .Net (VB and C#)/HTML/CSS For the hardcore-coding, I’ve found that Visual Studio running on my laptop (3GB ram) has been fine. If I want to manage backing-up/versioning code files on my local server or back-up drive, I use SVN with the Ankh add-in for VS. I know SVN works with online code repository sites, so if you are using one of those, you should check it out, and since it’s not a file-locking check-out system (like Visual Source Safe), there is more flexibility and easier use, I think.
Writing blog posts:
There are several “desktop” blogging tools. I’m not aware of any which will automatically upload your posts when connected, but I did some reviews of blogging tools on (one of) my own blogs, if you are interested. (http://heatherfloyd.com/?tag=/software) I’d also suggest you take a look at Windows LiveWriter, which I don’t have a review posted for, but is actually my preferred editor right now. That actually saves your posts as files on you local harddrive, so you can access them from there, then “publish” them.
Reading blog posts:
Sorry, I haven’t done any research on this one…
E-mailing:
I use Outlook. I prefer to access my main accounts via POP, so I can store it all offline and keep my server “clean”, but it also handles IMAP just fine. (My fiance, who uses Gmail uses Outlook to access it via IMAP) It can also handle multiple accounts without issue. You could easily “plug in” click “Send/Receive”, and unplug, write your responses from wherever (they will just hang-out in the Outbox until you connect again). As a work-flow issue, I’d suggest you create a folder to move emails that you can’t read or otherwise deal with until you can click the links or download images, etc. So you know what to focus on when you ARE connected.
Well, you have a laudable goal, so I hope this all works out for you.
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