Essential Sites for Home Office Dwellers

You wake up, dress, inject caffeine, and then grit your teeth and steady your nerves for the morning commute: through the kitchen and down the stairs to your home office.

Okay, working at home has its challenges, but the commute isn't one of them. Basically, you're on your own. You don't have an assistant or colleagues to supply you with news clips every morning or make sure your computer gets backed up. You might not even have a copier or fax machine. But a few good Web sites can help make up for what your home office lacks. Here are ten that I heartily recommend.

A Good Host

If a Web site is part of your business, you need your own domain name and a company to host it. I use IX Webhosting. The service is reasonably priced, starting at $5 a month for one domain and 500 MB of server space. (I pay $13 a month for three domains and 2500 MB of space.) It's also easy to set up, thanks to a simple control panel and around-the clock live-chat technical support (although some of the FAQs could be clearer). The basic plan comes with e-mail features, such as listserv mailing lists and autoresponses.

Fax-Free Faxing

You don't need a fax machine and a dedicated phone line to send and receive faxes. With a free EFax account, you get your own fax number, and faxes arrive as e-mail attachments that you can store on your hard drive--you have to download and install EFax's free software to view them. The caveats? Your fax number will almost certainly not be local, and you won't be able to fax other people. But for $13 a month, you get to pick your fax number's area code, and you can send and receive faxes to your heart's content.

Say It With Paper

Want to print 1000 copies of your new flyer? Try FedEx Kinko's Online Document Ordering Service. Kinko's free software, in the form of a print server, gives you a form to fill out, then "prints" your document over the Internet. You can choose to pick up your order at a local FedEx Kinko's store or have it shipped to you (by FedEx, naturally). But be careful when you select your shipping options--the order form defaults to the very expensive First Overnight. A quick price check for a thousand black and white copies to be delivered to my home in Albany, California, came to $186.78 for First Overnight, $132.06 for two-day delivery, and $97.43 if I picked up the copies myself.

Keep Up With the News

Home office workers can't rely on co-workers to help them gather relevant information, or afford professional clipping services to do the work for them. Your best bet for finding information in one place is Bloglines. The site gives you easy access to the news you need, in the subjects you're interested in. And despite the name, it isn't just about blogs; it offers newsfeeds--and just about anything else that uses RSS, Atom, and similar standards--to distribute time-sensitive information. Bloglines helps you organize and access information from both free and subscription services (such as the Wall Street Journal Online). Once you've signed up with Bloglines--yes, it's free--and figured out the initially confusing interface, it's easy. For example, when you're on a news site you find useful, such as the New York Times, Variety, or PC World, just click the Sub with Bloglines shortcut in your Links toolbar, and Bloglines will look for feeds coming from the current domain. Then you can pick which of these you want in your list of feeds. You can also save links or put them on your own (public or private) blog.

Good Definition

You know you're truly an Internet geek when you put away the big Webster's and start looking up words online. And there's no better site for finding them than Dictionary.com. At no cost at all, you get a complete and extensive dictionary with American and British spellings, an excellent and easy-to-work-with thesaurus, and a mediocre Web search option (no replacement for Google). I didn't find the ads too annoying, but if you do, you might consider spending $3 a month or $20 a year, for the ad-free premium service, which also includes audio pronunciations, a crossword dictionary, and games.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Everything

Need to read up on CinemaScope or global warming? Go first to Infoplease, a free, ad-supported reference point for general information. One search can get you links to information from the Columbia Encyclopedia, an atlas, several almanacs, a dictionary, and a thesaurus (although these last two aren't as good as those at Dictionary.com). But be warned: If you're cursed with curiosity, you may get distracted and never get back to work.

Let Your Fingers Do the Typing

AT&T's advertiser-supported service Anywho makes the Yellow Pages, and the White ones, obsolete; 411, too. You can find a company by entering its name (Scratched "R" Us), or its type of business (cat bathers). You can search for people by entering just a last name and a state, although if you're searching for a common last name, you'll want to enter a first name and city as well. Once you get a list of people, some of the options that are presented ("20-year personal history" for $25) are frightening.

Backed Up and Far Away

Everyone should back up their data. You can always reinstall Windows and your applications from the original CDs, but you can't reinstall your big report or contact list without a backup. IBackup provides an easy way to back up your data to a server on the Internet. First you install the IBackup software, tell it what you want backed up, and set up a schedule so you never have to think about it again. Why back up over the Internet? For one thing, the backup is off-site--not in the same building as your PC. A fire or burglary won't lose you both your hard drive and your backup. And you can access your backup from anywhere (and yes, IBackup is secure). On the other hand, it's slow; it took more than two hours to back up 644 MB over my DSL connection. IBackup charges $9.95 a month or $99.50 a year for a no-frills 5GB option, compared to $100 for a 100GB external hard drive or pocket change for some CD-RWs. Because of the expense, slowness, and lack of a disaster recovery program, IBackup isn't practical for backing up your entire hard drive. But IBackup is an extremely easy way to safeguard the files that matter most. (For a look at a few other options and some sound advice, check out Mobile Computing: Online Backup Services.

What's on Your Schedule Today?

Why use an online datebook? You can check your schedule from any computer, and you can share it, letting others view or alter your appointments, if you wish to do so. Calendars Net primarily services Webmasters who incorporate calendars into their sites, but it also provides a free, Web-based calendar to anyone with Internet access. Don't be put off by the ugly home page; the calendars themselves look very nice. And you can control your calendar in all sorts of ways: Select a language, choose from four levels of security, and color-code event categories.

International Money

If you do business out of the country, you need to know the difference between 100 dollars, 100 euros, and 100 yen (hint: take the euros). The Universal Currency Converter gives you quick, free, up-to-the minute conversions. You'll also find a quick reference table for popular currencies and a form where you can specify what currencies you want to see, which, in turn, are converted into 85 others in a table created for you on the fly. Lastly, you can sign up for a free service that e-mails you current exchange rates daily.