Like many people, I signed up for all the free web-based email accounts (RocketMail – now Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Hotmail, etc.), but I never really used them. Over time, I let most of them lapse and only really use Yahoo and – now –Gmail, but I do not use any of them as my main mail account. I didn’t use them primarily because I didn’t want to pay to be connected to the web to read my mail (my POP accounts were better), and I wanted to maintain addresses at my own domain, and – at the time – none of those interfaces allowed you to be seen as another mail address. Yahoo, of course, also provides photo storage, address books and calendars.
My web hosting company allows me to use my space as a virtual hard drive (if I work out how to configure it) and, as I have noted, Flickr is becoming my personal choice for photographs (even though I could try to manage it myself on my own servers) while I use Bloglines for feed aggregation. So, the question is, can I now run my life using storage space away from my own computer?
Here are some of my considerations:
- Outside of work (which I am not proposing to move) I have precious few documents so I don’t need masses of file space for them (I suspect my Yahoo account would happily cope).
- Photos: I can’t get away from the lack of storage (even at Flickr) for them but I suspect it will cope with all the photographs I care about (the rest would only be archived to CD anyway).
- Music: This is the difficult one, since I upload music to my Treo’s MP3 player, so I don’t carry it all around with me all the time (like an iPod). Perhaps it is time to readdress that issue.
- Mail: I have mail archives in Mozilla Mail format. What I think I need is Mozilla’s roaming profiles, but I have no idea how they work.
- Bookmarks: Ditto (but in the meantime, Yahoo Companion bar and Yahoo Bookmarks should work).
Do you have any tips? Will it work? If it works, I only need a reasonable internet connection to have my whole life on tap. What I really need is a proper method for synchronisation – but I’ve ranted about that before.