When I decided to start creating websites and creating content blogs, I did it for one reason besides the obvious second income stream. It was because I was able to post blogs from work or other locations, which mean I could really maximize my time and earning potential.

Update Your Blog From Work

One thing that I didn’t realize was the fact that it may prove difficult to do any major editing or customizing from work. Many places of employment do not let you use FTP or other tools needed to get the sites modified. The same goes for a lot of the free wi-fi providers. You may not be techincal, but if you modify websites and read a little about technology you have heard of proxy servers, which help businesses monitor and control traffic that leaves their network. In addition, there are plenty of monitoring programs and other things in place to help companies keep out malicious and unwanted visitors.

I have found a few work arounds that have helped me tremendously.

They are all secure and safe, and hopefully won’t get you in trouble from your local IT people. Please be aware if it is against your companies policy, you may want to save any website editing and content posting until you get home.

I have found a great free FTP site at http://www.net2ftp.com. Here, I can use my normal FTP login and password to access my files. It doesn’t not connect through the FTP protocol, it is all done remotely so to the proxy servers and proxy blocking software, it just looks like normal HTTP stuff. There are also no meta tags that end up being blocked by the cookie cutter website blocking programs, so you are pretty safe to travel to this site. They layout is nice, faily painless, with very few advertisments. They give you lots of editing options, folder creation, renaming, moving, and several different means of uploading. You get a fully functional FTP client, in a nutshell. The Java upload tool doesn’t appear to work through my work browser, but the flash one does. Play around a little, you will find this is an excellent tool.

One draw back is while you can upload multiple files at once, you cannot upload entire directories with one click so you do have to do a little manual work to create directories. But if you are in a pinch and really want to get that new theme up, it works fine. The best part is if you are just making simple code modification (like putting in a new advertisment code, changing the color scheme for example) you can do it in your text editor (which every single work computer should have) and upload it that way. Painfree FTP from work. Just the way I like it!

Some hosting companies offer a file manager, and these usually work from most places. Problem is they are pretty weak in terms of user interface. I user Go Daddy, and their file interface is worthless from work. Net2FTP offers full FTP, without the hassle.

Photoshop Express is another wonderful tool that I have discovered recently.

Very recently, it just went live yesterday. I spent quite a bit of time on it today, it it blows every ‘virtual’ web photo editor out of the water. Photo editing on the web used to be a myth. Photoshop Express makes it possible.  You can do all your basic editing here so it is easy to customize advertisement banners, logos, pictures or anything else you could need. I used it for the first time to create a logo about an hour ago right from my work computer. It does offer indexing, and you get a 2 gigabyte alotment to upload your photos.

I know there are a handful of other online photo editors out there, such as Pikcik and Photoflxer, but I do not feel they offer the same quality as the new Photoshop Express.

In a pinch, I have used the Roflbot to create banners. If your work has blocked photo editors they more than likely have not blocked the Roflbot. Roflbot is a website that people go to and create those Lolcatz photos that are all the rage now. But they offer a few fonts so you can make simple logos or banners.

A really simple method you can employ is to create your blog posts using whatever word processor you have, and emailing them to yourself. This method got me through many posts before I found alternatives. If you don’t feel comfortable emailing yourself from work, you can always bring a thumb drive. You can find these dirt cheap at almost any store that sell electronics.

What tricks have you devised to let yourself blog while at work? I’d like to hear!