By: Lindsay Hogg
If you are a travel writer, or you just need to stay in touch, you’re going to be spending a good chunk of money and time on the Internet. Here are a few tips that can help you cut costs of your internet usage.
1. OFFLINE MODE! This is my favorite Internet savings tool. I work in gmail – and google docs which offer an offline working mode. Google docs is also a great way to backup your files if your computer gives up on life or gets stolen, you have all your files online for access from any computer.
Enabling the offline mode, syncs your email and google documents to you computer so you can access them without an Internet connection. I can go online for 2 minutes to receive all my emails, then disconnect. Now that I have these emails while I am offline, I can read them, write my response and save it as a draft. I then go back online and press send send send, only using a total of 5-7 minutes of Internet. If I had stayed online the whole time I would have used a total of 30-45 minutes. If you are paying per hour or per stay on either a plane or in a hotel/hostel this information does not really help you much, but it is extremely helpful because many of the places you will travel to require a per minute charge.
2. THE COPY AND PASTE! If your email does not provide an offline mode to work with, go in, cut all your emails into a word doc/notepad and go offline. This way you can respond while offline, then cut and paste your reply and send, saving almost as much time if you had offline mode. This is also something to get used to doing if you have to reply to someone on facebook or myspace. Lastly, you can extract articles that you would like to read and either paste them into your google docs or save them to your desktop and just delete them when you are done reading. Don’t spend hours sitting online reading, it’s just text, so copy and paste it.
3. YAY AND NAY TO TOURISTY SPOTS! Hostels are usually surrounded with Internet cafes. There is an upside as well as a downside to this. The upside is that you can compare costs of the different cafes if you are willing to put in the extra time. The downside is that it is still going to be costly and depending on where you are, you may have to use the computers they provide rather than Wi-Fi to access your own lap top. *Keep your most recent documents or images you require on Google Docs or a USB stick for cases like this.
Depending on where you are in the world, there is a chance you can find a coffee shop, library or public place that provides free wifi networks. You can usually check where the closest free Wi-Fi spot is before you depart (see below).
Below are a few websites you can check for Internet access before you head to your destination.
www.jiwire.com
www.wifinder.com
www.wififreespot.com
www.wi-fihotspotlist.com
www.worldwidedialup.net
www.hotspothaven.com
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
hey! good tips.
what do you think of people who use smart phones? is that a good way to save money if you just have a phone that you can use to try and find free wifi?
Great tips, I often copy and paste but never thought about the offline mode in Gmail.
Great tips Lindsay. Also be sure to turn your wireless off or unplug as your computer may still hold the connection for its own updates or other messaging programs. Its easy to flick the wireless switch to ensure your completely offline. It also helps to have wireless off as it can be a big battery drain on your notebook.
Adam – hey! depends on what you need to use internet for while travelling. If you don’t want to travel with a laptop that certainly is a great idea, also the ipod touch has tons of applications for easy and quick internet access.
Ayngelina – google docs offline mode make my life so much easier and having all my latest emails on my desktop has saved my ass a couple times too haha.
Chris – I didn’t know wireless drained the battery so much? Seriously good stuff to know.
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