Useful Tools: Google Docs Can Publish to Your Blog!

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For those of you who use Google Docs and Spreadsheets, you might be interested to know you can post directly to your blog from within the ‘Publish’ tab. You need to set up your blog within the Publish area, then you can do it.

In fact, I just wrote this post in this way. I’m still experimenting with this feature. Apparently, you can even tag it with the correct category. It could be very useful when publishing longer articles and stuff that needs more formatting like tables, html, etc.

Ok. Here goes, I’m about to save it with a name: then hit publish. You can try it, too.

Two Caveats: The title didn’t appear, nor was it put in the correct category! I guess there’s some work to do on this feature! But still. It works well, and you can simply go back to your blog, and add these easily.

Insuring your car and home: it makes good cents!

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I purchased my first car at the age of 39! Now for most people that is quite ‘elderly’ to be the first time to purchase a car, but where we live has mostly excellent transportation via MRT, bus, taxi, etc. so we managed to get by without a car for quite a while. However, owning a car is a real education, as I suggested elsewhere.

Nowhere more so than getting good car insurance. We purchased our first car insurance from the company that sold us the car, which eased our transition into car ownership as there were enough new problems to deal with at the time. However, in retrospect, this may not have been a good choice.

We renewed the insurance in 2006 with some misgivings, but in 2007, when our insurance went up by more than 20%, and our coverage for the car went down, we actually decided it was time to do something about. So we went over the actual insurance form in detail, and discovered an almost arbitrary charging system over the previous two years. So, we took a red pen, and ruled out most of the expensive charges. I guess that was vengeance on the Insurance company involved.

Little did we know that we could compare car insurance just by visiting a website and getting the quotes. Geez! If we had known that, we would have been a lot more careful! Anyway, they offer a variety of insurance companies that can provide you with quotes. In addition, Insure121 also offers similar help on home insurance.

When purchasing any product for insurance, investment, banking, credit card, or whatever, be wise: read the small print, understand what the policy actually covers, NOT what you would like it to provide. If you are in doubt, talk it over with someone in the know. Make sure that there are NO unexpected surprises.

Website Proxies: an interesting opportunity?

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“… you could try something that is almost guaranteed to make you money fast and quick: Proxies.”

mubin in his blog publishes a series of 5 posts that look at how to set up, run, and monetize a proxy service. He also provides some cautions on what not to do!

This is an interesting series, and a service with tremendous opportunities for helping those who are otherwise restricted by their countries’ censors.

I’m not exactly sure of the cost structure, though. I don’t quite understand the expenses involved as I would think that you’d need your own server to be able to run a service like this. So monthly upfront costs could be quite high.

Revenue sources would be primarily ads served by Yahoo!, Adsense, etc., though text links might also do very well. He suggests you try affiliate marketing, too.

It seems though from his own posting that one of the revenue streams comes from selling the site on to others. So do read the thread and make your own decision.

Actually, I think that I will check out my own TOS and see if I can install a copy of PHProxy in my own private areas: I can figure out how it runs and works, and I can use it to access websites that I can’t get to right now.

A word of caution: do check your hosts TOS. Some will NOT like such software. And you may get banned for using it!