Having trouble accessing favorite sites from work? Whether it’s an office firewall blocking Twitter or the prying eyes of co-workers, here are some excellent tools that can both help you and make it look as if you are working.
(1) Vanishd – Access Facebook and Youtube At Work
Make your co-workers, bosses, and friends think you’re working. What if you could cover any webpage with a fake word document or even the Google homepage and peek through a small window to surf access Youtube, Facebook or some other site without anyone seeing. Enter Vanishd.
Vanish hides one webpage behind the other and gives you a small custom-sized viewing window that you can drag around and see contents of the hidden page. You can also use a mouse scroll wheel to resize the viewing window to a desired size.
When you need to quickly hide the viewing window all you need to do is drag the cursor to the side. Easy.
See Vanish in action in the video below:
Read more on Vanishd here.
(2) WebToMail – Get Websites by Email
If the internet access in your office is limited only to email then WebToMail is just what you need. It lets you quickly access a site of your choice via e-mail.
Just send an email to send@webtomail.co.cc with the URL of the webpage in a subject line and shortly after receive that page by email. Check out the screenshot below.
Although WebToMail doesn’t work with the websites that require you to login it’s still a handy tool to have in your arsenal.
(3) TwitterMail – Post to Twitter via Email
Is Twitter blocked in your office? If that’s the case TwitterMail has a workaround for it. Using TwitterMail you can post status updates to Twitter and receive tweets sent to your username (i.e. @your_username) all via email.
You might also want to know that when sending status messages by email all long URLs will be automatically shortened.
(4) MoDazzle – Facebook, LinkedIn, Weather, Stocks and more.
While TwitterMail brings Twitter to your email, MoDazzle brings the rest. Access Facebook, LinkedIn and a number of other web services (local business directory, weather, stock quotes, etc.) via email or mobile text messaging. No Firewall can stop you here.
Here are just a few of the many things that you can do with MoDazzle:
- update your Facebook ‘status’,
- get “˜un-read’ messages from your Facebook inbox
- get someone’s profile info from LinkedIn and Facebook
- check weather
- get driving directions
- get the location of the nearest Starbucks
- pull restaurant reviews
- check flight information
- and lots more.
It’s also very easy to use. For instance, to update your Facebook status message you can send an email to “˜fbprofilestatusupdate@modazzle.com’ with your new status message in the subject line. If you’re on a mobile phone then send an SMS message to “˜22553″².
(5) Read At Work
Read At Work is a wonderfully done website that looks exactly like a Windows XP desktop.
Now what no one knows is that those folders you got over there have about 20 ebooks that look like Powerpoint presentations.:-) Definitely check it out!
Bonus: If all you’re looking is a simple web proxy then try www.unblockall.net
Did we miss any cool websites office workers under firewalled connections should know about? Please share them wth everyone in the comments.
MakeUseOf Recommends
More articles about:
Hide 20 Comments
Those are great tips, unless you worked in a security-cleared workplace where those sites are blocked. Doh!
This a great post…..who seriously doesn’t slack at work anymore?
Nice finds. Read at Work could do well with several more books.
Vanishd seems to be the best bet however.
meebo.com – Lets you use most IM clients through a web browser.
Two other important sites to note for work browsing is ctunnel.com and vtunnel.com. Run on encrypted port 443. It’s secure. The logs are garbled. Every site you visit will leave almost no trace. You can browse just about every website with some having a few limitations. Just remember https:// before going to the site, the admins can see activity on port 80 (http://).
admins can also see that you spend your whole day accessing one site, get the url and just block it.
like i did
Thank you! Our crazy-stupid web filter blocks about 60% of the technical documentation out there (while still allowing the bureaucrats to surf CNN and ESPN all day, grr). WebToMail will help me *not* slack!
Bad youtube, bad! Please stop using youtube to host videos. Every page i’ve gone to that is linked to digg and has youtube videos meant dead video clips. They apparently don’t like digg traffic since no banner gets shown and youtube doesn’t make a few cents. Other sites work fine, youtube works fine, but you tube videos on sites that come from digg don’t!
I can’t wait to use “vanish” so I can play more on Chess.com while at work!
Alright, here’s a really ingenius way to hide what you’re looking at.
Ctrl+T
And one for vista users. Alt+Tab
As for using a proxy server? Don’t. Use XB Browser.
I’ll feed this very interesting info to my friends who are deprived of browsing the websites they like at work. It’s a good thing working for an SEO firm leaves me the freedom to access all sorts of interesting websites. I especially love Facebook and Blinklist.
Vanishd sounds really cool, great for surfing digg at work. Thanks.
Alternative free and fast – no login required – proxy is Coral Content Distribution Network, coralcdn.org. You just add a few chars to the URL like so:
Before: foo.com/bar
After: foo.com.nyud.net:8090/bar
Easy as pie :)
So funny, i’ll use it!
you say 14 comments leave one
my mom used to say there are 6 chocolates in the shelf…leave one.
maybe better to say add one
some very determined time wasting!
None of them are working in my office. All are blocking.
Great post Aibek. This should make many people extra happy at work (minus the bosses!)
Those are great tips, unless you worked in a security-cleared workplace where those sites are blocked. Doh!
no matter what proxy i use it is always blocked no matter where i go which one i use it is always blocked an this is the only computer i can get to to check my email am myspace to get a hold of my family but everything is blocked