What is an Internet-addicted Mac user to do when he is about to spend a week living offline? This isn't a trivial question if you are someone who is used to living with an always-on connection to the Net. Your e-mail is inaccessible because you cannot connect to your archive on Gmail or Yahoo mail or whatever online tool you use, and your blog archives and feed reader is likely offline too if you live in Google Reader or another Net-based tool, like I do during the regular week. So, how can you take your Internet with you?
This isn't rocket science, but it is worth revisiting. Over the last week I mainly just lived without the Net, but on a couple of occassions I was able to sip some free WiFi along with a latte at a local coffee shop, and during my short times there I tried to make the most of the connectivity by using more old school Net tools to feed my habit.
Offline e-mail
When it came to e-mail, I used good old PowerMail to suck down my mail and to reply to anything that needed a response right now (OK, to be honest, I didn't reply to diddly. I did reply to a couple of e-mails during the week from my Treo 650 logging into Gmail though).
Offline news reading (RSS)
As for RSS info, I used my limited connectivity as an opportunity to try two tools for offline reading - the offline option in Google Reader and the latest version of NetNewsWire (NNW). Not surprisingly, NNW kicked ass in this case. The only thing missing from the newsreading experience while using NNW as an offline reader was that the images in posts weren't rendered along with the rest of the post, as they normally would be if I were connected to the Net. Otherwise, the beauty of reading offline with NNW is that if I mark a post as read in the reader, or I mark an entire folder as read in the reader, it will be marked as read when I next sync my news feeds when I can get online. Meanwhile, I simply flag any posts that I want to read with full images or that I want to get back to for reference in upcoming blog posts and NNW will keep those around for me to use later.
The offline reading experience is more compromised using Google Reader. Like NNW, Reader doesn't give me offline access to images in my feeds, but worse yet, I cannot do a standard Shift-A to mark all of the posts as read in a Reader folder if I am not online. So the only way that I can see to make sure that Reader marks things as read is to actually open the post in the offline version of Reader and then it will be marked as read when I reconnect later. That's a waste of my time.
As an aside, if you spend much time doing offline RSS reading you will quickly come to appreciate sites that offer full text news feeds. While there is no way to get the full benefit of a well-written post with tons of linked references (other than flagging it and going back later with NNW), nothing is worse than being able to just read three of four sentences of a promising news item and then having to wait to read the whole thing later.
Offline Web reading
The last piece of the offline picture is how to read standard Web articles in a browser while offline. This one is a no brainer. Just load the articles you want to read later in separate tabs in the browser of your choice - Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb or whatever - and then disconnect from the Net and read them when you have the time. The caveat here is that if your machine crashes like mine did at one point during the week, you cannot simply open up your browser and expect to be able to resume reading those "saved" articles in the tabs where you carefully loaded them while you were connected.
Offline blogging
As for blogging and writing tools while offline, there was no adjustment here for me, since I use Tinderbox to do much of my writing and all of my blogging. Tinderbox doesn't care if I am connected to the Net. I just save my files locally, then export them and fire up Transmit to upload them to my Web server when I get connected again.
Of course, a healthy human being would just accept completely disconnecting from the Net for a week and not even think about these issues. Trust me, I spent most of my time offline enjoying real life and doing a lot of reading and writing, but a week is a long time to be offline for a true addict. Don't worry, I am looking for a 12-step program...
