In our school, some of the websites are blocked like youtube.com. To get away with that, I use ssh to tunnel through my web host (webfaction) and forward all my request.

ssh -D 8000 marconijr@marconijr.com

The -D flag binds the port 8000 to my host so any request response happens on that port. The next thing is to specify proxy on your browser. Here's how to do it in Firefox on a mac:

Under preference, select Advanced -> Network then click Settings. Select manually proxy configuration the enter locahost on SOCKS Host and 8000 for the proxy, click OK and you're done. Here's a screenshot incase you're lost.