Money related resolutions are very popular in the new year.  Everyone wants to get out of debt, everyone wants to reduce their expenses and everyone loves to create an additional source of income.  In this post, I will show you 2 online tools, that will help you maintain your Money Resolutions this new year.

Xpenser

This is an extremely simple but powerful tool to manage all your expenses, with their receipts (if any).  The major strength of Xpenser comes from its support of variety of channels – to record expenses.

You can record expenses to your account, in one of the following ways:

• Direct Entry on Xpenser Online Tool
• Send your Expense Details from a registered Email
• Send the details from SMS/Text Messaging (carrier charges will still apply)
• Send Expense Information as a Twitter Direct Message to Xpenser
• Send the details via Instant Messaging
• Speak about your expense after setting up a Voice account….

One other key feature with Xpenser, is the ability to use variety of Currencies and the accurate conversion it provides.  I find this feature missing in many other Personal Finance tools – which are biased toward USD.

Xpenser FAQ is the best place to get an answer for most of your questions.  Try out this sweet little tool and I am sure you will not regret!

PocketSmith

PocketSmith is an online money management tool – that is not very simple to use but its strength lies elsewhere.

It is a web based tool not only to record your expenses/income, but also forecasts your future cash position.  This tool helps you manage all the cash-flow in a calendar format – that is very intuitive and easy to visualize.

Some of the features of the tool include:

• Set and achieve your Financial goals
• Compare your Budget with the actuals
• Integrates with your Back Accounts
• PocketSmith calendar can be connected with Google Calendar

You can know more about PocketSmith here.  Though the Free version of the tool will suffice most of your financial needs, they also have Paid Flavors for needy users.

These 2 tools, when used with purpose can help you stick with your Money Resolutions this New Year.  However, to make these Resolutions a success – one has to develop a sense of money discipline – which no tool can help and must come from within!  Good luck this New Year and may you Grow Richer!

You comment on a blog post.  You comment on a website.  Have you ever wondered how to manage all these comments from a Single Dashboard?  BackType provides you a solution.

How it works?

First signup for an account with BackType. Once done, you provide the details to claim comments from across the web.

By claiming – you setup the URLs that you usually comment with.  For example, if you specify http://yoursite.com whenever commenting on any blog or website, setup this URL with BackType.  Similarly, specify all such URL so that BackType can look for your comments.

In addition, BackType allows you to enter your social networking account details like Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg etc. With this, even the comments you make using these accounts are grabbed by BackType.

Claim your URL and link your Social Networking Accounts

BackType also lets you add a widget to your blog, that shows all the websites and blogs you have recently commented on.

A Handy widget to display Comments on your Blog or Website

BackType Subscriptions and Alerts

BackType provides you with the following subscription options, to track comments and discussions across the web.

Subscribe to People

You can subscribe to comments made by popular people on the web like – Chris Brogan, Michael Arrington, Garry Tan etc. Whenever they comment on posts over the web, you can keep track of them and participate in powerful conversations.

Subscribe to Articles and Blog Posts

You can specify links to Articles or Blog Posts and let BackType intimate you whenever comments are posted.  Also, you can specify the Articles or Blog Posts and BackType fetches you related happenings from all over the web, that revolves around the specified items.  This helps you follow powerful stuff on the internet and the wave created around them.

Alerts

This is one of the powerful feature of BackType.  Assume you are interesting to track the happenings around PHP Developer Conference 2009. You can setup an alert for this “keyword” and BackType sends you e-mail whenever the “keyword” is mentioned in any comment across the web.  How powerful is it?!

Why should you use BackType?

BackType helps you mainly with the following:

• Manage your Comments in a single dashboard
• Follow powerful people and their comments across the web
• Subscribe to comments on particular Articles or Blog Posts
• Get Alerts when some keywords are specified on any comments across the web

Following comments and engaging in a comment network is essential for any blogger.  So get started with BackType and manage your comments like a pro.  Happy Commenting!

Imagine! You are browsing the internet at workplace and suddenly come across an interesting piece of information, that you want to post to Facebook.  Alas, Facebook is blocked in your workplace! So what you do?  Posterous – is for your rescue.

If Posterous sounds extremely new to you – checkout their FAQ here http://posterous.com/faq.  It is pretty exhaustive.

So, Posterous lets you post text, images or even videos right from your mailbox.  For instance, to post something to Facebook, set up your Posterous account, send an e-mail to a particular address – everything else is taken care by Posterous.

Keep an eye on this space for a detailed post on Posterous and how it might evolve into a “king-size” Twitter!

On 21st of this month, Yahoo! announced the roll out of a new home page through their corporate blog (Yodel Anecdotal).  In the times when social networking means more than just connecting with people, let us briefly look how Yahoo! leverages Web 2.0 and tries to provide some interesting stuff through their new home page.

What’s New

Logo changes color

The traditional “red” colored Yahoo! logo has given way to a more catchy looking purple one.  Also their favicon has been changed to match the new logo.

Featured News section

Earlier, the featured news section shows the top news with an image and to read the rest, user has to click a link, to be taken to a new page.  But in the improved version of the home page, up to 20 items can be scrolled using the arrow keys, without navigating away from the page.  This definitely helps the user experience – by providing more information on a given page.

Change the Page color

Now users can choose a favorite color for their home page, as there is “no one size fits all” with web applications.  But this appears very naive – compare it with the themes available for the iGoogle home page!! Yahoo! has a lot to improve in this area.

Favorite Applications

This is an interesting improvement from the previous version of the home page.  On the left side, you see the traditional applications that you find on a regular Yahoo! home page – Buzz, Cricket, News etc.

But the real improvement can be seen, once you hover over any of the applications listed here.  A layered screen pops up and displays the information.  For instance, this is what comes up when I hover over the Movies section.

Also many other sites like – All Things Digital, eBay, NYT, HowStuffWorks, WSJ – can be added to the Favorites section.  Another interesting thing to note is the ability to add any of your favorite site, by just providing the URL.  But this did not work well with me, when I tried to add my blog!

Interesting to note is that the following are also supported as favorite applications – Facebook, Gmail, MySpace. I did not try out MySpace, but had NO success setting up Gmail and Facebook.  Even after I granted access to my Google Accounts, Yahoo! was still asking me to ‘Sign In’.  Worse with Facebook, I was stuck on the Authorize screen. I am sure this feature is still in BETA (or ALPHA?) level!

You can check out this post on the Yahoo! official blog – http://ycorpblog.com/2009/07/21/welcome-home-to-the-new-yahoocom/ – to know more details about the new home page.

What Can Improve?

Speed

I have been using iGoogle for ages now and I know that it is slow!  But Yahoo!’s home page, with relatively light features is slow too.  Though my Internet connection is not very fast, but there is a good scope for improvement.

Applications are buggy

I was enthralled to find Gmail and Facebook listed among the applications but was only disappointed to find them not working.  I am sure Yahoo! is still working on their home page, but expecting a lot of improvement on this front.

Screen elements must be draggable and rearrangeable

I definitely expect my screen elements to be draggable, so I can keep my favorite ones at the top while moving the rest to somewhere I don’t see often.  I definitely look forward to this from Yahoo!

Lack of Themes and Gadgets suck!

There is no full fledged theme support with Yahoo! home page.  Also, there are no ways (yet!) for custom applications to plug-in with the page.  These are some valuable lessons, that iGoogle can teach!

Will the new Yahoo! be my home page? Not Yet!

I would love to hear your thoughts on the new Yahoo! Home page.  You can either put them as comments to this post or ping me on Twitter @thotsunlimited

Twitter is slowly but surely becoming a “Google” of ideas.  A wealth of information and ideas get into Twitter everyday and grasping even 1% of those is a gargantuan task. To better optimize your time and get the maximum information out of Twitter – I suggest you the following 2 simple ways:

Use Twittorati

Twittorati is a latest entrant into the array of Twitter based services.  But it is not just all about Twitter! In their own words:

Twittorati tracks the tweets from the highest authority bloggers, starting with the entire Technorati Top 100 and soon including many more of the web’s most influential voices.So if you start following Twittorati, then you can be rest assured to get the best of tweets from the best-in-class people.

I can already see some well known names like – Darren Rowse (ProBlogger), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Brian Clark (CopyBlogger), Pete Cashmore (Mashable) – whose tweets are featured in Twittorati.

Thus, Twittorati marks the consummation of Blogging and Tweeting.  In addition to reading the tweets, Twittorati helps you to:

• Find the Top Links shared over Twitter
• Find Top Blogs, based on their Technorati Authority
• View Latest Photos shared around people’s chat

You can also choose to follow Twittorati on Twitter – @twittoratinews

Follow the Twitter AllTop Site

Alltop is the brainchild of Guy Kawasaki and few more guys.  In their words – “Alltop is an online magazine rack of popular topics”.

In the same lines, Alltop for Twitter, is a magazine rack of popular and latest information from the Twitter world.  It ranges from information about Twitter to information shared on Twitter.

Make sure you bookmark this site and visit everyday – to be rest assured that you don’t miss anything important on Twitter.

I would strongly recommend these 2 resources, to get the best of twitter everyday.  Let me know if you find these useful.  Also, enlighten me with the other ways you may use to keep track of Twitter!

If you are an active social networker (a.k.a. Twitter/Facebook/MySpace user), then NutshellMail is something to know about.

NutshellMail is a tool, where you can configure and view updates from your social networking accounts – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn – all in a single dashboard.  You can also add multiple email accounts and view mails sent to them.

The power of NutshellMail comes with the delivery of a daily summary email, that contains updates from the accounts you have setup.  For instance, to see the twitter messages from the people I follow, I can just login to the inbox of my email.

I primarily use NutshellMail to:

• Read Twitter messages
• Read Direct Twitter messages sent to me
• See who are my new followers or quitters!
• Updates from LinkedIn
• Messages to me on Facebook
• Friend/Other requests to me on Facebook

I am sure NutshellMail simplifies you social activities, when you have limited time at your disposal.

I encourage you to try it and let me know how it goes!

I have frowned sometimes as why Google Chrome doesn’t give me options to save my browsing session.  After digging around for a while, I figured out a not-so-direct way to restore all tabs that were open.

• Open the Options window
• Choose the Basics option
• Under On Startup: – choose Restore the pages that were last opened

The downside with this is that, open tabs are restored every time you start Chrome (which you may not like!!).  So the only workaround I can think is to Close All tabs before exiting Chrome, when you don’t wish to restore them.

Hope you found this useful.

You have so many of your favorite sites bookmarked in Firefox. Alright! But this efficient add-on helps you navigate to these favorites using few shortcut keys.

SiteLauncher Add-on

Using some predefined or custom-defined hotkeys, SiteLauncher brings you all the favorite sites that can be chosen for launch.

You can install the add-on from here – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10127

A small preview

SiteLauncher has pre-defined hotkeys for launch – Ctrl + Space – but you can very easily define your own ones.  On pressing the hotkeys, the following dialog comes up with all the favorite sites that you have configured.

These are some sites the add-on provides you at install time.  You can also launch the site directly with – Ctrl + Space + <key denoting the site>

I heard about Prism sometime back, but did not manage to try it until I read this post from Digital Inspiration.

Prism helps you create desktop shortcuts for your favorite websites, so that you can access them much like the regular desktop applications (Gears, eh!).  I love it primarily for a single reason – the minimalist and clean browser interface it offers without the toolbar, bookmarks bar etc.

Here is a snapshot of how my Google Reader looks with Prism…

Isn’t it so clean!  Try it with your favorite websites and I am sure you will love it.

Get the Firefox plug-in for Prism

Gmail enables a new feature, that allows you to send mails in Indian languages.  Currently 5 Indian languages – Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam – are supported.  I am sure more languages are on the anvil.

No special fonts or keyboard mappings are required, as whatever you type in English is converted into the appropriate language.  Another cool feature is the “auto suggest” for similar words.

Enjoy sending e-mails in languages that are close to your heart!! Let me know how it goes.