The game was Texas Hold ‘Em, without a shadow of doubt the most famous gameplay variant spawned. It is easy to learn, simply addictive but inexplicably difficult to master. I digress.

During the tournament, we faced a minor speed bump. In Texas Hold ‘Em, blinds increase periodically and since this was a tournament, we decided that the blinds would go up every 15 minutes. Sure, that sounded sensible at the time but there wasn’t a clock in the room and none of us was wearing a watch. We had to resort to using our mobile phones to tell us the time. Every so often, one of us yelled, “Time to double the blinds, guys!” Personally, I considered that pretty inconvenient — especially so when you’re in a competition, it was distracting.

At the end of the tournament, one of the players suggested that we should bring a clock to time the blind increments. My mind immediately went, “What? A clock?” My innate geekiness wouldn’t allow myself to succumb to utilizing what I can only describe as “wall art”. I was positive that there was an app, somewhere out there in vastness of the internet, made for this specific purpose.

And there is. It sure took me a rather long time to find it, though.

It’s called Old Timer (a cunning play on words, I have to admit) and it’s available for Mac and PC because it runs on Flash. Ironically, I didn’t actually set out to look for a poker timer, per se — to be brutally honest, I didn’t think that an app like that existed. I initially searched for a timer application that would display a pre-set countdown and play an alarm once it reached zero. That proved much harder to find.

Old Timer is the perfect companion to a self-hosted, homebrew poker game. As soon as I launched the app, it gave me the option of running in full-screen. Instantly, I knew this was the one I was looking for.

The app is immensely simple to use. You are allowed three different modes of gameplay — all day, average or multi-table. Since my tournament consisted of several different tables, that was the mode I selected. Then, I had to enter my customized blind increment levels, the number of players, length of each round before the blinds double, cost of buy-in and rebuys, and finally the starting amount of chips distributed to each player; then hit Play.

Cleverly, Old Timer calculates the total number of chips in play and how much there is in the pot. But what I’m really pleased with is the timer! It’s a gorgeous white on black display with large fonts that everyone can see from across the room. What’s more, it shows how much the blinds should be at any given moment. Oh yes, it pays to be a geek!

In the final minute before the blinds increase, Old Timer plays a short soundclip to indicate that there is less than a minute left. It also displays the values of the blinds in the subsequent round. When the timer reaches zero, there is a wonderfully posh indication that new blinds are in play; and the timer automatically resets itself for the new round. It’s just perfect.

Old Timer will work on both Mac and Windows and there is no other way to say this – it is the perfect blinds timer for a home hold’em game. If you know any better texas hold em blinds timer, I’m all ears; suggest them in the comments.

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Sleep disorders, behavior disorders, obesity, diabetes and so many other ailments produce physical pains and emotional reactions that many doctors can predict, but which most of us lack the medical training or expertise to understand. This is why, especially if you’re caring for someone who is mentally or physically ill, it’s so important to track and monitor health factors such as weight fluctuations, mood swings, sleep problems and more.

As the Earth gradually drifts further from the sun and the daylight hours begin to shrink, I would like to focus on an important online resource I discovered that can help you create a mental and physical fitness log to monitor and predict physical and emotional problems and get yourself or someone you love the help that they need before it’s too late.

Here at MakeUseOf, we believe in the importance of living a healthy life, which is why we’ve offered a number of articles with geeky resources that might help, such as the miVitals online system to store and share your medical information, Trusera – a health information social network, and iMedix – a health search engine. The application I’m going to cover today is an excellent online community called MedHelp, which offers a wonderful library of “trackers,” which are tools that can help you monitor every aspect of your health that you might be concerned about.

Tracking Your Mood With a Mental Fitness Log

MedHelp is a health conscious online community that, according to the website, has over 8 million members. The social community itself would require an article all of its own to review, but what I’d like to focus on are the free tools offered for free when you sign up that allow you to log dozens of mental and physical fitness factors. Having some personal experiences in the mental health field, there’s one particular tracker that I found extremely valuable and an excellent resource for anyone suffering from depression or other mood disorder – a mood tracker.

When you click on one of the mood trackers on the main MedHelp page and provide your sign-up information, you’re immediately presented the page where you can modify the particular tracker that you chose. You can customize the tracker depending what type it is.

You can set the tracker to be your own mental or physical fitness log or someone else’s that your monitoring, and you can also make it public – either to just specific friends or completely open to the world (it’s surprising how many people are willing to share their personal logs. You can configure the tracker to remind you to update your mood tracker daily, weekly or monthly (or never), and finally, you can set it so that it’s customized for a particular mood disorder such as major depressive or bipolar.

The major chart area is where you click to insert your log entries, and you can scroll from month to month so that you can see the history.

On your profile page, you’ll notice the community features on the menu bar at the top. You can add friends (or family) who can view your charts, add private or public journal entries, notes, photos and of course post to various message boards about health issues. When it comes to health, having a community to ask questions and share experiences is absolutely invaluable – especially when you’re going through a major medical health crisis. There’s always someone out there who has suffered through the same thing.

When you click the “Manage” button  at the right of the top menu on your profile page, you can add additional trackers to your profile. When you enter this area, get ready to be shocked by the impressive number of tracker apps that are available, including ones to track addictions, anxiety and panic attacks, baby health, cholesterol, diabetes, headaches and migraines, ovulation and even weight and exercise trackers.

Back to the mood tracker example, when you add a new item to the chart, you can choose the update based on what you’re tracking. In this case you can update what your (or your family member’s) overall mood was that day. Not only can you track mood, but you can keep track of a whole assortment of symptoms and other signs that something might be going wrong.

The items mentioned on these menus and screens hint that a doctor or some other medical professional put them together because they really do hit on the items that are relevant to what you’re trying to track.

If you want, you can even type a journal entry for the day to note an event or a situation that you want to remember later on when doctors or anyone else asks what might have caused a condition to worsen. As you enter data every day, you’ll notice a trend line developing on the large chart at the top of the tracker.

While you’re entering in your daily information, little details that may seem inconsequential all get accumulated into the big picture and the tracker shows you, in a graphical format, how all of these things – events, medicine, mental state and physical state – all factor into your sense of well-being. For example, how the change in season and shorter days has a significant negative effect on your mood (so you should plan a fall vacation!)

The MedHelp library of trackers include such a variety of tools that you could use it even if you’re perfectly healthy and just want to start exercising and losing weight. There’s a weight tracker, diet tracker and an exercise tracker that can show you what exercises and food have the greatest impact on your weight and how. Here’s the summary data for an obese, 220 pound guy who sits on his chair all day writing articles (why are you assuming that’s me?)

You can set goals, monitor progress, and troubleshoot your own health with mental and physical fitness logs for every aspect of your life. You can analyze, with real information and real data from your daily life, what works and what doesn’t. By tweaking your daily life – removing what you learn has a negative effect and adding what you learn is positive – you can transform your physical and emotional well-being.

Which of the tracker tools look like they may help you? Do you use any other tools to track and analyze your health? Share your feedback in the comments section below.

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Let us take a look at Household Register 2010 which is a 6.8MB download. Once it is installed you can launch it from your start menu.

You will see a screen that looks like this:

You will see the standard home inventory list fields in there such as item number, item name, category, quantity, location, purchase price and owner. Are you ready to add your items? Do you have a list of serial numbers?  Maybe you will need to go around and collect the information. But you will need to provide this data to this application as it is not magic. Keep your paper copy as well for a backup. And maybe save a copy of your file to your Dropbox or Gmail account.

You are now ready to begin. Hit the add button and  you will get a type of wizard to fill in your information, as you can see below. There are places to fill in all your data and several tabs to do it on. The interface is very intuitive and simple to use.

If you hit the down arrows after certain fields you will see a List that you can choose from like this one for the item below:

Next up is the value field asking you about how much it cost, what credit card it was purchased with and appraisal value etc.

The model tab is where you fill in manufacturer, serial number and who you bought it from. Simple and easy so far right?

The warranty tab shows you normal and extended warranty information such as the date, phone number for repair and cost. The more you fill in the better off you will be when the item is broken or stolen.

There are two more tabs, one for notes and the other to insert an image of the item. Then hit OK. That will bring you back to the main inventory screen as you can see below. Hit add to continue adding items until you are complete.

You can run reports against your items in the home inventory list and save them as PDF’s, HTML pages or just print them. Some of the included canned reports are warranty information, details, valuation, location, category and a bunch more.

I love some reporting!

This program helped me save my data so the next time I need something – I already have it. You will thank your lucky stars that you have this when you need it. Take the hour or so to do this!

What do you use to keep your home inventory list? Do you keep serial numbers? Do you not? Do you wish you had after an incident?  Share your experiences in the comments kiddies!

Download: House Hold Register

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With Mobiwee I can not only trace my stolen cell phone but I can also deactivate it.

MobiWee works by way of a downloadable client for your iPhone, Android or Windows Mobile Phone, and the client automatically syncs with the server at preset intervals to get the latest pending “requests” from the web interface.

You can follow the quick instructions to download the client from their website, and then install it via .cab (Windows Mobile), .apk (Android) or on either the Android or Apple App Store.

After installing the software, requests that you initiate from the online site will automatically be sent to and then quickly processed by your phone in the background and then executed silently. Depending on the type of device though, you might want to set the time that the client checks for requests higher to conserve battery life.

If your phone is ever lost, you can use the GPS in the phone to send a signal back and trace stolen cell phone on a Google Map with an address on it. Should it get into the wrong hands and your data is compromised, you can even send signals to the phone to lock with a password or even wipe your data. This will deactivate stolen phone for anybody who takes it.

If I clicked the option (in the picture below) to locate my phone, my phone will get the message, and then get the location via GPS (assuming my phone has GPS reception) and then send the location back.

MobiWee’s suite of other features also allows you to remotely track your phone’s usage and statistics. You can view statistics like the last person who called, battery life, manage contacts, Internet Explorer favorites, files, call forwarding and view call logs, all remotely. You can even remotely install applications to your phone, and grab screenshots of what it is doing.

Depending on your type of phone though, some of these may not work to full functionality due to OS restrictions. But, if I wanted to see who has been calling my phone or who has been calling from my phone, I can pull call logs from it just like the location above:

MobiWee’s other features also allow you to do a lot more remote management with your phone, allowing you to take screenshots for example and add files remotely to your phone as well. Microsoft also offers a similar paid service known as My Phone which can do similar tasks, such as view photos and text messages and ring your phone when lost.

Do you currently use a service to track and/or deactivate your phone? Share your options and ideas for keeping your phone safe in the comments below and also be sure to check out similar phone-finding tools like BlueRetriver and WhereisMyCellPhone in the MakeUseOf Directory.

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The first thing you want to do is go about creating an account over at Google Analytics. Why would I want to do that, you ask? Well, in my own experience, the service provides a tremendous amount of data, has a great user interface, is easy to install on any website, and, more importantly, is completely free of charge. It’s undoubtedly the easiest, cheapest and fast way of getting your visitors’ information, including their IP address or hostname.

If you already use any of the Google services, you can easily sign in with your existing credentials. The process of setting up your website with Google couldn’t be easier. You will be prompted to create a profile. A profile is basically a metaphor for a folder, where you can keep track of various aspects of your websites’ traffic. Each different domain will have its own separate profile. Select ‘Add Profile for a new domain‘ and enter your domain’s address and timezone.

The next page will generate a bit of code that you’ll have to insert in the header or footer of your website’s template. You have to do this because you  want to keep track of visitors across your website, not just the homepage. This way, no matter where the user navigates to (eg. mysite.com/secondpage), you will know about the total time spent, the pageview/unique visitor ratio and exit funnels.

How you add the code to your website varies dramatically – and requires the knowledge to manually access and edit your theme files. You probably set your own website up, so you must know how to do this. If you don’t know how, don’t panic, and instead search Google for ‘[service type] + edit theme OR Google Analytics‘. For example, ‘Wordpress edit theme Google Analytics‘. There are plenty of guides out there that will show you how to add this bit of code.

In the latest version of the self-hosted Wordpress, I only need to click on ‘Appearance‘ in the sidebar, ‘Editor‘ and choose from the right side list ‘footer.php‘. As a golden rule, insert the code before the last ‘</body></html>’ tags. They’ve also got a lot of support material over at the help page, which you might want to check out if in doubt.

Twenty-four hours later and you’ve got the first taste of website statistics. Be prepared to spend the rest of the evening looking at various graphs of source locations, connection speed, ISP, browser capabilities, operating systems, browsers, time on site and more. After that, the only problem that could arise is that you’ll wish you could install a tracking code in your girlfriend, in order to be plot the ‘visitor loyalty’ chart.

If you want to view individual IP addresses of your website’s visitors you need to click on Visitors>Network Properties>Hostnames, from the right sidebar, as illustrated in the screenshot above. There you will see a list of IP addresses and how many times each has visited the website. This can prove useful if your site is being attacked (defaced, DDOS-ed, etc.), as you can determine who your attacker is, or at least his proxy.

More views and information is accessible through the sidebar on the right: Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals. They’re pretty much self explanatory. The Visitors tab will contain information about – you’ve guessed it, the people who accessed your site. Traffic sources will identify who sent you traffic, be it a search engine, a referral or just organic. The Content tab will dutifully tell you how each page is doing when it comes to attracting eyeballs. Finally, Goals is used by e-commerce folks and companies to measure conversions, a fancy word for a sell.

You should definitely spare a minute to check out the quite extensive page of articles about blogging tools.

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Did you know that in the United States of America, you could be fined up to $15 million for selling recalled items? According to Fox News’ article, New Government Policy Imposes Strict Standards on Garage Sales Nationwide, that could, indeed, happen.

Don’t live in the grand old U.S. of A.? It stands to reason that this law may be coming to a yard sale near you, anyway. Internationally speaking, large countries can set the standard that other countries follow, with respect to law.

So, how do you know if you have a recalled product? Fortunately, a lot of countries’ governments have websites to help you identify hazardous items. That’s what this article is for!

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)

The CPSC is the federal commission behind the crackdown on selling recalled items in white elephant sales. Although the law may be hard to comply with, due to the sheer number of recalled products, at least they try to help.

At the site you can search on products, see latest product recalls in the United States, or even send a complaint about a product. More specifically, the CPSC has a handbook to help you out. You might want to download a copy of the 24-page Handbook for Resale Stores and Product Resellers. Warning, it’s a PDF file.

Recalls Australia

The rest of these sites aren’t a whole lot different in content than the CPSC, however, it’s important to list them as MakeUseOf has a lot of viewers from these countries as well.

That being said, Recalls Australia provides some services to help you stay on top of recalls. They provide an email subscription service that provides you with daily alerts about categories that you are interested in. Maybe you’re a parent and want to get daily updates on toys. This would be a good service.

Also, you can subscribe for customized RSS feeds that are updated hourly. Moreover, they now provide advanced search options, so you can narrow down to a product that you are researching. Well worth the time for our Australian friends.

UKRecallNotice

It seems odd that this site appears to be independently run. The United Kingdom’s official recall site seems to be the Trading Standards Institute, however the page dealing with recalls is sadly lacking useful tools. That would be why the UKRecallNotice site is far more popular, according to website statistics.

UKRecallNotice relies on updates from the Trading Standards Institute as well as from searching newspapers. From there, they categorize the notices, making recalls easier to find. They also have an e-mail list that you can join to get the daily recalls.  Hopefully, they’ll branch into providing an RSS feed as well. That’s always nice.

Health Canada

My home country’s site leaves a lot to be desired as well. Note the lame logo. This particular page does have search capabilities, but is limited to consumer products. What does that mean?

Well, apparently it means anything but vehicles, food, drugs and health products, and pest control products. Because we know what a hassle it is to have information like this all in one place. Note the Canadian sarcasm.

To my friends in India, being one of the largest groups of our readers, I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to find a good product recall site for there. I don’t know if it’s because I’m searching in English or not, yet if you know of one, please share it with the rest of the readers in the comments.

I urge all of our readers from ANY country to share their country’s product recall site in the comments. Obviously, I can’t include all the countries but with you adding links, we can compile a good list. Perhaps this list might one day save someone’s life. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a part of that?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Time and time again, Twitter has proven itself to be the fastest medium for delivering breaking news. Sure, the mainstream media like the BBC and CNN have their own updated websites, but they’re usually minutes slower to the punch and simply no match for the millions of Twitter users reporting in real time from the scene.

While inaccurate tweets do exist and you probably won’t find any in-depth news coverage, the community as a whole serves as a prominent source in breaking news alerts first and spreading the word, allowing others to at least know about what’s going on.

As those old G.I. Joe PSAs put it, “knowing is half the battle,” so let’s get right to it and find out how to track breaking news online with Twitter.

Follow the News

There are plenty of great Twitter accounts that specialize in bringing you only breaking news alerts. CNN’s (@cnnbrk) is the most popular, but if you’re looking for more updates daily, BNO News (@breakingnews) does it best.

Other good ones include Reuters (@reuters), ABC News (@abc), CBS News (@cbsnews), the BBC (@bbcbreaking), The New York Times (@nytimes), and NPR News (@nprnews) just to name a few.

Search for Updates

Once you have an idea of what’s happening, it’s easy to search for the latest updates and information. As well as providing the ability to monitor trending topics, Twitter’s own search service allows you to search for keywords. Twazzup, Monitter, and Tweet Scan are also great services for real-time results.

If you’re looking for pictures, head over to PicFog.

The real time image search service searches for picture links in tweets and continuously updates automatically. Learn more about PicFog in the MakeUseOf Directory.

Track the Buzz

When a breaking news event occurs, plenty of websites allow you to follow just how hot the story is. Very Recent is one of them, which plainly displays any news buzz on Twitter.

The issue of accuracy does come into play here however, with tweets that are false and not news at all coming up. For that, turn to Muck Rack. The site compiles journalists’ Twitter accounts from major media outlets all into one place. The result is real-time reporting from reliable sources.

Breaking news alerts can also take some time to make it onto aggregators like Google and Yahoo! News. That’s why there’s TweetNews.

This unique search engine was created by a Yahoo! programmer Vik Singh. It relies on Twitter updates for fresh news to compare to stories that have not yet garnered enough links for a high ranking in a traditional algorithm. You can read more about TweetNews on his blog.

For more, check out these Tools, Apps and Bots to Improve Your Twitter Experience and 5 Great Multi-Source News Websites.

How do you get your breaking news? On Twitter or elsewhere? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: Gabe’s Guide

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We’ve reviewed quite a lot of different tools that allow you to be more productive, organized and collaborative, such as Shareflow,Tokbox and Notely, but the search has not ended.  Today we’re going to take a look at Ubidesk, a fresh take on online team collaboration.

Launched just a couple of months ago, Ubidesk has already attracted the attention of the media and presents a solid feature list as well as a good user interface. Leveraging the SaaS (Software as a Service) concept, Ubidesk allows for team collaboration, be it in the same building or another continent, to instantly share and edit documents, upload files, manage both shared and private calendars, and manage tasks easily and efficient.

Ubidesk is definitely one of the most comprehensive solutions available at the moment. The online rich text editor has all the features you need to create complex documents, with formatting, images, tables, spell-checking and most essential – a solid revision tool that enables you to quickly spot changes made by other team members. If you’d rather not have your co-workers mess with your presentation, there is also a feature that locks new edits.

Since tasks and documents are almost always related to each other, you can assign documents to tasks and vice versa. Multiple documents can now be easily bundled for a task – no need to search a massive folder – and you’ve also got useful information such as the due date. Unlike other services, your tasks have different statuses: after a task is assigned, the status becomes “Started” when the assignee clicks the “Start” button. Nifty way to keep the project manager into the loop, isn’t it?

If you need more information about the development of a project or the status of your team collaboration, see who’s not doing their share or assign payment – the Timeline and the task log give a bird’s eye view of the changes. Are you working on the next generation MacBook hardware? Keep only the assigned project members in the loop by creating a hidden project. You’d like anyone to participate – make it public. Want others to see what’s going on, but not interfere, simply choose Protected.

With Ubidesk, you can manage  both your “Space” and personal calendar in one place. Keep your personal appointments private while sharing the work calendar with your colleagues – and see them all in one view, eliminating the possibility of overlapping appointments. Best of all, you can import and export at any time in the standard iCal format. Another aspect worth mentioning is the Sidebar. The Sidebar is a click away when you need to consult another document while writing or jot down notes in the Notepad.

There’s also no need to download files to your computer in order to view them – Ubidesk supports image and document formats such as JPEG, GIF, PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OpenOffice. “Direct Edit” eliminates the need to re-upload documents after editing them in Microsoft Office. We’ve also got a dedicated discussion space – with separate threads for each topic. Security conscious users will surely note the use of 256bit key encrypted HTTPS protocol to transfer data between your computer and Ubidesk. It’s good security, the same your bank uses. They also pledge not screen or filter any data.

Overall, Ubidesk  is a good way to go around online team collaboration – a solid web app with lots of potential and great attention to details. Sign up for free and share your impressions in the comments.

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Well here are some web site traffic tracking websites that can tell you what you need to know.

(Note, these are not web services for tracking traffic on your website. These websites basically estimate the traffic levels of other websites based on a number of publicly available factors. For tracking traffic on your website refer to free traffic analytics tools.)

Google Adplanner

I think that Google AdPlanner should be your first stop to check out any stats about a particular website. As it is mainly for advertisers looking at website statistics to see if it is worthwhile to advertise on a particular site, this makes it a great option to get accurate and reliable data.

Face it, what doesn’t Google know? They have data on nearly every website but that is another issue. As you can see from the stats for MakeUseOf, anyone can tell how many visits we get and what type of people regularly read us. It is also good as you can select to show data from one particular country.

Alexa

Alexa is another popular web site traffic tracking site and it is owned by Amazon. Although it involves a lot of clicking to get your results, it has proven to be useful. As you can see by the image, you have a lot of stats that you can browse through.

Compete

Compete is another great website to see how many visitors go to a website. However, there are a lot of limitations if you do not have a pro account. But apart from that, you can save the graph as an image. Overall, if you want a nice graph of a website’s growth (or decline) Compete is a nice option.

BizInformation

Biz Information is a great website as not only does it provide you with a graph of unique website visitors (from Compete) but it also tells you how much it is worth (although I don’t know how accurate it is).

The other good thing about Biz Information is that it also tells you how many submissions it has in popular social networking websites such as Digg and Stumbleupon.

So do you think the owners of MUO will sell for that price? With nearly 100,000 subscribers, who knows?

Quantcast

With Quantcast, you have a few options to play with. You can change the graph to show by day, week, month and to select a range of dates to show from one week to all time. Another great thing about Quantcast is that it shows you the US demographics of visitors such as age, sex, income, children and education level. But I would think Google Adplanner would be better.

URL Trends

URL Trends has a nice user interface and well placed ads, so be careful what you are clicking. But the web site traffic tracking that they provide is good. As you can see from the image, it shows where users are coming from, and you can find more details as you read from the ‘report navigation’ links. If you have a paid subscription, you can download your report in a PDF format.

Which tracking tools do you use to look for visitor stats for websites you find?   Let us know in the comments.

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• Use Webslug To See How Fast Your Site Loads (3)

To make matters worse, it’s a recession out there so work is getting thinner on the ground. Not many of us can afford to, or want to hire, an accountant to take care of the books. I struggled with ledgers and taxes until I discovered a piece of free accountancy software that does it all for me – TAS.

TAS Basic, to be more precise. This is aimed at self-employed people, small businesses and start-ups. It’s incredibly easy to use. And when I say ‘easy’ I mean animated instructions, pictures and tutorials that will still result in professional-looking accounts ready to be filed away.

Firstly, download TAS Books basic for free here.

When you have completed the download and the software is installed correctly, start the program for the first time. Initially, you’ll be asked for information such as your various current and savings accounts etc. (Don’t worry, the actual account numbers are not required so there is no security risk). Once you have set up these accounts and entered in the current balances you can begin using this free accounting software.

The home screen consists of basic financial information and the toolbar which runs across the top. Say for example, you just sent out an invoice to a customer. Click ‘Customer‘ in the toolbar and ‘add’ the customer. Then, select ‘Customers‘ from the toolbar again and enter in the invoice. TAS will record them as a creditor.

When they have paid the invoice, simply click on ‘Bank’ and select ‘Moneys in’ and enter in the invoice number. The amount is then added to the bank and taken away from the creditors account. Simple. Your current financial information is recorded on the homescreen as seen below.

This basic process of entering in information is also applied to suppliers where you owe them money. It works right across the board by using basic reference numbers to keep track of invoices, bills, payments and interest rates.

VAT (and its equivalent in other countries) which many self-employed people and businesses are required to keep track of is also accommodated for. This can be set up very easily by entering in the percentage rates after clicking ‘VAT’ in the toolbar. From then on in, any purchases and sales made will have their VAT recorded so you can claim it back from the tax authorities and also pay your own VAT bill accurately.

What I liked most about this free accounting software was how all this simplicity of entering in basic numbers into easily identifiable forms with pictures and explanations, is transformed into good accounts that wouldn’t look out of place on the desk of an accountant. From the screenshot, you can see that by simply selecting which kind of account you want to see such as ‘Profit and Loss’ or ‘Trial Balance’, TAS will take all the information on its database and creates your accounts in seconds which can then be printed out.

For me, this software has saved me time, money and has significantly brought down the amount of errors I make during the year doing accounts (which as anyone who is self-employed will tell you happen a lot). There is nothing more frustrating that sifting through a year’s worth of paperwork to find one misplaced digit or decimal point!

One other thing I feel I have to add is that the TAS team are the best I have encountered. A few days after I downloaded their software I was relaxing when I got a call. I answered and a friendly woman introduced herself as being from the TAS team. She wasn’t calling to ask me to upgrade – rather she wanted to know how I was doing. A smile erupted on my face and I was really taken aback by this. Never, in my lifetime, has customer service called me to ask if everything was going okay and if I needed assistance with anything at all.

If you need software for free, to do high-quality accounts for you and your business then look no further than TAS.

The only piece of advice I feel compelled to give is to breathe deeply in the beginning and take it slow. When creating customers or suppliers for TAS, do so with care as you’ll have to use them in the future. The first couple of days using the software should be done so slowly – but after that you’ll surely haven gotten to grips with it and be easily creating great accounts for yourself. And if you do mess up, you can always use the ‘Restore’ function under the ‘File’ menu.

What free accounting software do YOU use and why do you prefer it?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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What Is Your Twitter Reputation?

Can your reputation be measured? Yes, there are many services that claim to do that using different methods. You can check your reputation on free Twitter tools like Twitterank, Twitter Grader, Twitterholic, Twinfluence, Twitalyzer, and Klout. There is no single model that defines Twitter reputation, and this guide tries to combine all the different approaches used by such tools and suggested by experts.

Your Twitter reputation is important because:

• It may well be the first impression you make on the social web.
• Everything on Twitter is public (assuming you don’t protect your updates, which is 90% of Twitterers). This means your colleagues, current employer or potential recruiter can always see your Twitter profile and your tweets.
• Reputation will play an increasingly important role in search rankings. Already, third-party Twitter search engines like Topsy and Tweefind incorporate ranking in their search results, and Twitter itself is also on the way to ranking search results.

Convinced? Let’s get started.

1. Your Profile

Use your real name, a (decent) profile picture, a meaningful bio, and a link to your website, blog, or social profile. If you have a custom background on your profile page, people are more likely to follow you back.

2. Follow Authentic People

Don’t engage in any “get hundreds of followers quickly” schemes. Follow people you’re already friends with on other social networks. Then grow your Twitterverse as you get comfortable. Use our previously covered 9 sites and 4 ways to find Twitter friends based on geography and common interests.

I use the free Twitter tool Topify to get informative emails when someone follows me. It shows useful information like level of engagement, percentage of tweets containing links, and recent tweets to help decide whether to follow back.

3. Manage Your Followers and Friends

The days of “higher the number of followers, higher your reputation” are becoming a thing of the past, thanks to paid services that allow buying followers. Think of your reputation if there were half-naked women showing up as your followers!

Block suspicious accounts, spammers and bots from following you. I have recently started using Tweet Blocker to filter and clean my followers list and it works like a charm. Another service I find indispensable is Twerp Scan, which shows me a list of my contacts along with details of their number of follows, followers, ratio, etc. You can easily sort the list to weed out nasty spammers and indecent folks right within the app.

4. Get ReTweeted

The best way to increase your reach and influence on Twitter is to get retweeted. Statistical studies of retweets have found that links, quotes, trending topics, breaking news, questions, and creative/novel tweets are more likely to get retweeted. Shrink your tweet and reduce its length to around 100-110 characters so that it becomes easier for others to retweet without editing.

5. Mix Your Tweet Types

Do not restrict yourself to tweeting out informative links or indulging in pointless babble. Use a mix of tweets that are status updates, links, retweets, questions, and self-promotions for your blog posts.

6. Spread Your Tweets Over the Day

Services such as Tweet Stats let you see how your tweets are distributed through the day. Don’t send out a large number of tweets in short time spans and then disappear. Distribute your tweeting activity evenly through the day, using planned “Twitter-breaks” from your work. If you are going to be offline for a considerable amount of time, let your followers know.

7. Be Responsive and Engage in Conversation

Tools like Topify and Mr. Tweet now show your level of engagement. This influences whether people using such tools will follow you back.

Reply to others’ tweets using @Replies. Answer all @Replies and Direct Messages sent to you. Let people see that you don’t use Twitter simply to promote your links. Try to answer people’s questions and if you can’t, be a helping hand by retweeting them.

8. Don’t Misuse Hashtags

A UK furniture firm suffered a huge blow to their reputation on Twitter as they sent out marketing messages using #hashtags that were meant for completely unrelated topics. The Twitter community uses #hashtags for tracking specific topics they are interested in, so stick to conventions.

9. Avoid Many Twitter IDs from a Single IP Address

Some experts have proposed that multiple Twitter IDs created from the same IP address should have a lower Twitter rank in searches. This is a counter measure against spammers and bots who abuse Twitter accounts. If for whatever reason, you need to create a large number of legitimate Twitter accounts, don’t do it from the same computer.

10. Use DMs with Discretion

If I get automated DMs after I follow someone, I unfollow them. The same with people who play mafia-style Twitter games and send me invites to play via DMs.

Do not send Direct Messages to people you’ve recently started being friends with on Twitter. Most people consider DMs to be private messages that they share only with good friends. Use @Replies wherever possible, unless you want to discuss a sensitive issue that warrants a DM.

11 Use Recommendations

Recommendations are a great way to discover and be discovered. The most popular method on Twitter is the #FollowFriday hash tag. Like everything else in social media, the more you give, the more you get, so if you like this method, use it to give recommendations to others.

A better recommendation engine is Mr. Tweet, which is getting popular. It gives me decent recommendations since I joined, along with useful statistics.

12. Monitor Your Brand

If you own a brand name, create a search to monitor for all mentions of your brand. Most popular Twitter clients let you create saved searches, some like Seesmic Web even let you sync your saved searches with those on Twitter’s website.

Will these techniques help you enhance your Twitter reputation? Have any other suggestions? Do let us know in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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An IP address is a series of digits separated by dotted decimals and represented from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. Currently we are following the Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), although the successor ‘version 6’ has been standardized.

A good hacker will take steps to prevent his IP from being revealed. A spammer might hide behind a proxy server. It is also important to remember that locating an IP address using online tools does not reveal the physical address of the guy on the computer. The basic tools merely tell us the location of the ISP providing the connection by using publicly available information. To go beyond that and actually nail down the guy sending you the dirty emails would require the law to be in the loop.

Stefan’s post on How to Trace Your Emails Back to the Source is required reading for a very useful application of IP address tracking. An interesting comment has been made by a reader who says that he uses IP address tracing to ‘find out the origin of potential customers who send e-mails and make inquiries through his company’s website’.

In the lines that follow, I am taking Stefan’s post as a stepping stone and extending it by listing sites which serve as tools to trace an IP address to a PC. Any one should be enough but is there any harm in bookmarking a few more?

Part 1: Trace an IP Address to the Country and City of Origin

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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I am a big fan of Fantastic Fiction – my reading list is so huge that FF helps me to keep on top of new releases by the best in the business.   But up until now, the only way to check up on each author was to individually go to their FF page.

This as you can imagine was very time-consuming and I silently hoped that one day they would introduce RSS feeds. That hoping seems to have worked as each FF page now has its own unique RSS feed which will alert you to that author’s new book releases.

Using the site is simple. First, just use the search engine to find the author’s page. I will search for Jasper Fforde, one of my favourites.

You’ll then be taken to his page and part of the way down, on the right hand side, is a small RSS icon.

Click on the icon and you will be taken to your default RSS reader (mine is Google Reader) and you will then see his new book scheduled for release in a couple of months.

In this way, you can input all your favourite authors into FF and get all their RSS feeds running through your Reader. Then when a new book is announced, you’ll hear about it pretty much straight away.  The only downside to Fantastic Fiction is, of course, that it is limited to fiction. So any non-fiction fans are not going to get any use out of this new feature.

If RSS isn’t your thing or if you’re more into non-fiction, and/or if you prefer email, then most authors nowadays have a web presence (it’s pretty much essential) and some even embrace social networking with fan pages on places like Facebook (Daniel Silva, for example, has a busy and popular Facebook page and so does John Grisham).

So check to see if your author has a personal website and if so, if they offer a mailing list. Big thriller authors like Ken Follett and Jeffery Deaver have websites and mailing lists for example (Deaver even offers an exclusive short story to his mailing list subscribers). Author sites like these will also feature other news such as upcoming TV / movie adaptations and perhaps even podcasts. When the author brings out a new book, they will immediately notify everyone on their mailing list.

Here are some more big fiction writers with websites and mailing lists.  Stephen King’s site is particulary impressive with its artwork.

John Connolly

Michael Connelly

Stephen King

Dean Koontz

Dan Brown

Some authors though prefer to defer to their publishers to do things like newsletters. So if you went to John Grisham’s website, you’ll see that he promotes his publisher Doubleday’s newsletter. Virtually all major publishers have their own newsletters and if you subscribe, you’ll be kept up to date with their authors new books. For example, here’s Random House’s fiction email newsletter with an option to subscribe at the end. If you go here, you’ll get a complete list of all of Random House’s email offerings.

If you like to keep track of where your favourite author will be appearing in person to sign books, a good site is AuthorsTrack. It only shows US events though which is not so great for non-US fans.

How do you normally track your favourite author? Do you have a favourite web resource not mentioned here? If so, please let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: eclecticlibrarian

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Here I will discuss 3 of my favorite latest discoveries.

Twi.tt

Twi.tt is a service that allows you to create and share pictures, videos, documents, audio and even polls. When you go onto Twi.tt you firstly need to sign into your Twitter account. Twi.tt uses the OAuth method for logging users in so it is secure and Twi.tt do not store your Twitter username and password.

If you have never logged into a Twitter service using OAuth before it is as simple as two clicks. First click the Sign in with Twitter button and then click Allow when you have been taken to Twitter.

Twi.tt allows you to upload pictures, videos, documents and audio from your computer, link to it via a URL or capture pictures, videos and audio straight from your computer. They are also planning on adding support for emails in a few days.

When creating a poll you have 112 characters for the poll question and there is no limit for the number of poll answers. You also have the option of disallowing repeated votes and not posting your poll to Twitter.

When your poll has been created you will be given a link to it and a link to it will also be posted on your Twitter feed if you did not select the option to not post there.

The profile page that Twi.tt creates for you is almost identical to your Twitter account as it has your background image and your profile image. People also have the option to comment on content that you have posted.

Tweepler

Tweepler is a service that was created by @coryschop that lets you organize people (also known as tweeple) that are following you and who you are following.

To login in to Tweepler you must enter your Twitter username and password at the top of the site. When you hover over Why? next to the login form you will see that they state your details are encrypted and not stored.

When you log in you are shown a list of people that are following you but you are not following back. These are listed as Unprocessed Followers. If you do not want to add a person you can move them to the ignore bucket by pressing the arrow to the right. If you want to follow a person back you click the arrow to the right of their name.

You will be able to see everyone’s username, name, website, location and their bio. But if you click on more details you will get

• Information on the average number of tweets they post per day.
• The total number of tweets they have posted.
• Information on the number of followers they have
• The number of people they are following along with a ratio of following:followers. Their three latest tweets are also displayed.

It is possible to sort users by newest followers, oldest followers, name and username. If you don’t want to bother going through all of the Unprocessed followers you can click the Follow All or Ignore All button at the bottom of the page.

Tweetboard

Tweetboard is one of the most unique Twitter tools I have came across to date. What Tweetboard allows you to do is add a Twitter conversation for your site so that viewers can post messages and others can reply all in an easy to follow nested view.

Tweetboard is still in alpha but you can grab an invite by requesting one on the Tweetboard website by clicking the “Request a free alpha invite!” button. When you click the button it will take you to Twitter where you must send the message that is entered upon load.

When your account has been set up you will be notified. From the Tweetboard you can then grab the javascript snippet of code that will be placed on your website for Tweetboard to function. On certain content management systems and blogs the code may not work as intended to so some tweaking may be needed.

Tweetboard is a really good way of increasing traffic to your website and also a great solution of getting to know what your visitors think of your website.

If you have a favorite Twitter tool or service then post a comment below and share it with us.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Hamster is available as an applet for the Gnome desktop environment and you can install it using your distributions package manager. It is most likely in there (or else you can install from source). Ubuntu users may sudo apt-get install hamster-applet. Once installed, you can add it to any of your panels by right-clicking on the panel choosing Add to Panel and then look for Time Tracker (not Hamster).

Hamster will appear as “No Activity 00:00″ in your panel. Click on it, key in what you are doing and it gets down to the mundane work of counting how much time you spent in that activity. It also displays how much time you have spent in the current activity in the current session while inconspicuously adding them all together in the background to create reports for you.

Hamster lets you categorize and add description to your activities. This is especially useful if for instance, you want to view how much time you are spending on a “Complete Project” which itself is made up of sub-tasks or sub-projects. You just have to include @ when letting Hamster know what you are doing and it will automatically create a category and file your task under it!

Letting a program know what you are doing every time you are about to switch an activity might seem like too much burden if you are not into time tracking. So Hamster provides you a leeway, allowing you to enter activities that you’ve done in the past. Why would you want to do that? You will realize in a minute when we move to the reports.

Click on the applet, expand “Today” and you will see what you have been up to on that day. Click on Show Overview and you will be greeted by pretty graphs and detailed statistics of what you have been doing this week, this month or this day. You can then click the “Generate Report” button and up pops your browser with a detailed report of your activities for the said period.

Overall, Hamster is an easy-to-use and intuitive time tracking application. Everything is just in place in the interface just as you might expect it to be. It is all the more useful if you are disciplined in its use or else, you can always go back in time and make entries (for a change). Did I mention the “Stop Tracking” button, just in case you feel the need!

If you’re new on MakeUseOf, make sure to download our hugely popular productivity manual. Nothing comlicated, only the simple tips that are easy to follow and actually work.

Do you use any time tracking applications? Which software or web applications do you prefer?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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MakeUseOf has always offered solutions to financially savvy geeks, such as the article I wrote earlier on 3 blogs to get you out of debt, or Kaly’s 15 cool tools to track expenses and budget, but if you have a financial blog or website of your own, now you can embed free website stock tickers into your site with very little effort.

Thanks to the wonderful Web 2.0 world of widgets, there are a number of quick and easy tools to integrate real-time stock information on your site. If you can copy and paste, then you can have updated stock information on your website.

How to Use Free Website Stock Tickers

When selecting the best stock ticker widgets, I searched for those that are versatile enough to work on any blog platform or website. The stock widgets listed below are not only universal (most of them utilize Javascript), but they’re easy to customize for the exact stocks that you want to display on your website. These particular widgets aren’t just a standard stock ticker with just scrolling text, these all display stock data in a more graphical real-time format.  Just review the following list, select your favorite and embed it on your own site!

FreeStockCharts are Interactive and Free – It Doesn’t Get Much Better Than That

One of the best free stock charting widgets comes from FreeStockCharts, which actually lets you choose between one of two formats. You can either use the standard graphical chart that streams the data for the stocks that you specify, or you can use the “Hover Chart,” which automatically locates the ticker symbols in your content and provides your visitors with the ability to hover the mouse over those symbols and see a real-time chart of that stock. That’s a very cool feature to have on any financial website.

Once you choose whichever chart you want, you can customize it to suit your needs. Customizing only requires filling out a very simple one-page form where you can select the ticker symbol, update time, colors and other features for the chart.

Once you’ve finished customizing all of the chart features, all you have to do is copy the code that’s automatically generated at the bottom of the screen and paste it into your website or blog platform where appropriate. For my example, I’m going to embed the chart into my Wordpress blog FreeWritingCenter, which is just a matter of pasting the code into the Wordpress widgets section. After you’re done, the finished real-time chart will appear on your blog or website as shown below.

The NASDAQ Market Ticker

No list of free website stock tickers would be complete without an honorary mention of the one offered by NASDAQ. This graphical ticker will actually work either on your computer desktop or on your web page. Once you click the “copy me” button on the widget page, you can choose from a list of services where you want to embed the widget. This lets the application customize the code to work best on your Blogger account, Facebook page or anywhere else. In my case, I just want the straight HTML embed code.

Once you have copied and pasted the code into your blog – you’re good to go. Unlike FreeStockCharts, you don’t have to sign up with your email address before you can use the ticker. Personally, I like the look and feel of the NASDAQ ticker better than most of the others.

With this ticker, your visitors can actually customize it to their own liking. If they click on “ADD,” they can enter their preferred ticker symbol and that stock will show up under the “My Stocks” tab. Now that’s coolness.

The Yahoo Stock Ticker – For Financial Yahooligans

Yahoo Finance is one of the most popular online financial resources on the net today, so it stands to reason that Yahoo would offer their own free stock ticker. Yahoo lets you choose from three types of modules for your site – large (quotes, charts and news), medium (quotes and charts), or small (quotes). You can customize the data with up to 10 ticker symbols, adjusting the width of the display, and choosing the color scheme.

Just like the NASDAQ ticker, you don’t have to enter your email, you only have to accept the terms and conditions to get access to the code. Usually I don’t really like Yahoo products because they’re typically kind of “plain vanilla,” with very few features. However, in the case of this stock module, the ability to customize it with up to 10 ticker symbols and choose from a variety of color schemes is very cool.

SaneBull Displays Data From Global Markets

SaneBull, briefly reviewed before by Makeuseof, offers a whole range of awesome plugins for Facebook, iPhone, Mac and many other platforms. One of the best ones is the “World Market Watch” widget, where you can display stocks from markets all over the globe on your website.  Like the NASDAQ widget, there are automatic installers for platforms like Blogger, Facebook and a variety of others.

If you do use any of these social networks, I highly suggest using this tool, especially if you’re not the type that likes to play around with adding the code yourself. However, I’m old fashioned – so I always go for the copy and paste approach. I’m weird like that.

I like the look and feel of the Sanebull stock widget – however if you don’t, then you’re out of luck because there’s no way to customize the widget. You get what you get. The extent to customization is that you can select only American, Asian or European markets instead of displaying them all at once.

Using StockTwits for Stock Tips

While not technically a stock ticker widget, StockTwits is a very useful stock widget for financial bloggers. Want to give your readers access to the latest stock tips? The StockTwits widget is a direct plugin to Twitter feeds of market investors. As investors “twit” personal stock tips, the StockTwits widget automatically updates the feed on your web page.

The major drawback with this particular stock widget is that you can’t customize it – not only in terms of its appearance, but also what information comes through. The feed is basically about any stock tip whatsoever, so expect to get a stream of random tips on any stock imaginable. Of course, for day traders or other folks who are always on the lookout for hot stock tips, that’s a great thing.

Do you use any stock widgets on your own website or blog? What are your favorites? Share them in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Su.pr is currently in private Beta mode. If you like to test drive the service, you must first have a StumbleUpon account, then follow the official SU twitter account and wait for them to release the beta code. I was lucky to receive the beta code the moment I followed SU, but I have seen others waited 5 days for the code. Your waiting time could vary. Once you obtained the beta code, simply enter into the input field at the Su.pr homepage.

At the homepage, you can see a textbox where you can enter your text message and link. Just like Twitter, you are only allowed 140 characters and all links within the text will be shorten with the Su.pr prefix.

From here, you have several options. You can either:

• Post your text message to Twitter or Facebook (or both)
• Schedule it to post at a later date (like Tweetlater)
• Just use the URL shortener service to translate your long URL

Is that all about Su.pr?

You bet! That is only the tip of the iceberg. Every post message or link that you submit (or create) via Su.pr will be tracked and recorded. You can view real time analytic result of your posted items and see how popular it gets. Statistics that you can view include the number of retweets, number of StumbleUpon reviews, number of click through and even traffic source. You can view stats for the past 12 hours, past 7 days, or even past 30 days.

More surprises

Suggested posting time

Based on your submission on Su.pr and the statistics, Su.pr will analyze your data and suggest the best time to post your stuff. This should help you to gain more exposure for your submissions.

Promoting your website

If you are looking to gain more traffic for your site, here is a good way to promote your site. By submitting your websites (you can enter up to 3 websites) in the Promote Website field in the Settings page, Su.pr will analyze your site(s) for the most popular content and promote them via StumbleUpon.

Su.pr bookmarklet

Su.pr is not yet integrated in the StumbleUpon toolbar. Users who wish to have quick access to Su.pr services can drag the bookmarklets (located at the bottom of Su.pr homepage) onto your bookmark bar.

Launching of API key

StumbeUpon has released the API for developers, so we should be able to see more third party apps that integrate with Su.pr in the near future.

How does StumbleUpon play a part?

Until now, it seems that everything is about Su.pr and there is no mention of StumbleUpon playing a part in the process. So how does SU play a part in Su.pr?

This is where SU comes in. When your readers/visitors/followers click on your link to reach the destination page, a StumbleUpon toolbar will show up on top of the page. If the page is not yet submitted to SU, a Discover button will be available for the user to submit to SU, else a thumb up/down button will show. This is very similar to the Digg bar, except that it is more user-friendly and maintains the usual high standard of the SU toolbar.

What Su.pr is lacking at the moment?

There are several functions that are clearly missing in Su.pr right now. The inability to post tweet to multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, inability to edit scheduled post (except for deletion), inability to post to Facebook page/group, not integrating Su.pr into StumbleUpon toolbar are some of the features that are missing and are highly requested by the community.

Noting that this is still a beta version, I am confident that the StumbleUpon team will get all this ironed out in the final release.

Meanwhile, if you have not tried Su.pr, do follow Stumbleupon (on Twitter) and grab the invitation code now.

So what do you think? Thumbs up or down? Let us know in the comments!

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• Track Your Short URL Links With tr.im (10)
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Tracer is a simple one-line Javascript that you can add to your site or blog to monitor the content from your site which users find most engaging. This means, whenever users highlight or copy-paste any text or pictures from your site, Tracer tracks it. What’s more, when users paste the copied content in an email, blog or another web page, Tracer automatically adds an attribution link back to your site, potentially increasing your site’s traffic and improving your search engine rank.

Tracer Dashboard

What does Tracer tell you? The Dashboard gives you a tag cloud of the most copied words, a list of the most copied images and pages, as well as high-level stats for page views, copies, etc. over different time spans. Here is an example of the Tracer Dashboard.

Tracer Benefits

• Automatically tackle plagiarism and protect your intellectual property
• Identify the most appealing keywords on your site, and use this insight to focus strongly on popular content
• Generate more traffic to your site via automatic linkbacks
• Automatic attribution links increase your site’s search engine rank

Sounds too good to be true? Let’s see how easy it is to get started using Tracer on Blogger/Blogspot.

Adding Tracer to Blogger

Sign up at Tynt Tracer with the domain where you want to use it. In our case, the name would be yourblog.blogspot.com. After successful signup, Tracer will give you the Javascript you need to add to your blog.

Copy the entire script code in the highlighted box to your clipboard. Go to your Blogger Dashboard, and click ‘Layout‘. On the ‘Page Elements‘ tab, click ‘Add a Gadget‘.

In the ‘Add a Gadget‘ window, select ‘HTML/Javascript‘.

In the ‘Configure HTML/Javascript‘ window, give it a title like ‘Tracer‘ and paste the Javascript code given by Tracer in the ‘Content‘ section.

You should see a confirmation and the Tracer gadget added to the list of page elements.

You can confirm that Tracer is active on your blog by checking that the gadget is active and visible on your blog.

That’s it! You are all set. Visit your Tracer Dashboard now to get a better understanding of what content your users find really interesting.

Most Tracer users are surprised at the extent to which users are copying their content. Their stats show that 2% of all page views result in some user action it can track. Within the first two weeks of beta testing, it tracked over 250,000 copy-paste operations. It is already being used by ~200 content publishers including bloggers and news media sites with millions of page views per month.

Are you happy with the results on your site? Surprised? Tell us! Also, if you know any other tracking services, share them with us in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Over the years, I have learnt my lesson. Now, before the start of any projects, I will tell my clients that I charge by hours and give them an estimate of the time needed to complete the project. I will then use a desktop time tracking software to track the amount of time I have spent in the project and then charge my clients accordingly.

If you are like me who provide your services on the hourly rate, here are some free and useful desktop time tracking tools that you can use to track the time you have spent on any projects.

Baralga

Baralga is a simple and lightweight application that allows you to track the time you have spent on your project. On the home page is a big Start/Stop button where you can click to start the timer as you start on the project. There is also options for you to enter manually the total time you have spent on the projects. Best of all, it allows you to export your data to Microsoft Excel, CSV or even as a data backup.

Baralga is developed in Java and works in multiple OS.

Rachota Timetracker

Rachota looks slightly complicated than Baralga, but it is in fact a simple to use application with several useful functions. It allows you to define your working hours/day and give you a notification when your working hours are not reached/exceeded. It also allows you to define regular tasks (with priority) so that you can access to them easily on the front page.

While doing your projects, there will be times when you need to take a coffee break. Rather than stopping the timer, there is a Relax button where you can use to pause the timer. Once you are done with your break, simply click the Work button again to start the timer.

Rachota comes with an Analytics tool where you can use to compare the amount of time and work done that you have completed.

Rachota is developed in Java and in available for all platforms (that support Java)

Klok

Even though Klok is still in beta, it is surprisingly an useful and comprehensive time tracking application. For each project, you can further split it into smaller sub projects and manage it like any other projects. You can also create templates to be used for new creation of projects.

Once a project is completed, you can drag and drop to the Archive button (located at the bottom left corner) to archive it. At any point of time, you can also access the archive to unarhived any old projects. While Klok allows you to export your data to Excel spreadsheet, there is no ways for you to import any data. This might be a problem if you need to work on multiple computers.

Klok works in all platforms and requires Adobe Air to be installed in your system before you can use it.

actiTime Basic

actiTime Basic is a free, yet powerful timesheet optimized for your basic time tracking needs. Once installed, you can run ActiTime from your browser. Features include creating new users, setting up customers record and project details, enter the time spent for each projects, allocate your work schedule and best of all, generate an invoice for the time you have spent on the projects.

actiTime uses Microsoft Access or MySQL to store your data. Data collected by actiTIME can be exported to qbXML file and then imported by actiTIME Invoice Importer to QuickBooks® for invoice generation.

Time Tracker

Time Tracker is a Windows-based application. One thing that I like about this application is its user-interface. It allows you to see everything in one glance. The projects, tasks and links to reports/charts are located on the left pane and allow you to switch between each project easily and quickly. The main panel that track the time you have spent on your project is of a spreadsheet format so you don’t have to spend a lot of time getting used to it.

The reports section comes with three different type of visual report: text, chart and grid. Depending on your preferences, you can choose the one you like.

Time tracker also supports plugins. However there are only few and limited plugins that you can use currently.

Time Tracking Tool

Time-Tracking-Tool is really what I call a lightweight application. Weighing at only 1.3 MB, it is by-far the smallest applications among these 6 time tracking software. Even though it is small, it still comes with the complete set of tools to track your time effectively. You can create new tasks and add sub-tasks to it, activate the timer as you work on the project, view the report with bar chart. One thing that is lacking from this application is the ability to export/import data.

Time-Tracking-Tool is developed in Java and works in all platforms.

What other time desktop time tracking software do you use to track your time?

Image credit: John-Morgan

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However, a very cool alternative benefit of the Joe’s Goals method is that it also helps people change bad habits. It may seem silly to think that just by using some free website, you can put an end to that huge habit that makes you feel horrible about yourself. But, in this article, you’ll learn how you can use the free Joe’s Goals web application to put an end to those nasty vices you’ve been meaning to put a stop to for years.

How to Change Bad Habits With Joes Goals

MakeUseOf often covers sites that help you achieve goals, such as GetGoaling, StickK, or GoalsOnTrack, but the cool thing about Joes Goals is that it was created by a regular guy who simply wanted to organize his life, stay on task toward his goals, and change bad habits. A personal project turned into a web application that he now offers to the public for absolutely free (or you can pay to remove the non-intrusive ads). The moment you sign up and log in, you’re immediately ready to start adding your goals and marking them as positive (ones you want to do every day), or negative (bad habits).

As you add each goal, it gets piled onto your list of weekly goals, with a box for each day of the week. Today’s day is automatically highlighted, your goals are all weighted by points, and your total statistics are calculated for the entire week. Every day that you either accomplish that goal, or you give into your vice, you just click the screen on that day and a check mark appears and you get points (or lose points). Keeping track of your progress every day takes less than a minute.

The score is even tallied per day, so you can see whether a certain day of the week is your sore spot, and plan accordingly.  You can also mark certain goals as more important to you than others by assigning that goal as worth a higher score, or the bad habit as one that you particularly want to eradicate from your life.

Stop Bad Habits by Tracking Your Progress

Psychologists agree that what most often helps people put an end to bad habits is when they are forced to become accountable for those actions. Unfortunately, for some people that means getting very sick from smoking, or hitting a pedestrian because they were speeding. Joe’s Goals offers a way for you to announce to yourself, and to the world, that you are finally owning up to those bad habits, and you’ve decided to make positive changes in your life and stick to them. You can even share your progress on MySpace, blogs and other websites (see the bottom of this article). In order to track your progress, you can run several charts based on whatever date range you like.

The account summary just provides a spreadsheet list of all of your goals and the total checks and scores for that date range. The logbook summary lists a log of all of your notes from your daily logbook (see below). The goal calendar shows you a graphical display of how many daily check marks you achieved for a particular goal.  The “CSV Backup” option lets you save your reports to a CSV file that you can open with any spreadsheet software that can read comma-delimited files. Now, I don’t know if it’s the engineer in me, but my favorite report, by far, is the “score calendar,” which provides you with a very cool graphical representation of your daily totals.

This display really makes you realize whether you’re going uphill or downhill, in a big way. The goal of this particular “game” is to reduce the red and increase the green. It can be difficult to change bad habits, but having that chart right in your face every week is enough to give you a real wake-up call. The time to change those bad habits is right now, and this software lets you assign some real values to those goals so that you can be accountable to yourself.

Announce Your Progress to Friends and Family

Best of all, there’s a social networking feature (which I find very cool), that lets you integrate a display of your progress into any website, blog, or social network that you like. You won’t only be accountable to yourself, but you’ll be accountable to all of your friends and family who care about you and your health. All you have to do is click on the link under “Your Badge,” highlight and then copy the widget script in the text box.

Inserting the code into Facebook, I’ve added the widget to my Facebook wall as you can see above. Now, every time you fail or succeed, you can be sure that friends and family will be there to cheer you on, or make fun of you, whichever the case may be.

Ultimately, brwaking bad habits and accomplishing your goals comes down to self-discipline and drive. No web application is going to instill that in you. But Joe’s Goals certainly goes a long way toward helping people outline the specific things they want to change about their lives, and providing a tool they can use to track their progress and achieve success.

Do you have any tools that you use to track your goals or change habits? Offer your own tips and tricks in the comments section below.

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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The best way to lose abdominal weight, or even just to control your weight overall when you can’t seem to get much exercise, is through controlling your diet. However, keeping track of what you eat and the calories you consume can feel both overwhelming and annoying. Who wants to waste time jotting down the calories of every little snack or drink?

Being a geek who’s always interested in Internet resources that will do all of my work for me, naturally I decided to turn to the Internet for my weight loss needs. MakeUseOf has touched on weight loss solutions in the past, such as Tina’s article listing 6 cool sites to help you keep New Year’s resolutions in 2009 as well as a number of calorie and weight loss calculators.

Lose Weight for Free With the Daily Plate

If you perform a Google search for “how to lose weight,” you’ll get back an entire truckload of weight loss scams that will leave you as fat as ever. Why don’t diets work? Because, as any professional dietician will tell you, there’s no magic formula that’s going to make you magically lose weight. Physics still comes into play. As a biological creature, if you take in more energy (calories) than you expend, you’re gonna plump up like the Goodyear Blimp.

So what’s a body to do? It’s simple. The best way to lose abdominal weight is to find an easy way to keep track of the food you eat and the energy it holds. By doing so, you can control the way you eat in order to get to your ideal body weight. I’ve found that there are foods that can help me lose weight by suppressing appetite, but ultimately you need a tool that will help you lose weight for free by tracking and calculating the total calories in the food you eat. The DailyPlate does just that.

Keeping Track of Calories and Nutrition

Once you get through the one-page registration, you can immediately get started tracking your food intake, looking up nutritional information, taking part in the DailyPlate forum community, or, heaven forbid, calculate the calories you’ve burned by working out (in an alternate universe).

The food diary is fast and easy, and by using it you never have to count a single calorie again. After each meal, you simply click on “My Plate,” search for the food you’ve eaten and add it to your diary.

One of the things that surprised me was the accuracy and size of the DailyPlate food database. For example, when I searched for “multigrain bagel,” I not only found thousands of results, but I found the exact bagel from Dunkin Donuts that I’d purchased that morning. To my dismay, it turned out that a Dunkin Donuts multigrain bagel is one of the most calorie saturated bagels in existence.  Luckily, the website application also offers suggestions for foods that can help me lose weight.  I can use all of the advice I can get.

Once you click on the item you ate, all of the data gets loaded into your “daily plate,” including calories, fat, carbs and all other nutritional content. The website automatically tracks all of the nutrition that you eat during the day.  As you add the food, the items show up on your My Plate page.

Cool Features For Lazy People

You probably got to this point because you’re too lazy to get on a treadmill, let alone constantly keep a log of the food you eat. That’s why The DailyPlate is perfect. To make the process even easier, the folks at The DailyPlate created a few extra, cool features to the site. The first of these is a “meal” system, where you can pre-load specific meals that you eat often.

Now, when you click on your “Standard Work Lunch,” it automatically loads the ham and cheese sandwich, pickle, and chips that you eat almost every day.  Underneath this widget in the right menu, you’ll also find the “What I Eat Often” box, where the foods you recently entered are listed.

After a while, you’ll find you can simply log into the system, click on the foods you eat often, and then log out – in a matter of seconds.  There are a few calorie management systems out there that are as easy as this. The right menu bar also saves the exercise and activities that you add to your daily calorie log, also for easy point and click use.

As you add items to your log of food and activities, the system gets easier and easier to use, because all of those items get loaded into these right menu widgets.  As you add the food you eat, and the exercises that you’ve done (if any), the page lists your calorie and nutritional totals at the bottom.

As the day goes on, each time you log in you can see how much of your daily calories and nutrition that you’ve already consumed. As you can see above – I love salt.

Monitor Your Progress With Graphs & Charts

Everyone loves a good chart, especially when you’re not the one who has to put it together. The cool thing about the DailyPlate is that as you’re entering your food consumption and activity details, the website constantly keeps track of your progress. Just check out the charts, calorie goals or weight goals at the top of your My Plate page.  As an example, I’ve clicked on my weight history for a graph of my weight from the beginning of 2008 into 2009.

Okay, it’s obvious I’ve been on the wrong track.  But a guy has to start somewhere right?  The system also tracks the calories you’ve consumed versus your calorie goal (based on your weight and activity level).  This progress is displayed on a dot chart.

Best of all, from the main page, you can monitor a pie chart that instantly updates as you add the food you’ve consumed. Just above that, you can even monitor how much water you’ve had throughout the day, to make sure that you hit the daily recommended limit (about 1.9 liters a day).

All of the information on your My Plate page, and the charts and data in the background, are constantly updated and tracked as you quickly click on the foods you eat throughout the day.  Counting calories has never been this easy.

Do you have a favorite website or application that you use to keep track of your health and fitness goals? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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That is why I was not surprised to find web apps that touch on interesting subjects like motivation, life reflection, and planning for life’s goals.  Here are five fun, useful, and highly personal web apps that can help organize your life the cool way.

Lifemetric

Lifemetric is described as a “social experiment that aims to track the factors of our lives that shape our society.” This app helps you track the different aspects of your life as you rate them one by one including your mood, sleep, love life, work productivity, etc.

Lifemetric will then analyze the relationship between these aspects and generate a graph for you.  This app can tell you some interesting and insightful stuff like how much you get agitated with less sleep, how productive you are when you feel good about your love life, how much coffee affects your mood, and many more.  You can compare your graph with other members or you can view the results of the entire Lifemetric community. This app will help you learn a lot about yourself and find a balance in your life.

43things

43things is a web community based on setting and accomplishing goals. You can find like-minded people with different goals and read about their experiences. Your goals can be as simple as ‘finish one book a month’ to big-time stuff like ‘own and raise a dog’ or ‘finish my online graduate course’.

Once you list your goals, chances are there are people who are trying to complete the same goals and you can help each other achieve them. With collective support like 43things, big goals become more manageable.

HighxLow

HighxLow tracks your daily mood by using your Twitter account. All you need to do is tweet to @highiam if you feel happy, and @lowiam if you are in a bad mood. Highxlow will then track your mood and generate a “mood graph” for you.

After a few days of tweeting to HighxLow, you can view the graph and analyze why you may feel happy in some days, and sad in other days. You can also tweet to @cheeron to encourage your twitter friends when they are having a rough patch.

HighxLow is a neat app to find smudges of positive thoughts to help you get through the day.

Wesabe

Wesabe is not your old regular personal finances tracker. Its real strength is the growing community of supportive people that share advice and ideas to help you get more value with your money.

While it has the usual features like allowing you your accounts in one place, organize your transactions, and set spending targets, you can also learn a lot such as how to set financial goals, save on specific purchases, live frugally, and motivate yourself to accomplish your life goals.

Joe’s Logbook

Joe’s Logbook is a tracking tool and journal of personal goals and dreams.  Like any logbook, you can set notes everyday for each goal that you want to achieve and track your progress. Reward yourself with a checkmarks for small victories, or give yourself a red X if you encounter a setback.

The single-page interface allows you to track any area of your life like spending, diet plan, health, and other life goals with a simple scoring system. Joe’s Logbook interface makes it one of the niftiest personal goal applications in the web.

At the end of the day these are just tools to organize your life/lifestyle. They inspire, motivate, and give you a system to track your life and accomplish your goals. I recommend to try them out extensively and develop a habit to use them if you want these tools to work for you.

If you have your own set of “life tools” please hit me with your comments and share them with the MUO community. Cheers!

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Manage Your Time Effectively Online With Slife [Mac Only] (5)
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The solution most financial experts suggest is to keep a simple log of your expenses from week to week. At the end of the month, you’ll have a nice snapshot of everything you’ve spent your money on, and where the major leaks are.

The problem for most people is that keeping a paper log is cumbersome and prone to getting lost. Using spreadsheet software is fine if you understand spreadsheets and how to manipulate the data. And most of free budget tracking software that are available are filled with so many bells and whistles that it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to keep a simple log of your finances.

This is where the SimpleD Budget Windows application can help. With this free budget tracker software, in just a few short steps, you’ll have a monthly budget and expense log ready for managing your household finances.

Starting A Budget With SimpleD Budget

SimpleD Budget lives up to it’s name the very first time you load it. It doesn’t get much simpler than this. The application first asks for your “budgeting type,” meaning are you a student, single without kids, a parent with kids, or retired?

Each one of these categories will automatically fill in the default budget for you with the typical items that someone in your circumstances usually spends money on. After also asking you for your monthly net income, it produces the default budget page.

While you can save a lot of time by using this simple budget, I like to break down my own budget into more specific items. For example, instead of grouping everything into “utilities,” I like to budget a certain amount specifically for electricity, cable, internet and so on.

You can do this by adding a new category and typing in the monthly amount that you typically spend on that item. You can color-code each item so that they are visually separated by type of expense. For example, I use green for fixed and blue for variable. You can also sort the items within each category by date, location, description or amount.

It’s important to take enough time to carefully go through all of the items you spend money on every month, and include it in this list. The more realistic you are with putting together this budget, the easier it will be to stay within your budget every month.

The nice thing about this software is that you can see a visual representation of the percentage of your overall income that each expense eats up. Every item is displayed in the form of a bar chart. The goal, obviously, is to get these bars as small as possible.

Here’s an example of what a completed budget looks like.

Tracking Your Expenses Throughout The Month

The biggest reason I like to use this software is not so much the budget itself. Anyone can put together a budget. What I really like about this application is how it allows you to log expenses as the month progresses. When you click on the “Expense” button at the bottom left corner of the screen, you are brought to a new screen where all of your defined categories are listed, and under each of those you’ll find a link to “Add New Item.”

Now, let’s say you’ve budgeted a fixed amount every month for groceries. Many people have a hard time keeping track of what they’ve spent and how much is left as the month goes on.  With SimpleD Budget, you can enter the expenses as the month goes on, and the software automatically calculates how much of your total budget you have remaining for that particular category.

With this application, you’ll know if you’ve spent the entire amount that you set aside for entertainment each month, and that it’s time to tighten the belt and skip dining out a few times so that you can stay on budget.

As the month goes on and you’re keeping a log of all of your expenses compared to your budget, you might also want to follow your trend of spending throughout the month. For example, do you tend to spend more on fuel at the beginning or end of the month? Do you tend to spend more on entertainment in the middle of the month?  By clicking on the “Balance” button at the lower left corner of the screen, you can view your spending trends based on the expenses you’ve already entered for the month.

These charts take no manipulation or effort, they update automatically based on the data that you’ve entered on the other tabs. Each month, you can create a brand new sheet based on last months budget, tweak it however you need to, and then start all over again tracking expenses.  As time goes on you’ll have a detailed record, complete with graphs and charts, outlining your monthly spending patterns.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

We’ve covered the pros of this software so far. It is extremely fast and easy to use. As a simple personal journal to hold all of your family expenses and spending in one place, SimpleD Budget works well. However, there are a few features that are lacking, and they need to be mentioned.  First, the print feature of this software is useless. If you hope to print out nice paper copies of your budget and graphs, then don’t bother using this software. The printout ends up shrunk down into a small corner of the page, barely legible.

Since I primarily use the software to keep an electronic log of my spending, I don’t really care about the print feature. However, for some people that could be a showstopper.

Another small drawback of the software is that you have one format to save the data, and that’s an XML format that’s readable only by the SimpleD Budget software itself. Again, for my own purposes, I only intend to store, view and manipulate my financial log within SimpleD, but for anyone who hopes to export this data to Excel or some other financial application, this will prove to be a significant roadblock.

With that said, the small size and simple layout of this application makes it easy to run on any PC, and the smooth flow from establishing a budget and logging expenses through the month to charting out your spending results, makes this application perfect for the amateur family budget planner who may be wary of the larger, more complicated financial applications.

For some additional ideas for tools you can use to manage finances, take a look at Sam’s 5 Online Tools to Help You Manage Your Money article.

Do you have a favorite budget tracker software that you use to manage your personal finances? Share your favorite app in the comments section below.

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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So, when something gets stolen or damaged and you’d like to report a claim to your insurance company, pulling out a record of the purchase isn’t likely going to happen. It is going to end up being your word against theirs.

In order to help remedy keeping track of your multitude of assets, I am here today to talk about online home inventory tracking tools, one online and one off. They are designed specifically for situations like I described. To track your entire home inventory, including photos of receipts, credit cards, tax documents and much more.

StuffSafe – Online

StuffSafe is a completely free home inventory tracking site that lets you track every asset in every room of your home or workplace. You can separate all of these items by room, track many different items of your purchase, along with attaching photos of receipts, or the actual product.

Once you have all of your items entered, there are also advanced reporting options, to Excel, HTML or PDF.

Here is a look at my empty inventory database on StuffSafe.

Here I am entering the first of many assets into my StuffSafe database. These items can include many details, and also photographs, which you cannot see on this screen.

StuffSafe includes advanced export options for you to display to your insurance provider, or just for safe keeping of a hard copy report.

KnowYourStuff – Offline

KnowYourStuff has many of the same features as StuffSafe, but is offline. In other words, it’s home inventory software which keeps it away from possible snoops in the cloud. It includes a room-by-room inventory as well, with item descriptions, photos and cost.

It does not however include any reporting option like StuffSafe.

KnowYourStuff also includes a nice search tool, for sifting through the dozens of items in your database.

One of the bonus options that it has is an online ‘vault’ to store your database for safekeeping. (Vault 24 is not free though, but comes at a nominal fee)

Below is what you’ll see at first glance in KnowYourStuff. Here you will create your new location, your rooms, and item additions.

Here is a look at an addition of a new item to the KnowYourStuff database. I’m adding the same TV that I added in StuffSafe. Here you can see that you have many of the same options, including photos for receipts.

Trying to keep track of all of the thousands of purchases you’ve made during your lifetime can be a daunting task. And you don’t really know how important it is, until you have something damaged or stolen. Without evidence, such as a receipt or photograph of your product, most insurance companies aren’t going to help you out. Free asset tracking tools like these keeps all of your things in a nice and organized fashion and makes life easier when you need to get it replaced in an emergency.

Try both of these out and let us know what you think. How do you keep track of your proof of purchases? Do you have your own methods? Please let us know, we’d love to hear about them.

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So have you been able to keep your New Year’s resolutions of the last year? If not, did you make wise resolutions for the New Year?

You likely already have all the knowledge and tools required to keeping resolutions. All it takes is an idea of how to use that and the motivation to start.

If you’re uncertain about where to start and have a bad record of breaking New Year’s resolutions from previous years, let us show you how it can be done. After all, you don’t want to end up doing it like this guy:

Making Good Resolutions and the Right Attitude

If you need some help in making wise resolutions and setting your mind right to sticking to them, I recommend reading the articles How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions and 10 Tips for Keeping New Year’s Resolutions on eHow and About.com, respectively. Briefly, they recommend to…

• be realistic and aim low
• keep the number of resolutions down, don’t overload yourself
• plan ahead and outline your plan
• tell everyone you know, so they can remind you
• when in danger of failing, make a pros and cons list for motivation
• keep talking about your resolutions
• track your progress
• reward yourself
• don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, some failure is OK
• make an effort to stick to your resolutions
• wait until spring for making resolutions
• keep trying and start anew anytime of the year

Reminders

As a regular reader of MakeUseOf you have all the necessary tools at your fingertips. But a ton of tools is roughly a ton too much. So let’s focus on a few good tools to keep you at your heels.

HassleMe (directory)

HassleMe will constantly send eMail reminders at random intervals, so you never know when the reminder will pull you out of your mental nap.

Resnooze (directory)

With Resnooze you can set up daily, weekly or monthly eMail reminders for recurring tasks. Of course it can serve as a reminder service for keeping your New Year’s resolutions. In each eMail you can edit the frequency or delete the reminder.

Remindr (directory)

Remindr can send simultaneous reminders on Twitter, Jabber, GTalk, your eMail and cell phone. Very simple to set up, however it has to be set up again and again.

Track Your Progress

Qwitter (directory)

Qwitter will help you quit smoking. On the website you can track how many cigarettes you are smoking each and every day, keep a journal to record your state of mind, view your progress and share the experience with others.

The great thing about Qwitter is that it’s fully integrated with Twitter. A Twitter account is actually required to sign into Qwitter. So you can easily hook up with your friends and have them motivate you.

Gyminee (article from Anthony)

If your resolution is to eat better and work out, Gyminee is for you. Gyminee provides workout programs, you can track your workouts, monitor your diet, keep a food diary, meet people who are doing the same and track your progress, for example on your iPhone and pass challenges until you reach your goals.

traineo

If you want to eat better and lose weight, you should have a look at this website. During the sign-up process you can select in which units (American, British, Metric) your progress will be measured, also your current weight and height, goal weight and time frame will be recorded. Finally, you can choose motivators by entering the names and eMail addresses of up to 3 friends or family members.

When that is done you can track your activities, the food you had during the day, your weight, keep a log and reframe your goals. Your progress is relentlessly recorded in pretty graphs.

Will you stick to your New Year’s resolutions this year? Let us know whether you already made it last year and how you made it!

Picture Credits: v_hujer, woodsy

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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For example, if you use TinyURL to shorten the long URL http://makeuseof.com/this-is-a-long-url-and-I-want-to-shorten-it.html, you will get something like http://tinyurl.com/2h4kud. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this but, what if, instead of using TinyURL, you can do it on your own server and brand it with your domain name?

Shorty is a simple tool for creating shorter, human- readable links from long URLs. You can install Shorty on your server, so the links are based on your own domain name and it never goes away. You can also manage your links and see how often people click on them.

Advantages of creating a short URL with your domain name

There are several advantages of creating short URL on your own server:

1. Branding your own domain name

When you use services like tinyurl.com, you are promoting tinyurl rather than your own domain. Your readers/visitors/followers have absolutely no idea where the link leads to and which site it ends up with. With your own domain name, you can better brand yourself and at the same time give your readers a clear direction where the link is leading them to.

2. The short URL is your own property and does not go down with the third-party site

When you create short URL’s on your own server, the URL is present as long as your server is running. If you use third party services, when their site is down, your short URL goes down with them. The more URL’s you created with them, the more risk you subject yourself to.

3. Give a meaningful phrase rather than a random string of numbers

If I want to shorten a URL such as http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-ways-to-turn-your-iphone-into-an-external-hard-disk/, which one is more meaningful: http://tinyurl.com1/3×4fphre or http://makeuseof.com/s/iphone-drive?

4. Statistical purpose

Services such as Tinyurl does not come with a tracking code and you are not able to find out how many people clicked that link. When you create it on your own server, you can implement a tracking script to monitor the number of click throughs.

In Shorty, there are three different ways that you can use it to generate short URL’s:

Auto

The tool automatically grabs a word from the long URL and appends it to the end of your domain name. This is useful if you want a quick and easy way to generate a short URL.

Keyword

Using the Keyword option, you can customize your short URL with meaningful keywords or short words that you can identify the link with. For example, you can customize the long URL: http://makeuseof.com/this-is-a-long-url-and-I-want-to-shorten-it-with-shorty.html to http://makeuseof.com/s/shorty.

Random

Random allows you to generate short URL’s the TinyURL way. It will generate a short URL with random alphabets and numbers.

Admin

The Admin page is where you can modify/delete your short URL’s and check how many times your links have been clicked on.

To install Shorty, you need to have Apache, MySQL and PHP installed on your server. As a rule of thumb, if your server can run WordPress or any other PHP-based applications, it is good enough to install Shorty.

In conclusion, if you are constantly using third party sites to generate short URLs, you might as well use Shorty since it is easy to install, use and you are able to market your domain at the same time. However, if you just want to create short URLs (that link to other sites) quickly so you can post in Twitter, then TinyURL (or any other URL shortening sites) might be the one to go for.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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These five free services are some of the best I’ve found.

Mint

Mint is one of the most popular money management tools on the web, and for good reason. Mint automatically syncs all your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and investments, and then gives you detailed charts and reports on where your money is going.

It also allows you to set budgets for yourself, alerting you via email or mobile when you go over your limits.

Karl did a review of Mint here.

Rudder

Rudder is similar to Mint in that it syncs your accounts and keeps your balances updated in a central location. It’s different though, because it not only tells you how much money you have, but it also forecasts how much you can actually spend.

It does this by calculating what you will spend on bills and other regular expenses, and then giving you what’s left over. Rudder also gives you more control over your user experience with a draggable widget interface.

ClearCheckbook

While expense tracking tools like Mint and Rudder are useful for seeing where your money is going, you also should keep track of your money as you spend it. After all, checks sometimes take a couple of business days to clear, as do some credit card transactions. Even up to the minute bank balances can be deceiving if you haven’t factored that in.

ClearCheckbook helps you balance your virtual or real checkbook by keeping track of your account balances as you spend your money. This keeps you from doing something dumb, like overdrawing your account.

SmartyPig

Americans are not known for saving their money, but saving is an important part of wise financial management. SmartyPig makes saving fun and easy – even social. The concept is simple: motivate yourself by setting a savings goal; then, set a deadline for reaching it.

SmartyPig will do the rest, automatically withdrawing payments from your checking account every month. If you have generous friends or a rich uncle, you can share your savings goal. Friends and family can then contribute to help you reach it. Oh, and don’t worry: SmartyPig works with a real, FDIC insured bank, so your money will be safe.

CreditKarma

Have you ever wondered what your credit score looks like, but you aren’t sure how to find out? Try CreditKarma. CreditKarma is a free site that lets you check your credit score easily, and as often as you want.

It tracks the changes to your score graphically, so you can see if your credit is getting better or worse. CreditKarma, like Mint, makes money by offering you deals from credit card companies and other institutions.

So what online apps do you use to track and control your money? One of these four or a totally different one? Let us know in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Despite the diversity of URL shorteners out there, none of them are quite like tr.im. The easiest way to explain tr.im is to walk you through the process of shortening a URL with it. First of all, take any URL you like. For my example I’m going to use the front page of MakeUseOf.

Obviously if you want to send your link to a friend or post it on Twitter, you’re going to need to condense it into a smaller package. Heading over to tr.im will present you with a text box for your URL.

Notice at the bottom there is a check box for whether you want tr.im to compose this link into a Twitter post. This is because tr.im allows you to either make a separate tr.im account or simply use your pre-existing Twitter account. If you choose the latter, you’ll have all the same user benefits of having an account, but tr.im will also send your links on to Twitter, per your preferences. Tr.im also accepts Identi.ca accounts as well.

When you’ve put in your URL, there is a little box available to you for extra options. You can try to select a unique identifier for your tr.im link. For ours I went with “MUO.” Fortunately it was available. Next you can select a privacy code. I couldn’t figure out what that was supposed to be for the life of me, but it completely disabled the first demo I tried to use it with. The instructions fail to come up when clicked, so no help there. Lastly, you can add some search terms to your link, but this is another mystery option.

Finally, when you click the “tr.im!” button, your link will be trimmed according to your selections and from there you can post it wherever. The story doesn’t end there, though. As I mentioned before, the link can then be made into a tweet for Twitter or Identi.ca. There are several sets of preferences that allow you to adjust how that works. Also, you can choose whether the link will go directly to the target address or go to an intermediary page so your friends can be sure it’s not a dangerous link.

The last and most interesting feature of tr.im is the stats tracking for each link. As you can see, each of my tr.im links has been clicked a different number of times and has a date attached to it for easy categorization. It looks like the link that has been clicked the most is http://tr.im/3ii, a link for contributing to the two charities I am trying to raise funds for. I love the ability to track the links you make because largely when you make a link you actually want people to click it (whereas many links are just for reference). Tr.im also includes a handy pie chart to display where the clicks are coming from.

Overall I plan on using tr.im in a limited capacity. All the microblogging tools I use already include link shortening, so that characteristic isn’t lacking in my digital life. The main thing I want from tr.im is the link tracking. Often I put up a link on Twitter and I want to know how many people actually clicked through to see what it was. Not only does this help me structure my teasers on Twitter more effectively the next time, but it is yet another metric to see where my traffic is coming from.

[rating=3]

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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If any of these are true, you may be addicted to freeware. As a fellow sufferer (Hello, my name is Jimmy…), I have a suggestion for you. No, it’s not therapy. It’s a social network for software users. If your computer is going to be full of free software, why not share your experiences?

Wakoopa is a website connected to a small piece of tracking software. After you download Wakoopa Tracker (which sits conveniently in your taskbar), it simply reports the programs you’ve used every fifteen minutes. This data then goes back into the website and creates your profile. Instead of writing out a profile of your interests, or tracking which sites you visit most, Wakoopa essentially describes you by your usage habits.

The most prominent metric in your profile is an animation of all the software you’ve used in icon form. Note that if you use a lot of indie software, the icons may not be in the database and will show up as a generic icon. Below that are your top 10s. The top for the last week, last month, and the most new are fun lists to contrast with one another. You can see how your usage habits have changed over time.

Below that is a pie chart that displays how much of your time you spend with each program:

As you can see from my chart (note: I haven’t used it for a full month yet), I spend the most time using Flock. Beyond that I use Digsby the most, then Thunderbird. While those are fairly obvious metrics, it’s nice to see them laid out quantitatively. I wish they had more chart options, like “max time,” but hopefully the developers will see fit to add those at some point.

From this point you really start to move into the minutia of your usage. There are several tabs on the profile, including a breakdown of active and background programs. You can also pimp your fantastic user stats with badges, signature, and even a Facebook application (which was glitchy when I tried to use it).

Here an example of a badge you can create [see below]. This one in particular is of my most used applications (over all the time recorded by Wakoopa). The badges are fairly primitive and I can’t understand why they don’t offer the animation at the top of the profile as a badge. It’s definitely the most attractive thing on the site.

Once you’ve let the tracker build up some usage stats for you, or while you’re waiting for it to do so, you can explore the rest of the site.

Most Used Software

The software section is a giant database of all the software used by every user under the tracker’s observation. Users can write reviews for their software and the top apps have lots of tracking info to show their rise or fall in popularity. Maybe eventually this will become “the Alexa of software stats.” Most software metrics are based on surveys and downloads, but this tracks actual usage, a much more impressive figure.

Similarly you can explore most popular apps for a given task by category or using tags. That is to say if you go to MP3 section, you will see most popular programs that has to do with MP3s (i.e. media players, music organizers etc.)

Overall, Wakoopa is growing on me. At first I didn’t really get it and figured it would be a waste of time, but it’s nice to be able to visualize all the time one spends on a computer. Also, you can look through and figure out which programs you hardly use anymore. Right now, though, Wakoopa needs to be fleshed out a lot by its developer team. There aren’t very many options, it is a little cluttered (I’m not a huge fan of tag clouds), and the community isn’t really where it needs to be yet. Even so, I’d say Wakoopa is definitely worth a few weeks of running it in the background. The worst you’ll get out of it is a pretty pie chart.

[Rating=2]

If you’ve used this before or start using it, post a link to your profile in the comments. Let us know if any of your top ten surprised you!

(By) Jimmy Rogers is a biology major at George Mason University and an avid freelance tech blogger. Check out his blog, Mason Tech Beat.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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I always speak up against all this privacy obsession, but while I don’t care if someone gets to my personal thoughts, I do care if they get to my money. There is a heated debate about Mint’s safety and policies and even if you don’t mind that part, if you have bank accounts outside the US, Mint won’t work anyway.

Enter ClearCheckbook, stage right, one of the best money management apps I’ve seen in a while that won’t require you to surrender all your personal info. Manage multiple accounts, savings, credit cards, cash, Paypal and so on easily, with overviews, statistics and summaries readily available. Of course the negative side of the app is that you need to do everything manually. You don’t have to share your info, but this means the app doesn’t pull anything from your bank account either. For me this is a huge positive side to things because it gives me much more flexibility. Let me show you a bit more about this extremely helpful application.

Setting up

I needed a simple but effective app to tighten my grip on my expenses and ClearCheckbook impressed me right from the start. With the simple few step process you will set up your accounts in no time, designating an initial sum for each. Since you are not tied to your bank accounts you can create “fictional” accounts for anything you wish. If you like to put $20 in a jar each month you can create an account named “jar” and designate an initial sum. You will be able to add transactions in the same way. While this seems like a weird use of the application it is very life-like, you could even use it to track a loan you gave to someone. To add an initial fund to a credit card account you will need to either withdraw or deposit that amount while all other accounts have an “initial amount” option. There are a few reasons why this is technically more accurate, but I see no reason why it is complicated. Nevertheless, it’s still pretty easy to set up stuff. You can even modify the initial sum at any time if you want to reset your account, or balance it.

Daily use

Of course setting up is all nice and easy, but the real task is to track your daily expenses right? I’ve only been using ClearCheckbook for a week, but since I have been moving I used it heavily. It manages to really help you, and not bog you down with micromanagement. Just click on add an entry, choose account, amount, date, category and name. Adding an item takes about 10 seconds for me, even if I add a new category and spend some time on the transaction name, so you won’t spend minutes and hours pushing sums about.

The Summary screen is also great for daily use, showing a list of recent transactions, which can be filtered by certain categories. You can also view your account balances and the total, a great place to get some at a glance info about how you stand financially.

The summary screen also enables quick editing of items (just click and go, nice inline editing implemented), you can modify every aspect, plus you get the option to jive an entry. Jiving basically means checking that the amount matches your bank statement. Since you aren’t pulling data from your account but editing manually, this is a nice function to have. However if you have a lot of transactions, I doubt you want to spend 3 hours each month to go through all your entries. If you find a discrepancy between your ClearCheckbook and your real account, just add correction transactions for the relevant amount.

Reports

Actually reports are not that important to me, but they are a cool way to visualize your account and see when your earnings are going up or down in general. You can see total spending compared to withdrawals, then by account, you can even take a look at spending by category. My current standing there is Food – 90%, Hygiene – 10%. Is that something I should hide? As you use it more and more these statistics become more and more relevant and useful, if you have 2-3 transactions daily you should have some usable data within a month.

That’s about it for reports, which is enough for me, but what is a real help is the search option which let’s you find any transaction, at any time, for any amount. Searches are quick and productive, you’ll be able to find that “lost” transaction in seconds.

Management Tools

What surprised me are the amount of tools ClearCheckbook offers. CheckBot for example is a way to interact with your account using different platforms, like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, or even your mobile phone, which can be a great asset if you’re on the run.

You can also set up reminders and recurring transactions. For people like me this is a blessing, I am not the best in keeping track of my monthly bills and so on. Now I can just input them and off I go, worry free. Spending limits can provide the same auto-regulators that some people need, and while they don’t actually stop you from spending, they might make you sit down and think about it.

There are some other nice features like importing, a sort of notepad, refreshing accounts and so on, plus some basic features like managing categories and accounts of course.

Is ClearCheckbook right for me?

Well, this is up for you to decide. Give it a go and share your experiences, thoughts, rival products in the comments. For me this is the perfect solution since I can add any account from the cash in my hand to the money in my Paypal account to my allocated Poker funds.

There are no privacy concerns or at least ones that could compromise your real account and although you have to manually add stuff, this can be done pretty quickly and easily. I think I like this much more that other apps out there, but let us know what you think!

(By) Daniel changes his signature lines all the time because although he has a blog about organization, Hack Your Day, he can be a bit all over the place at times. He also has a blog management service called Blogtastique which helps newbie and pro bloggers in anything they need.”

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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