Farecast.com

Farecast.com is a fairly popular site that many of you might already know.It is an excellent resource to check before purchasing an airline ticket and get a buy now or wait suggestion.

Farecast analyses past historical data and provide recommendations on if the flight ticket price you are interested in is supposed to stay the same or rise or drop (even by how much). This can be handy when you are unsure if a good deal might come along after you bought the ticket.

Farecast also shows how high low the current price is to the previous average. As you can see, my flight to Vegas right now is $64 less than the average and it is predicted to rise.

Also, you can get an idea on when to travel to a place if your dates are flexible. Or you can find out where to travel on particular dates based on flight ticket prices.

Farecast has a beta version of Hotel room prices too. I haven’t tried this yet but it’ll be interesting to see how this will work for hotels.

PriceAmbush.com

PriceAmbush.com is a shopping service that tracks product prices and emails if the price product drops. If you think, the price of iPod Touch is high right now, go to PriceAmbush and search for it. Then just click on ‘Add Alert’ to enter your email address and target price.

Also, check out the cloud tag to see the top products being searched by folks. Here is a sample how a search for Canon Rebel XTi looks like.

What are you waiting for? If you already know what you are going to get your wife this Christmas, jump to PriceAmbush and set up an alert to watch for price drops.

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Just what I was looking for to track my car mileage! I drive a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse with over 100,000 miles on it. It is running well and I try to guess its mileage with every fill up by setting up my trip meter with every fill up and making a mental note of the number of gallons I put in.

The problem with that is: I kind of know what the mileage is but I don’t know for sure. I could have kept track of it in a spreadsheet but that wouldn’t be cool would it. With my love for web applications, Mymilemarker is just what I needed.

Quick Facts

Mymilemarker is a simple web application and it offers

• Quick and easy signup
• Name your car or cars if you have multiple
• Enter date, odometer reading, the number of gallons you filled and price per gallon.
• It gives you a nice projection of miles that you will drive in a year, projected costs and average mpg based on your history.
• You can change the forecast time from the default one year to whatever you want, say, like 6 months.
• You can add every fill up using your Twitter account.
• You need to fill-in data about atleast 3 fill ups before it will start spewing numbers and projection graphs at you.

I like the simple approach taken by Mymilemarker. It just tracks my mileage data as well as my driving habits. Looking at projections out for a year could be very helpful for someone like me driving a car with over 100,000 miles on it. I have to plan for a replacement sooner or later. I think this little web application is going to come in handy for me.

Do you attempt to track your mileage? Do you know how much you will be spending on just gas alone in the year to come? You might be in for a surprise and I am hoping this will make me change my driving habits for the better. I will post an update after 2 more fill ups on the promising usefulness of this service.

[via SolutionWatch]

I talk a lot about Wesabe here and you can find my earlier posts in ‘Related Posts’ or just search for Wesabe. For those of you new to Wesabe, it is an excellent online money management application with social features built into it.

Wesabe Firefox Uploader

Wesabe’s desktop uploader worked great for a couple of my accounts and I had to manually upload a couple. I loved Wesabe’s features that I didn’t mind that hassle but I would find myself not uploading every week as I intend to. Now with Wesabe’s Firefox Uploader, I wouldn’t have that excuse to not take care of it every day or two and track where I am spending too much. Here are a few quick facts about the new uploader.

Quick Facts

• Recognizes a lot of accounts automatically and logs you in.
• For the ones that can’t auto login, the uploader can record your login session and detects the download and can redo it for you anytime in a single click!
• You get a ‘W’ button in the Firefox location bar and you can easily add accounts and upload to accounts right from there.
• It is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• As it is a Firefox extension, updates will easy to apply.

Here is a screencast of how to set up accounts with the Wesabe Firefox Uploader:

[youtube w7av7jUoCfU]

Links

• Download it!
• Wesabe Home

Need an API to your bank, credit card data? Wesabe provides it even if it is indirect.

Who/What is Wesabe?

Wesabe is money management in a true web 2.0 sense. You have a secure place to manage your money online with great tools like tagging transactions, charts, etc. Plus, you get the benefit of the collective tips and discussions from the community of Wesabe users around it.

Let’s say you shop at Meijer’s in a Michigan store. So are other Wesabe users and if they have posted tips for saving money in Meijers, Wesabe will show you those tips. It is more localized, more useful and more targeted. That’s just a gist of it.

In Wesabe’s own words:

We want to take the idea of a credit bureau (where businesses report their experiences with consumers so that other businesses can benefit) and turn it on its head — building instead a value bureau, where consumers can share their experiences with businesses, so all consumers can benefit.

Wesabe has so far provided tools to upload your financial data from bank, credit cards, etc. to manage, analyze, budget your finance online. Now, with the new API to the data online, you indirectly have an API to all your bank, credit card & financial data.

Why would I need an API?

• You might be a hardcore Excel user and are not satisfied with the reports/charts available with Wesabe. Now, you can download your data and do whatever it is that you do with Excel.
• Love another application? Just use Wesabe as a filter to get to your financial data in a manageable form. And Wesabe doesn’t mind it. In fact, they encourage it by releasing this API.

Links:

If you’d like, check out the related posts below for my other Wesabe posts.

Take a tour

API documentation

[via Wesabe blog]

Welcome to ShanKri-la’s Reference page.

This will be an evolving list of links to websites, services, tutorials, tips, guides, manuals, resources that I use or find useful. It does not contain referral links and if I add it in the future, it will say so.

Consider this to be my ultra-filtered, no BS, premium bookmarks.

Updated: Oct 06 2007

Browsing | Getting Things Done | Finance |Firefox | Photo | Telephony | Webmaster | WordPress

Browsing

• PopURLs - One page for all major headlines, pics and videos. An excellent time sink.
• StumbleUpon - A wonderful place to discover new sites of interest.
• Sputtr - Search multiple sites from here.

Getting Things Done

• Remember the Milk - Great online task management application.
• d-cubed - A GTD web application based on TiddlyWiki concept.
• TiddlySpot - A hosted place for a variety of TiddlyWiki’s like d-cubed, MonkeyGTD, etc.

Firefox

• Top Firefox Extensions - A categorized list of top Firefox extensions compiled by truly yours.

Finance

• Wesabe - Online web 2.0 money management.
• Mint - Another excellent online web 2.0 money management application.

Photo

• Flickr - sharing and storage
• PhotoBucket - sharing and storage
• iStockPhoto, Yotofoto, Stock.Xchng - if you are looking for royalty free images for blogging

Telephony

• Free 411 - Google’s free 411 service. Get text message with directions to your mobile.
• GrandCentral - One number for life (recently acquired by Google)
• Jajah - Dial-around service. 3 cent international calls.

Webmaster

• Google Analytics homepage - Get snazzy reports and graphs of your website traffic.
• Google Webmaster Guidelines - Guidelines for a webmaster from the big G.
• Google Webmaster Tools homepage - Submit your sitemap, robots.txt and view your site indexing stats, etc.
• MyIPNeighbors - If you are shared hosting, view your ip neighbors.
• Collection of robots.txt files - From Daily Blog tips. Good starting point.
• Text Link Checker - Check your site for links to nad neighborhoods.
• Website Grader - A quick tool to analyze your website.
• Xinu - Look at a wide variety of stats in one cool interface. (Xinu project)

WordPress

• Adding a Sitemap to your Blog - by Garry Conn
• Global Variables and the WordPress Loop - For Wordpress hacks
• Separating Comments & Trackbacks - WordPress Hack

 I use Wesabe to track my personal finances and I have written about it before. It is definitely well worth a look if you are looking for a way to manage your personal finances online but securely.

What was a great product just got even better with these new features:

Cash Accounts

Previously, Wesabe just showed cash withdrawals and I would tag that as cash expense but was not able to track my coffee purchases or the occasional snack at the gas station. Now, they have introduced Cash Accounts and I can keep track of all my cash purchases if I wanted to. As Marc explains, Wesabe does not show running balances but lets me optionally track expenses that I want so I can make better spending choices.

Better graphing ability

I am a visual person. I can understand and assimilate a lot of information easily if they are presented visually and I love the new update Wesabe has done with their graphing. Here are a gist of the new features but you can get a full review at the  Wheaties for your Wallet blog.

• Scroll through your spending over time
• Change the time scale of the graph
• Add up your spending by year, quarter, month, week, or day, for any tag
• Compare your spending by tag
• Drill down into the bars
• Build a consolidated spending graph

Web 2.0 is all about community and Wesabe has applied to personal finances. As the community around Wesabe grows by the day, the web applications value is going to shift from the software to the community around it providing the collective wisdom to anyone who goes looking for it.

And this is all for FREE! What do you use for managing your personal finances?

Consumerist thinks so. And I trust their reasons. Here is the short article with links to some bad apples. As they suggest, try to use someone with a few good references.
I used the free offering from TaxACT this year and already used up the tax returns towards the closing costs for our home!

Remember that this year’s Federal tax-filing deadline is Tuesday April 17.