Stuart Conover

IndyBudget – Budget, plan, forecast, organize and analyze your personal finances to achieve your goals.

IndyBudget is a great app on how to plan out your budget in a way that lets you plan for your expenses on what you will need to spend compared to what you are earning. If you are trying to worry about your personal finances this is probably the best free applicaion you can find.

Looking to schedule your banking, retirement, and debt accounts? IndyBudget has you covered! All of this is done through an easy to use expense sheet that factors in your various income and expenses.

Free Features of IndyBudget

Any good online service these days tries to lull you in with a fully functional product that is free to use and once your hooked and want to buy those other features lull you in with a cheap upgrade. Smart marketing plan and for this app, if you have a use for it, is a GREAT deal!
Secure & Safe- industry-standard encryption and data protection
Anonymous & Private- no names, account numbers, PINs, phone numbers or addresses
No Ads, No Third Parties- no sharing/selling your data with/to third-parties
Internationalization- customizable regional settings, currencies
Budget Plan Wizard- get started in a few simple steps
Bank, Retirement & Debt Accounts- unlimited accounts
Recurring Actions & One-Timers- avoid repetition, schedule recurring actions; schedule one-timers ahead of time, or afterwards
Tags- categorize your spending with the flexibility of tags
Quick Expense Sheet- quickly add one or more recent or upcoming one-time expenses
Upcoming Activity- view 45 days of upcoming scheduled activity and estimated account balances
Email Reminders- get weekly reminders of upcoming activity
Goals- keep yourself motivated and focused
Cancel Account- we’d hate to see you go, but we’ll permanently remove your data from our system

Pay Features of IndyBudget

While the core services above are free there is a pay version of this service that offers a few more features that may prove beneficial. At $4.99 a year (yes that’s year not month so it shouldn’t be blowing your budget) you get:
Asset Management- track real estate, vehicles and other property
Budget Plan Overview- analyze scheduled income and expenses
Monthly Statements- analyze actual income and expenses
Net Worth Outlook- net worth projected for the next 12 months
Tag Manager & Report- rename and delete tags; search for untagged activity; spending-by-tag report

Interested? Check out IndyBudget today!

GRAZEit – Helps You Find What You Didn’t Know You Were Looking For

GRAZEit is a plugin for your web browser whose purpose is to allow you to share anything you find online with both friends and connections. The plugin itself will display relevant content to what you are currently looking at while browsing websites and comes from both friends and fellow bloggers you choose to associate with in this service. You also have the ability to have incoming content from anyone in the GRAZEit community.

A plus on this feature is that you are able to add your own content to the service in order to help spread information to relevant pages, easily allowing more people looking at one topic to find more information on it. It’s a great resource both to find more information on a topic you are currently looking into as well as share your own information or sites that you have found with others.

A video demonstration of the service after the jump: (more…)

Tweak Today – A Daily Mission

Tweak Today has a goal of giving it’s users a mission everyday. It can involve various forms of media and interacting with others to acomplish and is quite an interesting project. The purpose of the site is to allow for interaction with others, re-examine some of the things that you take for granted in your daily life, increase creativity, and finally to try new things.

Each day a new mission is posted that you can participate in that is voted on by the community in advance. You are able to suggest as many missions as you want on a daily basis and that alone can spawn new ideas. There is always one mission each day though you are able to freely explore the archives if you want more things to do or get a few new creative ideas. If you are someone stuck in a rut or looking for new and creative ways to express yourself this is a great place to check out. Some of the ideas on their own are something that would just be fun to do if you have a creative side.

Past Tweak Today Missions

- Take a picture of a scar and tell it’s story.
- Do a google image-search on your name and post the most interesting result.
- Take a picture of yourself holding a picture (or postcard) in front of the actual location.

Twerbose – When 140 Characters Just Aren’t Enough

Twerbose just has a great name, merging the ideas of the 140 character limit with users of the service who are a bit ‘verbose.” If you are one of the many people who run into a problem with the 140 character limit and need just a bit more this could be the service for you. Once upon a time we could rely on IMs, e-mail, etc in order to converse back and forth with people but I’ll be honest I’ve met quite a few people who I do not know or speak with outside of Twitter. Constantly I’ve had to rephrase or send multiple tweets to get an idea to someone. Twerbose is the solution to having this problem.

Basically it will display the start of your over sized message with the equivalent of a “more” link at the end that will take you to the user’s Twerbose account that shows the full message in question. On the full message you are able to respond, comment, etc. Some people really don’t seem to get it though as a few of the examples looked like blog posts! If you feel inconvenienced by the 140 character limit Twerbose is a great tool to get around it. Actually thinking of it for the blog posts. I’ll have to re-browse the Twitter wordpress plugins out there- having an option to display your recent tweets in this format would be a plus.

Are You A Freelancer That Uses Twitter?

Tweetlancers is a free resource to allow both businesses and individuals post jobs they need to Twitter at a targeted audience or on the flip side if you are a service provider looking for work you can use the same service to find potential clients.

It’s a simple service to sign up on that will:
As a client – Allow you to easily contact providers who can help fill the work which you need to finish.
As a service provider – Show any incoming tweets that are targeting freelancers with open jobs.

By signing up on this site when you take a look at one of these tweets you will see the contact information of the client or provider you wish to work with. It’s another source to get freelance work done or find freelance jobs depending on which you are looking for. Freelancing is obviously a huge business on the Internet and new ways to find work or workers is always a boon to everyone involved. If you are a, or work with, freelancers you may want to try Tweetlancers.

Task Mate – Easy Project Management Online

Task Mate is a simple, yet effective online tool to keep track of your tasks. Not only are you able to use this tool to keep your personal tasks organized but also those that you work on with others.

You are able to both control and monitor your tasks. You are able to have the application focus on single tasks or view them all at the same time in order to make sure your progression is working at the pace that you want it to be.

Task Mate Features

- Easily create, manage and assign tasks.
- Track estimated time against actual time taken.
- Personal dashboard communicates the status of your projects.
- Simple drag and drop interface for managing tasks.
- Hosted on our secure, backed up and reliable web servers.
- Quick to set up.

Task Mate Pricing

The only downside to this application is that anything past the base option isn’t free. The free version does allow for 5 projects to be running at a time however offers no file sharing space for collaborative projects. Each tier above that allows for more space and open projects up to the “Platinum” level which is unlimited projects and 50GB. However if that isn’t an issue than this is an easy to use and effective project management solution online- Task Mate should be one of the first options you take a look at.

Name Bee – Your Domain Name News Portal

Name Bee is a news blog aggregator that focuses on blogs whose pure focus is domain names. Name Bee focuses on the more popular domain bloggers keeping you up to date with the latest news, articles, and tips for anything domain related. While there are many news aggregators out there, or as an alternative a regular RSS feed, Name Bee strives to make their site personalized for you.

So personalization being the key let’s focus on what the site allows you to do. Once you are logged in you are able to not only block the standard feeds listed but add your own personal ones as well. Not sold yet? How about adding in a personalized history to keep track of what you have and haven’t read so if you visit it often youll be able to easily see where you last left off. One of the best parts though is being able to “save” articles, or bookmark them, so it’s easy to come back to them at any time.

Being able to customize your news page is a huge plus and with the AJAX technology they use it both loads quick and is easy for the site to make a custom experience based around what you want. Name Bee is developing into a great central source for finding domain name news without having to follow blogs individually.

This Week’s Top 5 Blog Posts

1. Top 10 Myths About Freelancers by: Adrian Try on Freelance Switch.
While my income obviously does not come from freelancing full time, it is helped by it. So when I saw the post title being linked around Twitter I figured that I would give it a quick read and it’s amazing how right on the money this article is. Some of those on the top 10 I actually believed before I started doing side work freelance and it really is easy to see how these myths can be viewed as the truth until your actually doing it yourself.

2. The Secret of Work-at-Home Businesses by: David Atya Shakir on Successful and Outstanding Bloggers.
This is a post that many people who are looking to start an online, or even just home, business should read, however probably won’t. If they do I can see many also not listening to the advice within either even though it is exactly what needs to be done when your trying to get started.

3. Blog or News Site by: Jeremy Schoemaker on ShoeMoney.
This is a post that I actually enjoyed reading as it reminded me on how badly I’ve slipped into leaning towards that writing style on the majority of my posts. I was tempted to stick this as #1 today though I felt the Freelancing topic was a bit more useful. Still it’s easy to fall into writing news styled posts just because they are easy to make blurbs on and that’s what I do on most of my sites. It shouldn’t be the majority of my posts here though and I’m going to have to keep that in mind.

4. Timing Is Everything In Affiliate Marketing by: Yaro Starak on Entrepreneurs Journey.
Unless you feel like being sold on something I want you to stop reading this article after the 3 points for “Why You Need To Act Fast As An Affiliate.” The article ends there and the sales pitch begins. The quick writeup though is extremely useful if you are new to Affiliate Marketing or have been doing it for awhile and making limited profits in letting you know the truth- if you are going to be doing affiliate marketing you need to get in when something is NEW. It’s a good read with a demonstration on exactly why this is true. I’ve seen so many people want to jump into affiliate marketing and don’t get that. It’s rare to have a product to sell in this area that you can sell for years. (I don’t claim to make my living off of affiliate marketing but I make no secret it’s a nice side income.)

Now for the sales pitch, don’t get me wrong- I hear nothing but good things about Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Program. In fact if I didn’t have my hands in too many things already right now I would consider taking it as I believe from everything I’ve read it’s a good course to learn from. I just don’t want anyone to think I’m directing them to a sales pitch in the Friday 5.

5. 5 Funny Things Bloggers Do To Make Their Blog Look More “Official” by:Alex Fraiser on Blogussion.
Alex put together a list of a ‘few’ things that are done by bloggers to make themselves or their blogs look more official. The great thing is that this usually happens on smaller sites trying to help make a name for themselves. I know I’ve been guilty on the first of these complaints on a couple of my niche blogs in the past. It’s a good read though and semi-entertaining at the same time if you think of a few times you’ve seen this happen in the past.

TweetBots – Helping To Make Twitter Users Lazy Since 2009

TweetBots while having some of the standard features of Twitter services has a good combination of them and also an interesting way to allow multiple users use a single account without having to give away the login for that account.

There Are Currently 3 Main Features To TweetBots

- The first of these 3 is the selling point (assuming this wasn’t free) of the service. It has a unique way that will allow you to have multiple people send messages from an account via a bot that has allows accounts enabled. You create your bot account and setup other Twitter users to have access to it. Once this access is enabled any direct message which they send to this account will allow the bot to post a Tweet to post to the account. It’s a great way to allow multiple users to post on a Twitter account without allowing them all to have the login credentials to it.

- The second feature is a pretty standard feature that has been popping up on Twitter services as of late. It is one that lets you set your account to automatically follow anyone that follows you. It’s great for follow-action but does make you have to worry about people who are just looking for others to have more followers as well. If you want to expand your audience it’s a good way to thank those who follow you, though not a feature I’ve ever been that large of a fan of.

- Finally the service allows you to tweet your RSS feeds to your Twitter account. Does this feature sound familiar? I spoke of a similar service just two days ago called FeedNest.

If your looking to have any or a combination of these services, TweetBots is a great web service that allows you to do so.