Freshbooks
June 14, 2006 in 5 out of 5 stars, Hosted software, InvoicingFreshbooks: Billing/Invoicing/Timetracking service/software. The good folks at 2ndSite Inc. Freshbooks has a clean, quick interface and all the features needed for a small business/freelancer without the bloat of many accounting packages. It is like having a billing department watching your back, invoicing your clients via email who can then view and pay online. The tool hooks up with major payment gateways for credit card payment.
The tool also allows you to brand (colors/logos) the payment site your customers will use so customers have a seamless experience when logging in from your site. Coming soon is the ability to send invoices via snail mail right from the interface for a small fee. No more printer jams and paper cuts. Excellent. I have been using the tool for about 4 months now and have yet to find a gotcha or missing feature. Would love to hear others impressions. Free for 3 clients -- up to $39/mo for 1000. Reviewed by Gregg TurnbullWhat is it?
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Joe's Goals
June 13, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, Hosted software, ProductivityJoe's Goals: A simple application that lets you track your daily life and work goals with just a click of the mouse. It tracks goals with a checkbox and vices with an X. A row at the bottom tallies your daily score so you can visually see if you are having a good day or a bad day. Ian Smith It is stupidly simple. A little popup form lets you add your first goal as soon as you signup. Goals get added down the left hand side while days of the week are shown along the top. Click a corresponding box to "check" a goal complete. You can even add multiple checks for those days when you are extra productive. There is no refresh when you click so check those goals all day long.
The bottom row shows your positive goals minus your negative goals for the day and gives you a score.
A share function lets you share your goals with friends. This works great if you have an accountability partner or just want some friendly encouragement. It doesn't work with long term objectives. There isn't any way to add notes or comments to goals. It might also be nice to be able to track time spent on each goal. Free for the taking Reviewed by Jennifer MurrowWhat is it?
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Happy Quote
June 12, 2006 in Happy Quotes“We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing.
Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates
action.”
– Frank Tibolt
SiteKreator
June 8, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, CMS, Hosted softwareSiteKreator: SiteKreator helps businesses create a web site. It is fully-hosted. SiteKreator has several features, such as blogs, web forms, discussion forums, and mailing lists. Web site information can be tiered through multiple content layers by adding members-only areas and registration forms. Ivaylo Lenkov SiteKreator helps smaller shops gets a professional website for a modest expense (about the price of typical web hosting). Limited templates may turn some off. The pricing model isn't clear without some digging. From free to $95+ per year.What is it?
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PBwiki
May 26, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, Hosted softwarePBwiki: It is a wiki farm which allows anyone to create a wiki website for free. Wiki technology lets you create web pages within your browser, with simple text formatting and easy linking to your web pages. The technology was invented by Ward Cunningham, a software engineer / guru. Coceve, Inc. PBwiki is fast. You can create a new, free wiki in seconds. All you need is an email address, so they can send you a password. PBwiki servers are very responsive; your pages update immediately. PBwiki gives you the features you need and then stays out of your way. You can make your wiki private, if you want. If you know HTML, you can use that too. PBwiki needs to provide backlinks. This is a wiki feature that tells you what web pages link to the current page. The tutorial could also be beefed up. Basic is free; Premium features are $5/month Reviewed by Dave Raftery Editor's note: PBWiki is the wiki tool I'm personally most excited about. Wiki products I've seen so far are unimpressively difficult to use and understand for most people. PBWiki is actually making brilliant strides in this area through their obvious and simple interface and intelligent help and support. What is it?
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TimeTracker Firefox Extension
May 23, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, Free, ProductivityTimeTracker Firefox Extension
TimeTracker Firefox Extension: A FireFox extension that tracks how much time you spend browsing per day. Juan Casares This was profiled on Lifehacker a few weeks back and I installed it. It has since had a dramatic impact on my productivity. The simple act of measuring how much time I'm wasting browsing around has been eye-opening and enlightening (and depressing). I'm now in competition with my buddy to see how little time we can rack up on our clocks per day. While this has caused some creative time wasting workarounds, it has also really helped me stay focused. I even find myself trying to be more efficient in how I browse the web (reading bloglines at light speed for example). Three weeks later and I still love it. I spend a great deal of time on the web for work related items (being a web dude and all) and fortunately this plugin allows you to filter out certain sites so that visiting them doesn't run the clock. You can also pause the clock by clicking on it to ensure that browsing at 6am before your run doesn't count against your productivity. A manual clock reset might be nice. It resets every night at midnight however and for my use that's fine. FREE like Sunday afternoon garage sale furniture Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Happy Quote
May 16, 2006 in Happy Quotes“Far better it is to dare mighty things to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered with failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that know not victory or defeat.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
(thx Garrett)
TracksLife
May 12, 2006 in 2 out of 5 stars, Hosted software, ProductivityTracksLife: A spiffy, simple very, very lightweight cross between a spreadsheet and a database designed to help you track stuff. You can keep track of almost anything with Tracks - spreadsheets/databases that combine columns of money, numbers, words, paragraphs and yes/no's. If you ever forget to update - and you will - you can have the Friendly Trackslife Remindbot send a link through email or RSS politely reminding you. And - if you want - you can share your progress with friends, family, coworkers, bloggers - whoever! I'm not sure this service is worth paying for. It's well made, and fun, but the free version might just be enough. Adam (the owner) has recently taken steady employment with JotSpot, so although I can't imagine needing much of it, support might have a few kinks to work out. 4 Account levels -- Free to $10.99 Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Bare Naked App by Carson Workshops
May 10, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, A blogBare Naked App by Carson Workshops: A simple blog where they document the building of their next web app. The Carson Workshop Clan By documenting some of the little steps, including estimating timelines and costs, picking freelancers, branding, naming, and legal decisions, they're freely giving visitors the benefit of their experience (which they gained building DropSend). Entrepreneurs, particularly those building a web app, will instantly relate with the information here. It's so common to find yourself wishing you had a yardstick to measure your own decisions against. Bare Naked App is a nice yardstick. Make sure you start at the beginning. I just read every word. This is good stuff. Kudos to the team at Carson Workshops. Even more detail, but they've got a web app to build! So I suspect we'll have some good post mortem information like they provided with DropSend. For some unfortunate reason you won't pick up all the posts if you only look through the archives by date. Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Harvest
May 8, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, Hosted software, ProductivityHarvest: Online time tracking and reporting application. Iridesco, Inc. I've been looking for something like Harvest for years. As a freelancer I keep track of my time religiously, but the available tools are either bloated desktop-based uber-business apps or worthlessly oversimplified calculators. I didn't want something that just let me record my time - any piece of paper could do that. I wanted something that would actually calculate my time for me. I just wanted to clock in and clock out and let the computer do the calculations. Harvest does all this and much more with a fun and intuitive interface. I can set up multiple projects and tasks and use it for billing clients. I love the multi-user feature which allows me to have employees and subcontractors keep track of their own hours and submit them to me for approval. I can even send reminders when they forget. The reporting section is perfect for invoice time. I can see at a glance how many hours each person worked on a particular project or task. The application is designed well and the AJAX is handled beautifully throughout the application. It's actually fun to track your time! I've kissed my desktop applications goodbye. Hello Harvest! Harvest is very young. The developers are hard at work on feature additions, but there is definitely still room for improvement. I've submitted my feature requests and gotten the impression that they actually want to hear from their customers and are actively working to make the application what their users want it to be. $5-60/month + free account Reviewed by Timothy GrayWhat is it?
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