Mint.com ... OR ... Easy peezy lemon squeezy money tracking

Alright friends and neighbors, I've done found a new website ... well it's new to me ... for doing budgeting.

I know I know. Not a fantastically interesting subject and I heartily agree. Doing the budget sucks eggs. But what if you didn't really "do the budget" anymore but rather just watched where the money is spent?

What if rather than balancing numbers and running your personal finances like it's You, Inc you just watched trends, etc? What if you could just set a monthly spending amount and then monitor it online to see how your spending matches up to what you budgeted?

I was looking for something like this. Something simple and fresh with good reporting so I could see where money was going. Something with which I could get detailed if I needed to or if things were percolating along all hunky-dory, I could just watch stuff from ye old 30,000 ft view.

AND I didn't want to pay a lot for this muffler ... remember that old commercial? Or am I just old? Regardless ... and ahem ...

Behold, Mint.com.



This FREE online software does everything we need it to do for tracking our finances. Plus it even has an iPhone app so I can access my budget remotely. Too cool!

See you simply hook this software up to you bank info .. Mint reads your transactions and pulls them into a list. You assign your overall budget and categories.

Done.

Mint starts tracking your finances.

It learns how you spend money and makes very, very good guesses on which category each transaction should be assigned. If it gets it wrong, it's super easy to correct.

Then the cool part starts. You can see where your big expenditures are. Where you can trim some fat from your budget.

Basically, you can quickly see where you blew it and where you done did good :)

And did I mention it's free?

Give this a shot if you're in the market for simplifying your finances. We did and we're not regretting it.

Mint.com gets a long term badge on my site cause it's darn good! I highly recommend it.

WPF? ... OR .. How to neatly print your blog

Impress your friends!

Wow your neighbors!

Fun at parties!!!!

Ok, maybe not fun at parties.  And admittedly this may not impress your friends (unless they are geeky).  Ok honestly your neighbors probably don't even know about your blog - lord knows mine don't.

BUT!

All that aside ... (pushes all that aside ... grunt!)

Let's pretend for a moment you might want to print one of your posts.

Hey could be an ice-breaker with your neighbors right?  Perhaps at some party, a game of "who can print their blog the fastest" might break out.  Never know!  But lord help you if you're at party like that .. you might need to get a life :)

So for whatever the reason, if you have the hankering to print (or save) neat little copies of your blog post .. here is how to get er done.

PrintFriendly Blog posts

Try it out from right here at Horton Hollow to see if you like it .. before you screw up your blog template before you try it out and it works really really well for your non-geeky self..  The link is right below each of my blog posts.

Cause hey, I'm fun at parties.  :)

Last talk about the new look ... OR .. How did you do that thing you done did?

Before I start I'd like to thank Blogger personally for losing this entire post from last night.  Good on ya Blogger! I just love retyping an entire post from memory after my brain has already flushed.  Sheesh.

So moving on.

As I mentioned the other day, my blog has underwent a little makeover.  I love to do layout and design for user interfaces.  It's kind of a big part of what I do as a computer programmer in my day-to-day job.  So I had to take a shot at blog design.  The idea had been rattling around in me noggin for a long time, I had scrawled ideas on bits of paper, listed ideas on Google docs, written in my notebook, etc

Then I found this little number for doing mockups of software.  It's called Balsamiq Mockups.  It allowed me t to get those ideas from paper into something more usable.  A mockup.

If you're interested in a little review of Balsamiq Mockups and how it helped me with my site design, read on true believers ...

After the easy-peezy download and install process I dove right in.  The software came up very quickly and I was off and running.  I'm more of a tinkerer than a "follow the steps kinda guy" when it comes to stuff like this so I just played with the sofware until I figured it out.

It didn't take long.

After very little noodling on my part, I was able to come up with the mockup you see below in way less than an hour of tinkering.

This was really easy.  I just took different parts from their easy to use library and dropped them onto design area.

Mockups even let me use my own graphics and insert them right into the design.  Then as a bonus it even let me squigglify them so they match the "penciled look" it has built in.  Very cool.

Balsamiq if you're reading this, the term "squigglify" is all mine.  I want royalties if you use that one :)  haha


The user-interface for Mockups is very well done.  You simply point and click, dragging and dropping everything into place.

It's like you have a way to take your mental jig-saw puzzle and just put it right down on the screen, no issues.

I found Mockups very powerful yet simple to use.  Since the symbols of each part are so easy to identify it really felt like I was using building blocks to make my site design.  And that was important to me for one big reason.

The tool I was using to create with didn't get in the way of my creativity.

Nuff said?

If you've ever scrawled on paper, or God help you, used Visio to layout a site ... give those up right now and try this.  Why?  It's simple.

Mockups is better than paper.  Changes are way easier to make than on paper.  I mean you're pulling parts from a big parts bin, essentially just snapping the pieces together.

Also Mockups is MUCH simpler but still MORE powerful than tools like Visio.  And yes even Visual Studio doesn't compare to this tool.  I've designed quite a few interfaces in VS and the biggest risk you run there is that most folks end up using their "mockup" and turning it into an application.  Those apps usually turn out pretty bad too for usability when that happens.

Plus VS is big, slow and expensive.  Mockups is powerful, agile, and easy on the pocket book.

Lastly, with Mockups you can separate the design process easily.  You can make your designs, and if you're in the corporate world, you can even use the software's presentation mode to show your clients your design.  Very slick.

I highly recommend this to everybody who is doing design work.  If you're a blogger, designer, or programmer ... or like me, you're all three .. you need to get this tool in your game.  Check out some examples of what others have done with Mockups.

This made design fun for me again.  And that's what it's all about.

The New Look .. OR .. Better Looking Through Digital Plastic Surgery

Well if you've been coming here for any length of time you may notice the old hollow is looking different as of today.  Being the clever little geek I am, I tried my hand at blog design.  I've been cooking up this new look for the blog for some time. 

I hope you all enjoy the new digs.  Feel free to comment if there are changes you'd like to see.  You come here to read - I'd like you to be comfy while you do that.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Could You Explain Programming Please - The Daily WTF

Could You Explain Programming Please - The Daily WTF

Posted using ShareThis

Working: Its not me, it's them

Is it so so bad of me that I have a countdown timer on my computer's desktop, ticking away the seconds until "freedom" sets in?

I don't think so.

Well of course *I* think so right? I mean, I readily admit to normally agreeing with myself. I do try so desperately hard to keep disagreements with myself to private moments and mumblings lest the well-intentioned mistake my obvious brilliance for lunacy and spirit me away to some place to "help" me.

Lord knows I don't need *another* jacket that fastens up the back. But man oh man are those suckers warm! I mean a jacket that forces you to hug yourself? Getoutta here! What a good idea! And talk about building self confidence! "I like me, I reeeeeeally like me!" .. it's my favorite thing to say as they fasten the top buckles at the base of my neck right between the shoulders.

Wait. What were we talking about? Oh yes, timers!

Well I have one on my desktop at work constantly reminding me, and hopefully my boss, that I have a life outside of here - and although I enjoy helping folks here with their computer problems - it's not near as fun as being home or with friends outside of work. Well I can think of many things more fun than work but let's not slip back into digression-land where comfy-jackets abound.

So ... I recommend this little timer to you. Its kinda fun. Here is a screenshot. Enjoy :)