organize

Best Money Tips: Organize and Simplify Your Bills

Ashley Jacobs — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:00:09 +0000

Welcome to Wise Bread's Best Money Tips Roundup! Today we found some awesome articles on organizing and simplifying your bills, unexpected expenses to keep in mind, and making a restaurant menu work in your favor.

6 Easy Ways to Spring Clean Your PC

Linsey Knerl — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:06:31 +0000

With all the hustle and bustle of the new season, it may be easy to forget about one important item in your home that could really benefit from a good spring cleaning — your PC! Before you go another day with clutter or dirt dragging your performance down, check out two of the six tips we shared at My LifeScoop to help you clean up your act!

Clean That Screen

Don't wait until a stranger at the airport asks about the menacing blob on your laptop screen before you do something about it. Take time weekly to shine it up the right way: Mix ½ part distilled water and ½ part white vinegar for an affordable alternative to the store-bought stuff. Spray a clean rag (old T-shirts work well) lightly with the solution. With your PC turned off and disconnected from an outlet, gently buff the screen until all the gunk is gone. (Note: Plasmas may have special considerations to prevent voiding the manufacturer's warranty. Consult the manual for the details.)

Trim the Temporary

Every time you visit a website, your browser may be holding on to various files and data paths that you'll probably never need again — and each of these can take up valuable space on your computer. If you cruise the web often (more than an hour or so a day), get into the habit of clearing all temp files, cookies, and cached pages at least once a week. Each browser will have slightly different methods for getting the job done, but most likely you'll find a "Tools" drop down from your browser command bar that can get you headed in the right direction. (Google searches for the name of your browser and either "Delete Files," "Delete Cookies" or "Clear Private Data" should get you adequate info to do the job right.)

Looking to finish the job? We have all the tips in one place (including a nifty how-to video), over at the full My LifeScoop article.

This article is from Linsey Knerl of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Woo-hoo for Wufoo!

Amy B. Scher — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:29:11 +0000

How many guys does it take to make the hassles of technology A LOT easier? Apparently only three really innovative ones.

I recently felt the pressure by both peers and professionals to “get a website.” Well, as I discovered, it’s not that easy to just “get one.” Not to mention that if you are going to have it, it might as well be useful. A simple homepage just sitting around isn’t enough these days.

Website marketing gurus will all agree that if you’re not collecting information from visitors, your website is wasting away in cyberspace. So, after researching what seemed like a dozen options, I built my site in iWeb on my Mac. As a side note: some other options that seemed efficient and stylish were Homestead, Yahoo Site Builder and Website Tonight (by Go Daddy).

After much tedious tinkering, I got my website and blog up and running. However, iWeb doesn’t have a way to collect information. Enter Wufoo (www.wufoo.com)! This program is free for the most basic version, and it’s awesome. But if you want to upgrade, it's more than reasonable! Wufoo lets you easily (gotta love the drag and drop interface) create totally attractive and useful forms, surveys, registration forms for workshops or meetings, invitations and more to put on your website, or just use for personal stuff.

You can customize them to fit the look and feel of your website. Not only that, but the back-end user panel is like a little worker bee in itself. You can organize the information, e-mail people you wan to fill out your forms, run reports and the list goes on. Stored information can be exported it into an Excel or other file to put all that good stuff to work. If you don’t want to bother, it’s no problem. Your form-building friends at Wufoo have it covered. They can e-mail you the entries or you can subscribe to them as an RSS feed.

A newer feature allows you to take orders if you sell a product or service because they’ve integrated with Paypal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net.

It didn’t occur to me until I was using it for my site, but this form building and organizing program is just as helpful for personal data too. Create a form to track your daily diet log, manage your to do lists, house inventory, etc. The possibilities are pretty much endless. Check out some of their examples at: http://wufoo.com/examples/.

Ok, by now you can clearly see I’m pimping this product. I should state here and now, although it may seem like it, I don’t work for them and have no affiliation. But, I would if they wanted to add a chick to their brainy trio.

You’re gonna have to see this one for yourself to believe it Wise Bread smarties. Go ahead. I dare you. Make one form and see if you can stop.

You can check out the examples on my website at: www.amybscher.com.
I made a form on the contact page so no one would have my e-mail address. And, on my blog, I linked a form to a button that allows you to subscribe via e-mail to my blog.

This article is from Amy B. Scher of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: