Thursday, August 28, 2008

Web Mashups

Web Mashup :  A web app that combines data from more than one source to be viewed in a single page.

The simple example is http://www.housingmaps.com/
It actually mashes the data from Craigslist - Housing list with the Google Maps. 

Nowadays there are many free Mashup editors like 
Yahoo Pipes
Google Mashup editor
Microsoft Popfly

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Money Manager Tool

Some months ago I was wondering if there is some free tool to create and maintain all our different bank accounts in a single place. Recently when I was going through some website, I came across the Title 'Money Manager'. It increased my curiousity and I read the article. In that they proposed many web sites which provide free web sign-ups to manage all our financial transactions. Out of which I found 'mint.com' as a more useful and sexier one. I created an account and tried using it. It had many useful features to view all the different Financial accounts under single page. Useful and easier Search of transactions. Budget Creations, Useful tips based upon our Usage, Tips that tell how we can save by comparing other Financial Institutions. So I found 'mint.com' as a really useful Money Manager Tool.

Personal Startup Webpages

As we know, Nowadays there are lot of websites which provide Personalized Startup pages. The list increases with iGoogle, My Yahoo, Pageflakes, Netvibes etc. I tried using them and I found Pageflakes as very useful one. The UI looks very sleek. It allows us to select the themes for every tab. We can check multiple email accounts at a single page. We can read multiple emagazines in a single page. We can view multiple RSS feeds in a single page. I used to view the Job Openings in multiple Job sites - Dice, Monster, Careerbuilder in a single page by using their RSS XML configured in Pageflakes.
Another interesting thing about Pageflakes is that it was architected by a young guy Omar Al Zabir. He have also created a sample web site with the same concept - dropthings.com. He have also authored a book on How to create a Web2.0 Portal using ASP.NET 3.5. Nice one to read.