It's a good idea to look after your day-to-day finances and make sure that you have enough money to pay for your bills and look after your costs. It's too easy to pay for something you can't afford and be in a situation where you run out of money at the end of the month. Thus we turn to budgeting, where we make sure we make sure that we can pay for the items we want and make sure we don't get in to debt. However, when you need to save for something long-term, then we need another solution, so we can plan for the future.

PocketSmith is an online service that enables you to setup long-term forecasts for the future so you can make sure you put away enough cash for a project such as a replacement car or similar. Quite honestly, the website is superbly designed and looks like a professional Mac application, rather than a pure online-only site.

PocketSmith link.

A few years ago you had to purchase commercial PDF application to create a PDF from a Windows application. Now it's dead easy. There are many PDF tools, such as the free doPDF, that will enable you to create a PDF suitable for the web or commercial printing. Problem is that there's only so much editing you can do with a supplied PDF document. You can open it and grab some of the text, but you can't really re-format or edit and send back to the user, apart from adding comments. The answer is to convert the PDF back to a usable format.

CometDocs is online technology that will enable you to convert between various document formats. For example, you can convert a PDF back to a Microsoft Word document or even as an image file. You can convert a XPS file to just about anything else and more. Most of these conversions are available for free.

CometDocs link.

When we sign up to a broadband account, many of received free space to put up a basic homepage. Indeed, there are many web providers in the market that will offer you free space to design your first site. Even designing your first commercial space, with a domain, can be relatively low cost. Back in the 90s GeoCities where one of the first companies to offer a web hosting service and enabled people to create their own local 'city' or community.

In all fairness, the domains they used to give were rather obscure, long-winded and almost impossible to remember. Worse, the the page designs weren't good. However, people still used them and they were popular as local homepages. Hard to believe, but Yahoo bought GeoCities for over $3 billion (yes, billion) in 1999 - ten years ago.

Now the service is going to close so anyone with an existing GeoCities account will have to move the service to another hosting service, such as the paid-for Yahoo hosting service.

One day computers will take over our lives (well, they have, I suppose..) and will make our decisions for us. If you've ever wondered about your personality and how people perceive you, then look no further. You're now able to take a check on your personality by examining how you perform via Twitter. Seriously. No idea how it analysis your posts and posting style, but some users come out as 'cautious' and 'spamming' within the same personality result.

Twanalyst is online technology that will enable you to get a better idea of who you are via your Twitter account. Simply enter your Twitter username and a detailed (yeah, right) analysis will be performed. You can also see other people's personalities based on their Twitter username, just in case you couldn't figure that out for yourself.

Twanalyst link.

It's not a wise idea to use your name as a username across forums, online portals and areas of discussion. Primarily for the reason that it's way too easy to run a Google search on your online activity and find out what you've been up to during the day. You'll also want to try and keep the same username across various social networking sites. However, finding and choosing a consistent username is far from easy. Try making up something using your name and you'll find it is taken. Try choosing your favourite movie or TV star and that username will be used, too.

Namechk is an online tool that you can use to search for username availability across various popular sites across the Internet. The only downside with this approach is that you can't type in a core name and for the site to recommend some possible usernames that you can use across the web. Still, it gives you a chance to test various usernames for availability.

Namechk link.

Soon we won't need to install software on our computer. There are a wide number of web services that enable you to manage a project, share files with other users, write a document and even edit images. With the rise fast broadband, it makes it possible to use an online service as if it was a desktop application on your computer. Microsoft have realised and are working on technology that will enable you to use Office applications via the web than installed on your PC.

WobZip is a service which will enable you to handle and extract just about any archived file. This means you could upload an obscure archive to the service and it will offer you the extracted files for you to download. Alternatively, if you have to download an archived file, rather than download and attempt to find an archive manager that will open the archive, simply give the URL to WobZip, it will extract and give you the option of downloading the archive contents.

WobZip link.

Only the other day we were recommending that you take the initiative and create your own floorplan using the free Google SketchUp. It makes a lot of sense. Although this person shall remain nameless, I know of someone who recently took on a house with a lot of 'potential'. Signed up with an architect who went away and came back with draft designs on how to extend the house. Problem is that they differed wildly from the clients requirements. In the end, the client simply designed the extension themselves and then asked the architect to finalise and certify the design.

Floorplanner is web technology that enables you to design your own floorplan in 2D by simply dropping in the various elements on to the design. Simply select the household items, drop on to the design and scale as required. Once you're finished, you can turn this 2D design in to a 3D model and then use your mouse to move around. For personal use, you can only have one plan and design.

Floorplanner link.

When you're self-employed or a small business, getting away isn't easy. Convincing the wife that you need to take your laptop on your vacation is even more tricky. Strange thing is, I took my laptop with me when I was over in Italy last summer and there was nothing better than waking up on a warm morning, grabbing a coffee and checking the latest news around the web. Of course, as my work is all online, it was possible to earn money on the road by adding content to our site whilst away. Still, the problem is with any project work, if there's more than one person working on the project, it's tricky to work out who's doing what, when and to which deadline.

LiquidPlanner 2.0 is web technology that will allow your company to set up multiple users to track a project on the fly. It's a proper Microsoft Project-style management tool that you can use from within your web browser. Even your Blackberry can access the web. The latest LiquidPlanner 2.0 has been released with a host of new features such as workspace chatter, so the project colleagues can chat within the browser.

LiquidPlanner 2.0 link.

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to install Microsoft PowerPoint on their laptop. In a corporate environment, every license costs. However, most corporate laptops are restricted so that you can't simply just install your own software, so OpenOffice is out, too. This can leave you with a dilemma when you realise you need to pitch for a project and really need to produce a professional-level presentation.

280 Slides is an excellent alternative. It's web technology that enables you to create a presentation from your browser, without having to install desktop software on your computer. As everyone has access to a web browser, using 280 Slides is an easy way of creating your presentation, quickly. It ships with some basic themes to get you started and you can save your presentation as a PowerPoint presentation, if you need to access it from your desktop PC at a later date.

280 Slides link.

Some of the most popular areas on the Internet are news blogs where people offer a personal opinion (or rant) about some recent current event. Indeed, a news blog can be a quick synopsis of a more formal press release. It's also easier to get the users opinion, rather than read through what the press department wanted us to read. For this reason, some blogs are proving popular destinations. Snag is, gone are the days where a professional blog can look like you've designed it in under 30 minutes. You need something a little more professional.

CMS Theme is a website that offers various blog-related designed themes, for free, for the various blog toolkits on the market. For example, you could download a theme for Wordpress or MovableType. There are only a small number available, but they are well designed. If you know what you're doing, you could enhance these with your own improvements.

CMS Theme link.