Josh Young

Yesterday, Dave Ramsey’s team launched an online version of their class, Financial Peace University. The first lesson is available for free on their site.

It’s a great setup. There’s access to all of the interactive video lessons, money tools, an online community, and even the ability to download the full lessons via mp3s so that you can listen to them whenever you want.

If you are a Dave Ramsey fan, and you haven’t gone through FPU yet, this looks like a great option (especially if there are no FPU classes in your area). The information alone is worth the price. It’s only $99 for the full 13 lesson course.

Go try out the free session and see how you like it. It’s a great interface and some great material.

Financial Peace University Online

Dave Ramsey

After frustrating me for some time with complex API’s and whatnot, Google has finally added the ability to easily embed Google Maps.

All you have to do now is find the map view you want to see, click Link to this page, and you can use the direct link for e-mail or IM or use the html embed code in your web page or blog post. You can even customize the map you want to embed by clicking on Customize and preview embedded map and choosing a few options. It literally couldn’t be any easier.

Here’s an example that took me around 10 seconds to do:

View Larger Map

Googles Maps has made some great updates lately. Two that are extremely useful are the ability to drag your route to modify it and the ability to add a location to your directions if you don’t know the address but do know where it’s located on the map.

To show you these new features, Google has put together this short video. Enjoy!

Thanks to: Lifehacker

Well, after many years of talking about it, I finally have all of my data on a regular backup schedule. I have two internal and one external hard drives on my desktop, and an internal hard drive in my laptop - all of which have important data (i.e., I’d be sunk if I lost most of it).

To backup all of my data, I decided to use one 500 GB Western Digital MyBook to hold it all (I already use another MyBook for some of my data storage and really love it).

To schedule and perform the backups, I downloaded SyncBack Freeware. I was originally turned on to SyncBack by a Lifehacker post about it. They were right. It really is that simple, it’s fast, and it does a great job. And the best part is that it’s totally free!

I would walk you through the steps I took to do it, but honestly, the Lifehacker post really does a great job of explaining everything, so I’ll just let it speak for itself.

In the not-to-distant future, I also plan to set up a secure FTP backup of some of the more important files.

My question for you is: Are you backing up your data? If so, how?

Geek to Live: Automatically back up your hard drive via Lifehacker

Google Docs & Spreadsheets just got a new look and some new features.

Now you can organize your documents in folders, and when searching for a document, it dynamically suggests a query from your document collection.

Plus, as they put it on the Official Google Docs & Spreadsheets Blog, another new feature is simply “Looking Pretty.” And I agree. It does look better.

Read more about it on the Official Google Docs & Spreadsheets Blog, or take Google Docs & Spreadsheets for a spin yourself. All you need is a Google account, and if you don’t have one yet, then get on the ball!

A couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail and a call from a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. She was doing a story on the social/Web2.0 aspect of personal finance sites, and one of those sites was Wesabe.com. I’ve written about Wesabe a couple of times on here, so she wanted to see how it had helped me.

After a couple of phone interviews and a few e-mails, the article was published last week. Pretty cool to be involved in something like that out of nowhere. All because of a few things I share here and there on my blog.

You can give the article a read here: Managing Your Money in Public View via the Wall Street Journal Online.

Here’s what Marc Hedlund over at Wesabe had to say about it.

Some other sites with the article:

• AOL Money and Finance
• The Charlotte Observer
• Savannah Now

Shock of all shocks.

Google has bought yet another awesome service that I already use.

If you haven’t used Feedburner before, I encourage you to check it out. It makes things very simple, like podcasting and letting your users subscribe via e-mail instead of RSS, plus they keep things nice and tidy for you.

Google buys Feedburner [via Official Google Blog]

Google has added the ability to embed a flash slideshow of any of your Picasa Web Albums with just a couple clicks.

It’s not the fanciest thing I’ve ever seen, but if you’re looking for a quick flash slideshow of some images with built-in controls and captions (if you want them), then check it out. One thing I wish it would do is loop the slideshow…as of right now, it just ends. Booooring.

Official Google Blog - Oh, the places you’ll go…

Here’s a sample using some pictures showing the progress of our new house when get got it last year.

Sweet.

Google just completely redesigned Analytics. I love that they keep making their free stuff even more cool and more useful.

Over the next month, everyone with an Analytics account will get migrated to the new server, and for a month you’ll be able to access both the old and the new versions without any interruptions. In the meantime, they’ve set up a tour of what the new interface looks like. It’s killer.

Read about it on the Official Google Blog.

View the demo of the new interface.

Google Analytics

Read a great post over at eMinistryNotes this morning about explaining RSS in plain English. I’ve taken a stab at it on our church’s website before, but this video (from CommonCraft) does a great job explaining things.

Check it out.

Click To Play

eMinistryNotes - RSS in Plain English

CommonCraft - Video: RSS in Plain English