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Russell Beattie took the words out of my mouth while writing his blog post I hate money. Money management is just not fun for me and therefore gets very little attention. I could have bought a house a few years ago, but didn’t do it simply because I wasn’t interested in investing the time to learn the ropes. I actually was successful in using Quicken for a full 3 months last year. I tracked my income vs. spending and became a lot more aware of where my money was going. I just did not like the fact that I had to allocate time a few times a week to start Quicken, update my accounts, categorize items, fix miscategorized items, and reconcile my checking account.

I believe its time for financial management software to meet RSS. How cool would it be if my RSS aggregator notified me that a transaction has been posted to my credit card? Now instead of setting aside time each month to do my finances, I can process a little bit a time while I read my news and go about my daily activities. The feed would link to my online money management software which would then allow me to categorize and process the transaction(s), and generate real-time graphs of my spending vs. income. Ofcourse some security details with RSS would have to be worked out, but this would make my life a lot easier. Another idea for a Rails project?

When listening to syndicated radio shows, how often do you not hear the location of a caller mentioned? Every radio show I’ve listened to with national reach has always mentioned the callers’ location. Knowing the location of a caller helps localize national shows. It is a little comforting knowing that someone near you is going through the same thing, or that someone near you has the same views on a certain subject. I believe this is something that is missing in the blogosphere.

Since the web is an international medium, having user’s locations in blog comments will help humanize the blogosphere. Instead of limiting all communications to the online world, people who meet while commenting on a certain blog entry may decide to carry on their discussions offline, if they know that they are co-located.

Instead of burdening the user with yet another box to fill out, I’ve been thinking about using some type of IP address to location mapping software. I’m currently investigating MaxMind GeoIP. GeoIP has a Ruby API, which will be great for integration into Typo. Well, its another project to add to my list of cool things to do. However, this year I actually intend on implementing some of my ideas. 2005 is the year to focus on getting things done.

For the past 2-3 months, I’ve been thinking through the details of implementing the last great web app, the shareable calendar. I believe it is time to bring the calendar into the world of Ajax and RSS. I was excited a few weeks ago when Novell announced that it was open sourcing its Hula Project. Hula provides a great platform to build the next generation calendar.

I want to see a calendar that has the simplicity and responsiveness of Tada List. I want to be able to see the details of a day by simply hovering my mouse over a cell in a monthly view. I want to be able to start entering an event with just one click, without having the page reload. I believe, with proper design, a calendar can be functional, and not be complicated and cluttered like Yahoo!’s Calendar. Yahoo has just too many boxes, lines, and ads that distract. It seems like the web is moving away from portals that do everything, to specialized sites that do one thing really well. I don’t need a todo list with my calendar, I already have that covered, I just want a calendar.

If a popular calendar site comes out and gets widely adopted, it may even sway people away from Outlook/Exchange or force Microsoft to implemented a non-proprietary calendar standard such as iCalendar. This will help immensely in alleviating the synchronization issue.

How do you make money with it?

I’m sure the big guys like Google will obviously want to make money doing something like this. One thing I can think of is to have sponsored events during the free time on your calendar. Google can index the past history of your calendar and suggest things for you to do in your spare time based on this history. For example, lets say you had an event for a rock concert a few weeks ago. Google can now add a sponsored event this coming weekend for a another rock concert, with a link to Ticketmaster. Obviously this event will be transparent and will not trigger any reminders. This model can be made to operate just like AdWords. However, if it is too intrusive, they can simply list the ads on the side like they do now. I believe its worth the experiment.

It looks like I’m not the only one who has been thinking about this.

Well, the post below worked. I literally was able to make web posting work in under 10 minutes using Ruby on Rails. This is truly a great web framework. Rails is perfect for those who follow Agile methodologies, as you can start with an auto-generated scaffold and gradually improve (refactor) your design. I can see this being used as a prototyping tool for a large-scale J2EE or .NET project.

Rails fills a gap that has existed in web frameworks for a long time. You have J2EE which is geared towards the most complex projects, and then you have server side scripting which can be used for simpler projects. Rails fits right in the middle, which I believe satisfies the requirements of a majority of the projects out there.

This is a test post to see if web posting is working. For those who have been left in the dark, this blog is being powered by a new open source blogging tool named Typo, which I contribute to. Typo follows the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle, and thus does not come with an online posting mechanism. It is made to work with existing XML-RPC based clients. Unfortunately it currently seems to work best with the Mac client MarsEdit, and I am running a PC. So I attempted to hack together a quick and dirty web posting system. This is better work otherwise this post would be wasted energy.