Happy New Year!

If you’re like me (and most of the country), you’re probably making promises to yourself that this year you’ll eat less, move more and work more effectively.

Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard it (and done it) all before. But I just discovered a tool that may help! Experts say it takes 21 days to make or break a habit, and 21habit is a simple tool to help you through it.

You set up a goal to do (or not do) something every day, and every day for 3 weeks you’ll get an email or check in at the website to report on your progress.

A free plan has no real ramifications, but sign up in Committed Mode, and you invest $21 toward your challenge. Every day you succeed, you get a buck back. If you fail (or don’t check in for three days), you lose a buck. Your money will be donated to a list of 21habit charities.

I’m committing to start getting in shape for my marathon (read the very important reason I’m doing it here), so I’ll report back to you in 21 days on my progress!

21habit

• Create a simple banner ad
• Write a customized limerick
• Make a tough decision for you
• Tweet your message to thousands of followers
• Record a voice over in a native British accent
• Add music to your video 
• Send your child a personalized letter from Santa Claus
• Create a QR Code
• And on, and on and on… Hilarious and fun!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Get the book! Upgrade to Free: The Best Free and Low-Cost Online Tools and Apps is just ten bucks on Amazon.com!

Square is a tiny little card reader that slips into the audio port of your Android phone, iPhone or iPad. You set up a free account, get a free reader and can start swiping cards immediately. The system is linked to your bank account, and the money transfers in the next day. They charge no setup or maintenance fees, and take just 2.75% out of every transaction. They’ll even help you calculate and keep track of sales tax.

I’ve been practicing with the reader by charging the price of my book on my husband’s credit card. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to have plenty of copies to give away for Christmas.

See the full review here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the year 2000, people sent about 12 million daily emails. In 2010, the number of emails per day is 247 billion — an increase of about 20,000%! If you want your email to be noticed in all that mess, you have to do something different.

Give Paperless Post a try. Sign up for an account and you get 25 free “stamps” that allow you to send a cool, attention-getting email as an invitation, announcement or thank you. Your recipient receives an elegant email with an envelope they click to open. The invitations themselves are fun to open, and they have tons of templates and realistic-looking textured papers that look as handsome as something you get in the mail.

Paperless Post is not free, and there are several things about the system and the pricing that have made me hesitate to recommend it for business use. First, it’s a clumsy way to manage contacts and responses. Second, all their little extras (like envelope liners and your logo) can really add up. But I just had a great response when I sent a promotion about my speaking services to my professional association contacts, so I thought I’d share.

Watch this quick video to see how it works:

Online Invitations, Stationery, Announcements, and Save the Dates by Paperless Post

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Drum roll, please! The OFFICIAL name of the upcoming book is:

Upgrade to Free

The Guide to the Best Free (and Low-Cost) Tools and Apps

The jacket design is next, and we have three finalists. More updates coming soon!

For the commitment phobic, finding a time to meet with others just doesn’t get any easier. Just visit Doodle.com and click on “Schedule event.” Without having to register or give any personal information, you can quickly set up an event or meeting with alternative times. Then just send the link to members of your team, and each person (again, without registering), can indicate availability.

Here’s a little video about how to set it up:

Doodle’s best features are free, though you can sign up for a premium account with more features for less than $30 a year. Doodle also integrates with lots of other scheduling tools such as Google Calendar and now has an iPhone app.

Doodle: easy scheduling.

Because of horrible, malicious virus writers who spend their days trying to figure out clever ways to take over our computers, our bank accounts and the universe, we are warned again and again to never click on anything that we don’t recognize. I used to tell students in my computer courses, “Even if your grandmother sends you a link, be suspicious. Make sure you know where you’re going before you click.”

This is great advice, or it was until a couple of years ago, when Twitter’s 140-character limits meant that we would be 11 characters over just by pasting a link such as http://www.cheapskatefreelancer.com/2010/03/pdfescape-the-pdf-editor-ive-been-dreaming-ofe-online-pdf-reader-editor-form-filler-form-designer-solution/.

With Twitter and other services, brevity was imperative. So they started creating URL shortening services that let you convert a long URL into a teeny, tiny one.

Now back to the security issue. If your grandmother sends you a long link like the one above, you’d probably trust it. But what if the link she sends is http://z.pe/56lG? You may think your grandmother has become a hacker and try to block her.

Some people have an inherent (and justified) fear of shortened URLs since you can’t see what you’re clicking on. But I have good news. A 2010 study by Zscaler Inc., a company that sells security services, looked for malicious content in 1.3 million shortened links taken from Twitter over two weeks. Just 773 of those links – 0.06 percent – were malicious. The rest were just grandmothers and regular users like you and me sharing information and resources with others.

Here are just a few URL shorteners that I use:

• A.gd (http://a.gd): Cool options like password protection, link tagging and expiration dates, plus traffic tracking.
• Bit.ly (http://bit.ly): Twitter’s built-in shortener.
• BudURL (http://budurl.com): It’s a long link, but BudURL offers all kinds of tracking information to help with your marketing.
• Is.gd (http://is.gd): I love this little guy. It has no bells or whistles, but it stands for “is good.” That makes me happy.
• Threely (http://3.ly): Lets your viewers preview the link before they click (so you can verify your grandmother is still a good person), and allows custom URLs, such as http://3.ly/Cheapskate (goes to www.cheapskatefreelancer.com, of course).
• TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com): The first service I discovered that would shrink a long link into a short one. They’re still around, but now the URL seems impossibly long.
• Unhid (www.unhid.co.cc/): This site will convert a shortened URL to its actual link so you can take a peek before clicking.

(PS — this post is a preview excerpt from the Cheapskate Freelancer book, available in October!)

Ever need to dash off a quick text to someone while you’re at your desk? You have to get up, hunt down your phone, press all those dang buttons…. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just do it from your computer?

Ta dah! Joopz can help. Joopz lets you send an receive text messages from your computer. You can create groups of up to 10 people, so you can text several at once. You can schedule reminders and program it to send texts at a certain time. Cool stuff.

The free version gives you 50 outgoing messages a month. For $19.95 a year, the unlimited version has plug-ins for your desktop and Outlook.

Joopz – Web Texting.

I love these types of environmentally beneficial services (I consider it a Beth Favorite). Signing up with My Junk Tree should put an end to quite a bit of the paper junk mail that fills up your mailbox.

It’s twenty bucks for three years, and they promise to cut down on junk mail and even stop delivery of the phone books that collect dust under the coffee table. Who uses those anymore anyway?

My Junk Tree.

Have you seen these two other green resources?

I’m having way too much fun discovering new tools for the Cheapskate Computing book. A couple of people have recommended BeFunky, and I finally checked out their site last week.

I’m so impressed. Just upload a graphic and click around on the filters. Within minutes you can create an interesting graphic to spice up your website, your newsletters or your Facebook profile. Here’s what I did with a picture of me after the Seattle Marathon last summer. It took about 20 seconds to create. Cool, huh? BeFunky is an instant Beth Favorite. Their basic level is free (you can do what I did with the basic level), and the nice folks at BeFunky upgraded my account for six months (the next tier up is about 50 bucks a year) so I can investigate their premium tools.

BeFunky.

Oh, I’m thrilled! I just found a PDF tool that allows you to add text, notes, form fields and more to existing PDFs. I’m often frustrated when my clients send me PDFs to edit because I have to do screenshots with Jing page by page. Don’t get me wrong — I adore Jing, but the process takes forever.

But PDFescape lets you upload a PDF and add all the notes you need without having to have Adobe Acrobat, which costs hundreds of dollars.

This find is definitely my favorite of 2010.

PDFescape – Free PDF Editor & PDF Form Filler – Your Free Online PDF Reader, Editor, Form Filler, Form Designer, Solution.

WhatTheFont is a lot like one of my favorites, Identifont. This little free service allows you to upload a graphic that contains words, and the system does its best to identify your font.

I tried it with a few logos I’ve developed where I knew what the font was. It hit about 50 percent of the time, but the misses were darn close. I could have easily used one of the fonts they came up with as a close match to the look and feel.

WhatTheFont is a tool brought to you by MyFonts, which looks to be a pretty inexpensive way to purchase interesting fonts. Of course, I still prefer dafont, which is free. I’m funny like that.

WhatTheFont! « MyFonts.

The web is now full of helpful reminder systems. I like Task.fm because you can write the way you speak and it converts your note into a smart reminder, such as if you tell it to remind you about “my meeting with Scott Thursday at noon.” You can set reminders to come to you via text, email, twitter or a phone call.

The basic level is free, and the deluxe is less than $4 a month.

Want another reminder system? Try my old favorite, Jott.

Task.fm – Free SMS and Email Reminders.

Come on… be honest. Some of you still text and drive, right? Jott.com is the solution. Just dial a number on your phone, and a chipper voice asks, “Who do you want to Jott?” Say the name of a contact (or yourself), and Jott will take your message and convert it to text, plus attach the audio for the recipient’s listening pleasure. One of the attendees to my presentation called it “automated nagging.”

Jott has been one of my Beth Favorites for a couple of years now. It used to be free, which was crazy, and now they charge a very reasonable $3.95 a month for their most basic service. Well worth it. It integrates with all kinds of things — social media, great to-do list services, etc. Love it.

Jott.com | Voice-to-Text Notes, To Dos & Reminders.

It’s about time I profile Dropbox, a great little tool my readers have mentioned several times, and it came up again when I was presenting  “Free and Low-Cost Tech Tools Your Organization Can’t Live Without” at the Fancy Food Show this week.

Dropbox allows you to synchronize your files among your computers and also stores them online for access anywhere. This is a fantastic application for those of us who travel and don’t want to deal with throwing files on thumb drives. Its storage capacity matches Mozy.com for backups and its feature set is on par with Live Mesh.

You receive two gigs of storage with the free version, and 50 is only $9.99 a month.

Dropbox – Home – Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy.

Now here’s a switch… Penzu is an online blog-type service — that you can keep private! All the other blogs in the world are out there so you can share your thoughts, but Penzu lets you create a private journal for your eyes only, though you can choose to share with others.

I’m not sure what type of business application this might have, but I love the notebook-paper graphics. PC Magazine gave it props for being some of the best free software of 2009.

Penzu – Write in Private: Free Online Diary and Personal Journal.

Monday I’m speaking for the Western Association of Chamber Executives, and during our webinar dress rehearsal, the coordinators told me about Poll Everywhere.

Poll Everywhere is a free/low-cost replacement for the very expensive audience polling devices. Instead of handing out devices that connect to a man behind the curtain who creates a chart of results for the audience to see, a speaker can ask the audience to text their choice of responses from a poll he’s displaying, and the results are instantly communicated to a dynamic PowerPoint slide he can show. The system integrates with Twitter, and people can vote from the web as well.

It’s free for up to 30 responses, and darn cheap after that. Plus there’s no long-term commitment, so you can go to the highest level for a one-time event then go back to a free account.

Text Message (SMS) Polls and Voting, Audience Response System | Poll Everywhere.

*** Click here for more tools about surveys…

I’m in Orlando this week, teaching a series of sessions on Free and Low-Cost Social Media Tools. Ordinarily I remote in to my computer at the office using Live Mesh from Microsoft, but the software is misbehaving.

So I returned to an old standby, LogMeIn. I abandoned LogMeIn because it didn’t have all the cool features that Live Mesh does, most notably that I can store the files I need on the road in Live Mesh folders, so when I update them on either computer, all copies of the files are updated. Plus, Live Mesh lets you drag and drop files across the computers, and LogMeIn makes you upgrade to the Pro version for that.

But I just tried LogMeIn again, and I am impressed. I can’t do the file sharing, but now LogMeIn allows me to copy something on one computer and paste it to the other, so I can copy a whole file to transfer. Plus, I use multiple monitors on my desktop, and LogMeIn lets me switch between them with the click of a button.

The biggest thing I like about it today is that it works, and, of course, it’s free. The professional version is quite reasonably priced as well ($70 a year for one computer), plus they have other services such as backup.

LogMeIn – Remote Access and Desktop Control Software for Your Computer.

The cool thing about Elance (besides the very affordable prices you can find) is that you don’t release payment until you’re satisfied, so you can guard against a flighty freelancer.

Elance | Hire experts to do your work: outsource to companies, consultants and freelance professionals..

Most of us green-types cringe when we print out a 10-page document that has giant pictures and a last page with 3 words on it. GreenPrint helps take control of your printer, allowing you to save money, ink and trees.

Download the application and it installs like a printer. Then you can print to GreenPrint and choose which pages you want to print and whether you want graphics. You can also use it to print straight to a PDF.

I love that it also includes a little meter to keep track of how many printed pages you’ve avoided and how much money you’ve saved on ink. GreenPrint World is fully functional and free, though you have to see ads for green companies. The Home Premium edition costs just $29 per computer.

GreenPrint Software – Millions of Trees Can’t be Wrong..

I first discovered chartbeat when Ashton Kutcher and CNN were competing to be the first Twitter account with one million followers. Chartbeat showed the race live, and I was hooked.

For about 10 bucks a month, you can monitor the traffic on up to 5 websites in real time. I mean really real. It shows how many people are visiting, whether they’re new or returning, what pages they are on, how long it took for their pages to load, who is talking about you on Twitter, where they live… everything you might want to know.

On sites with very moderate traffic (like mine thus far), it can be incredibly boring. But when I send out a newsletter or one of my tools goes viral for a few minutes on Twitter, I can monitor the “stickiness” of my site. Do they visit just one page or click around for a few? How long are they hanging out?

As I write this post, a new visitor to my site is checking out my entry about Wordle from a computer on the East Coast. Cool!

You can set up alerts so you get a text when a certain number of people visit your site at once, and the service sends you emails (or texts, your choice) when your site is down (which happens more than you know).

TRY IT! Keep Cheapskate Freelancer open and click here to see yourself on the site.

chartbeat – real-time website analytics and uptime monitoring.

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What a fun, free idea to find new books, music, videos and games! Go through your book and media shelves to find items you no longer want, and enter the UPC or ISBN code into your SwapTree account. SwapTree finds people who want what you have and connects you so you can trade. You can also create a list of media you want, and SwapTree will go as far as a three-way trade to make it happen.

I’ve gotten two books so far, all for the price of postage. And the best thing is that you don’t have to go to the post office to ship. For a small fee, you can print out your trackable shipping label with postage to paste on your package.

So happy I found this.

Swap & Trade Books, Trade Music, Swap Video Games, DVD & Movie Exchange – SwapTree.

I’ve long been a fan of Fontifier, which lets you create a font from your own handwriting for $9.

I’m even more excited about their new feature, a signature font creator, that lets you write things like “best wishes” in full signature format (rather than printing — who prints these days?). I haven’t done it yet myself, but it’s great if you need to mass produce thank you notes or if you want to “sign” your electronic newsletters.

Fontifier – Your own handwriting on your computer

No less than three Cheapskate Freelancer readers recommended SurveyMonkey as “worth the money” in the June Giveaway (don’t miss this month’s giveaway — register now!).

SurveyMonkey lets you design surveys easily using more than a dozen question types. I’ve created simple forms for feedback from my clients as well as elaborate surveys with custom skip logic, graphic and customized filters.

The free version gives you 100 responses per survey and up to 15 questions. But, as the Cheapskate Freelancer readers pointed out, for just $19.95 a month you get a whole host of other useful features. Well worth the cost.

SurveyMonkey.com – Powerful tool for creating web surveys. Online survey software made easy!.