One-Click Holidays: Free Web Apps Make It Easy

Evernote also has a mobile version, which means I can pull up recipes (and ingredients) if I've stopped unexpectedly at the grocery store.

Have I mentioned how much I like Evernote?

Hat tip to Computerworld reviews editor Barbara Krasnoff, whose write-up inspired me to give the service a test drive.

If you want a Web application that's specifically geared toward recipes, several cooking magazine sites offer that kind of functionality. For example, MyRecipes.com not only aggregates recipes from several magazines like Cooking Light and Southern Living, but also offers the option of storing your own recipes as well.

The advantage is a specific structure for recipes and recipe categories (as opposed to remembering which tags to use in Evernote) as well as easy integration and search with a large database of already published dishes. The disadvantage is that the structure for entering your own recipes can discourage you from entering a lot of your own items. Plus, your information exists only in their cloud, whereas Evernote syncs with the desktop and entries can be exported.

December Holidays

Card writing. Gift buying. Gift shipping. Holiday dinners and other gatherings. Whether Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, New Year's, all of them or others, end-of-year holidays generally mean a stack of competing tasks that can tax a simple to-do list. This time of year, it's time to pull out the big gun in your organizational arsenal: project management.

Yes, project management -- but not some cumbersome, complex desktop app. This year I'm entering all my "milestones" and associated "to-do" lists into Basecamp , the lightweight Web project management tool that spawned the popular Ruby on Rails development framework.

Basecamp offers a free one-project account that lets you add milestones, associate to-do lists with each milestone and assign a to-do task to anyone in your account. (Adding people is also free.) There's a message section that lets you send out e-mail notes but also keep each message collected on the site.

You need a paid account in order to upload and share files within Basecamp, but a free whiteboard included in all accounts allows you to have links to external files (such as a spreadsheet or text document, which you could easily store and share using something like Google Docs).