Every year, Mary and I get an entertainment book for christmas. A few years ago, I decided to track how much I saved. Being a programmer, I decided to over complicate it, so, instead of using Excel, I wrote a javascript-based solution for a blogger-based blog. Basically, each blog entry was call to a javascript function that saved the data. The blog template had a little snippet of javascript that would sum up the savings for each blog entry's javascript call. It worked great. I think I saved around $150.

[Update: I just loaded up the old one on blogger, and it says that I saved $125.40, not quite $150. Also, if you are interested, you can look at the javascript in the page to see how I did it: nothing too impressive, though, especially with how mature the javascript implementations are these days.]

One thing I also noticed was that I was driven to use the entertainment book more. The next year, I didn't track the savings, and we hardly used it at all. I think that seeing a running total made me strive to take the total higher.

As I mentioned in part I, I am creating an application for this as a learning experience in Rails. Well, after working off and on for the last couple weeks, I have a working version of Coupon Tracker, a multi-user coupon tracking website that allows you to enter coupons with a description and tags. You have your own personal savings list, along with a tag cloud for them. The tags can be used to categorize them however you want. For example, why not have a tags Restaurants, Shopping, Entertainment, etc. Maybe you also want a set of tags that describe how likely you would go back. The sky is the limit.

If you would like to use it, please go to Coupon Tracker and register as a new user. Send me an email (when you register, the page has my email address) with your user name, and I will validate you as a new user. After that, just come back, login and start entering your savings. I would appreciate any and all feedback, as well, considering possible features.

One thing that I would like to add is a pledging piece: users can pledge to donate a certain percentage of their savings to charity. The site would track how much the user has pledged and how much the user has contributed.

It is still in its infancy, feature-wise, but I am constantly adding new features to get the site completely usable. Currently, the feature set includes the following:

• Multi-user
• Enter new coupon
• Support for tags
• List entered coupons and total savings

The list of features currently being prioritized for addition:

• Delete a coupon
• Edit a coupon
• Filter list by tags
• Custom sorting of coupon list
• Export to CSV
• Integration with charitable donation sites / paypal to donate part of your savings