FuelFrog is a website to track your fuel usage and mileage. Mainly mileage. A major problem:
You need to know how many miles since your previous fillup. Yes, you need to reset your trip odometer or make a note or something and then do the math, because you update it primarily via twitter or through the website with three fields:
Miles (since last fillup), Price (per gallon), Gallons (purchased).
This fails hardcore. Use math (it’s a fancy part of new math called subtraction) and accept odometer readings. This comes to my second point:
Your first fillup needs to know your the difference between it and your previous fillup, and you CAN’T use 0 for the miles since last fillup. So you can’t start out with something, you have to fill up, count, then start out. This sucks on the price range, but if their goal is to track “mileage” and not also your prices, this wouldn’t matter. You could just enter your “miles since last fillup” each time you fill up, and they could make a chart, and it would be really useless. But currently you do have a records page and so you can track your gas expenditures. But that doesn’t require knowing how far you’ve gone since the last time you’ve filled up…
So basically, FuelFrog is two different services that go together, but don’t HAVE to, and yet force you to. I would like to know that I bought gas today at 3.509 a gallon. But in order to do that, I have to give it a number for how many miles I’ve driven since the last fillup, and I can’t leave that empty. This means I’ll either:
1) Lose the first entry (and just add later fillups and do the math)
2) Lie, messing up my efficiency data.
What they should do is simple: Allow you to input your odometer, so that they can IGNORE it for the first fillup and use it to compare differences on future fillups. Right? Right.
FuelFrog sucks.
This is silly: they have a DHTML calendar for your date input. If you bought gas, it was probably today. If it was yesterday, I can edit the date by one, or at most edit the month. You don’t need a calendar popup. You’re not that important. (And still, when you post an entry it actually adds it to the system as occuring at midnight EST, because it says I bought fuel 22 hours ago, and it even did so when I updated via Twitter which would be a pretty good indicator that I just bought fuel and tweeted it.)
(via Download Squad)
Edit: My MileMarker was recommended by a lifehacker comment and it’s much better, except the order is MGP instead of MPG and you have to use a direct message (i.e. D mymm Odometer Gallons Price) instead of the public @reply system (@FuelFrog Tripometer Price Gallons). Other than that, I like it.
Tom Sucks 