CyberNotes: Keep Track of Gas Mileage with FuelFrog

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Every time I drive by the gas station these days, the price seems to continue to go up, and up, and up. The other day when I went past the gas station, the price at the pump was $4.07. Five years ago if someone had told me we’d be paying over $4 for a gallon of gasoline, I probably would have laughed. It’s no laughing matter now, and everybody is talking about the prices and how they are impacting our lives.

We’ve seen all kinds of sites pop-up around the web for helping you find the cheapest gas prices in your area which can help you save money. In the past we’ve written about those sites, so today we’re looking at a site called FuelFrog for helping you track your gas mileage. Sure car manufacturers put out gas mileage information, but mileage varies for every driver. Using FuelFrog will give you a good idea of what kind of mileage you actually get, and then you’ll be able to keep a history of it as well.

What is FuelFrog?

According to their “About” page FuelFrog’s goal is to help you track your gas milage but more than that, they want to be able to provide you with a history of your milage so that you can watch trends. They try to make the process of adding your information quick so that you’ll be more likely to use the service, and part of making it easy involves allowing users to enter their info via Twitter, which we’ll explain in a minute. Ultimately, they want users to be able to do the following:

• Quickly add info to your account after filling up
• View trends for the amount you spend on gas
• See how gas prices change in your city over time
• Gain insight into how your car’s gas efficiency changes

Dashboard/Records

As you’ll see from the screenshot below, the Dashboard is the place where you’ll be able to view your fuel efficiency history in the form of a graph. You’ll also be able to view your latest fill-up information and add a new record. The only information you’ll need for a fill-up record is:

• Miles you drove since you last filled up
• What you paid at the pump per gallon (or liter, depending on your settings)
• How many gallons you put in your car
• The date you filled up

You can also click on the “Records” tab at the top of the page and then you’ll be able to see your entries in a list. This is where you’ll also be able to delete entries as well. At the top of the page you’ll see what your average mileage over the last 30 days has been.

Settings

There aren’t that many things that you can tweak in the settings of FuelFrog because it’s really a simple service. What you can do though is enter your Twitter ID so that you can take advantage of using the service to enter in your fuel and mileage information. You can also select your region so that the currency and measurement of fuel and distances will be correct (miles/km or gallons/liters). If you want you can enter in your vehicle make, model, and year. They have a big long drop-down menu that has them all listed. It would probably be easier if they had three drop down lists- one for the make, model, and year, so that people didn’t have to scroll through such a long list to find their vehicle.

Using Twitter

They’ve made it really easy to enter in your information to FuelFrog by using Twitter. All you need is a Twitter account, and then you’ll need to enter your Twitter ID in on the FuelFrog settings page which we mentioned earlier. Look at the example below to see how you’ll enter your data.

1. enter @fuelfrog
2. then enter the miles
3. enter the price
4. enter gallons

So in the example I drove 251 miles on the tank of gas. I paid $4.09 for each of the 13.589 gallons of gas I put in.

Wrapping it up

Of course this is not for everybody. If you don’t use Twitter, it’ll take effort to remember to go to FuelFrog to enter in your data every time you put gas in your vehicle. For those who do decide to use it though, it’ll be a great way to watch trends and keep track of the kind of mileage your vehicle gets over time and how gas prices change.

 This is just one of the hundreds of CyberNotes we have done. You can find more of them by visiting our CyberNotes category, or by subscribing to our CyberNotes feed. We also have a full feed available if you want to receive all of our articles in your reader!

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