Five Best Travel Sites for Cheap Tickets [Hive Five]

If you've got travel plans for the upcoming holiday season, the time to book your tickets is now. The question is, where can you find tickets cheap enough to offset the extra $40 you'll have to spend to check your bags and enjoy a snack on your six-hour flight. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite travel web site for cheap tickets, and today we're back with the five most popular answers. Keep reading for a breakdown of the best travel sites on the block, then cast your ballot for the one you like best. Photo by alex-s.

NOTE: In an completely unscientific test of each site's prices, I ran a search for a round trip ticket from Los Angeles to Omaha (my most frequent flight) departing on November 15th and returning on the 22nd. I'll end each site's description below with the result.

Kayak

Kayak is a travel search aggregator, scouring over 140 sites to bring you the cheapest fares it can find. The results are nicely sorted by price, and once the search is complete, you can tweak and filter the results to find the perfect ticket for your needs. Kayak supports email alerts, can search nearby airports, and the Buzz feature is great if you're looking to take a spur-of-the-minute vacation on the cheap. Like most travel sites, Kayak also covers hotels, cruises, and rental cars. My Flight: $207.

Yapta

Yapta—aka Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant—is an airline search engine with an emphasis on tracking airline prices before and after you purchase your tickets. Before your purchase, Yapta will track a flight and alert you when it falls below your desired price (a feature available on most of the sites featured here). After your purchase, Yapta will continue tracking the ticket price. If it drops, the site will send an alert if you're eligible for a refund or travel credit. If you're a big Yapta fan, you can even integrate it in your browser with the previously mentioned Yapta Firefox extension or Internet Explorer plug-in. My Flight: $206.50.

Live Search Farecast

Live Search Farecast is another airline ticket search aggregator similar to Kayak. Farecast sets itself apart by offering price predictions that suggest whether now is the right time to buy your ticket—or whether you should wait. It does this by tracking and analyzing fare histories. Earlier this year, Farecast was purchased by Microsoft, who slapped the Live Search moniker on the front end. My Flight: $216.

Priceline

Priceline has long been a favorite of bargain hunters and William Shatner fans alike. Priceline made its name with its Name Your Own Price system, and while the Name Your Own Price option is still available, it's been significantly de-emphasized on the site. If you're looking to really low and you don't mind bidding blindly (when you name your price, you don't get to choose departure/arrival times or number of stops, for example), NYOP is a good way to go. Otherwise, Priceline's default search engine still has a lot to offer. My Flight: $206.

Sidestep

Sidestep is yet another search aggregator that you may find oddly familiar if you're a Kayak user. That's because Sidestep was purchased by Kayak a year ago this December. In fact, from what I can tell, SideStep's search results are the same as what you can get from Kayak—it even sports the same Buzz feature—so it's really just a matter of choosing which one you like the look and feel of more. My Flight: $207.

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Now that you've seen the best, it's time to practice up for Tuesday's election and choose your favorite.
Which Is the Best Travel Site for Finding Cheap Tickets?
( surveys)
This week's honorable mention goes out to Mobissimo. Whether or not your favorite made the short list, let's hear more about it in the comments.

Five Memberships Worth Signing up for [Saving Money]

Smart Money magazine crunches the numbers on the cost versus benefit of various paid memberships to find you five with a high value. While you may not be in a position to take advantage of all of the memberships (you can't sign up for an AARP membership if you're a ripe old twenty two, for example) the list has a variety of potential money savers. At the zoo, for example:

A family of four visiting the San Diego Zoo for the day would pay $132, including one-day admission ($28.50 per adult, $18.50 per child) and rides on the Journey Into Africa tour ($10 per adult, $3 per child) and Skyfari air tram ($3 per person). Signing up for a family membership costs just $5 more — and comes with a year of free entry, free rides and other perks.

The quote echoes my experience, having paid a few extra dollars for my first zoo visit to secure a pass that allows my nuclear family plus 4 guests for a year, instead of just a day. Averaged over the next year the monthly zoo visits a couple bucks a person. Other potential sources of savings highlighted in the article are warehouse clubs (shop for cheap staples like milk and eggs, avoid gimmicky 40 pound pallets of junky food) and an AAA membership (the $48 enrollment fee is recovered with a single call for a tow truck). What memberships have you saved money with? Share in the comments below and help your fellow readers save a buck or two. Photo by Sir Mervs.

CSSHttpRequest - cross browser AJAX without JSON

Because XMLHttpRequest only functions in a same-origin model, the main alternatives have been to either proxy the XML request server-side, or transfer javascript arrays via JSON (since cross-domain script calls are allowed). CSSHttpRequest is another method for performing cross-domain AJAX-style requests, but instead of running loading a remote Javascript file, CSS is used as the transport, and data is encoded inside of urls in @import statements.

A request is invoked using the CSSHttpRequest.get(url, callback) function:

Data is encoded on the server into URI-encoded 2KB chunks and serialized into CSS @import rules with a modified about: URI scheme. The response is decoded and returned to the callback function as a string:

CSSHttpRequest is open source under an Apache License (Version 2.0).

This is a pretty cool alternative—it seems to be a much safer way to do things than blindly executing javascript from servers not under your control. It's somewhat like what XMLHttpRequest could have offered if it weren't limited by the same-origin policy (though in a more roundabout way).

It still begs the question: why on earth is XMLHttpRequest limited by a same-origin policy, especially when it forces developers to adopt more dangerous methods for cross domain communication?

CSSHttpRequest

Top 10 Online Freebies and Deals [Lifehacker Top 10]

Unless you're a financial Jedi Knight or economic Sith Lord, you probably don't have a ton of control over our turbulent economy. What you can reign over is your spending and saving—and when you know where they are, you can take advantage of deep discounts and general freebies across the web. Even you're not much for coupons and you're occasionally unable to resist splurging on a new tech toy, you can save some serious cash on many purchases, or avoid them entirely, by spending a few minutes online. Check out some of our favorite current free or cheap deals and low-hassle discounts for your weekend viewing. Don't dawdle, though, because some deals are ending soon. The full list is below. Photo by jswieringa.

10. Get 15-30% off laptop art.

If you've spent any time in a Wi-Fi-providing coffee shop, you know that MacBooks look a lot alike, and the most creative most folks get with their rigs is usually a single-color skin. Break your laptop out of conformity at Infectious.com, which is offering 15 to 30 percent off adhesive art, including stick-ons for laptops and walls. The skins, on sale through Nov. 4, tend toward the feminine, but the gallery is pretty intriguing to flip through—and imagine your own gear sporting an eye-grabbing, easily-identifiable look.

9. Get free AT&T Wi-Fi on an iPhone at Starbucks and other nationwide hotspots.

After two false starts, AT&T started offering free Wi-Fi service to iPhone owners at their hotspots at Starbucks and Barnes & Noble and other locations earlier this week. Unfortunately for those of us who relished the idea of browser-tweaking freebies on laptops, this iteration uses a text message to confirm one's iPhone-having-ness. Still, it's a faster connection at a wide selection of hotspots, and laptop-luggers only need to spend even the tiniest bit each month off a Starbucks gift card to get a month's worth of two-hour passes.

8. Get your real free credit report.

If you're looking for the federally-mandated, completely free, no-service-cancellation-needed online credit report you're entitled to once per year, head to AnnualCreditReport.com. Use it as explanatory ammo when applying for a loan, see what issues are waiting to be settled, and avoid the temptation of a smirking dilettante who wants to sign you up for an easy-to-miss yearly credit protection fee.

7. Get free or cheap books.

For those willing to look, new and used books you've been meaning to read can be had for the price of one of your barely-touched tomes, a postage fee, or just a pittance for downloading. PaperbackSwap (which deals with hardcovers as well) is a neat system, where mailing books out gets you credits you can "spend" to receive them, with no transaction fees, and print-and-mail forms handily provided. BookMooch works much the same, except the organizers say you can maintain a 2-to-1 ratio of received to sent books with your credits. Check out screenshots of those services and other free and cheap means of finding books, both print and audio, at our free/cheap book photo gallery.

6. Get $50 off an Amazon Kindle thanks to Oprah.

Oprah Winfrey announced last week that her favorite gadget had no 3G connectivity and a pretty low-power graphics processor—the Amazon Kindle, an online/offline e-reading device that's more than just a flat screen you can hold. To entice her viewers and Book Club readers into checking it out, her site offers a coupon code--OPRAHWINFREY—that gets a buyer $50 off the normally $359 Kindle. The code expires today (Nov. 1, 2008), however, so if you're thinking about getting your eyes off the back-lit screen for a bit, now's the time to grab one of these nifty gadgets. Here's more on how the Kindle can save you time (and perhaps money).

5. Ship online purchases for free.

FreeShipping.org is one of those URLs that you could imagine turning into a veritable spam factory, but it thankfully hosts a roundup of free shipping coupons found for more than 600 stores. If you think you can do better, or your online merchant isn't covered, also check with Free Shipping On, which sometimes hosts different versions of similar coupons. If you're buying from Amazon, though, and you're just a few bucks short of hitting your free shipping target, try the Amazon Filler Item Finder, which takes in a dollar amount and shoots back hopefully useful plug-ins to save money and get you more gear.

4. Get a year of free online Carbonite backup with a LaCie drive.

It normally costs $49.95 to back up unlimited data for one year to Carbonite, which runs at least second place amongst our backup-savvy readers. At the moment, though, any external hard drive purchase from LaCie comes with a CD enabling one free year of service. So for the price of something you might've bought anyways, you get both external and remote automated backups—pretty much the gold standard of data safety. Carbonite is currently Windows-only, but soon to be Mac-compatible.

3. Get Microsoft Office at 91% off.

Microsoft wants college students to get familiar with their Office lineup—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, et al.—so they'll be more apt to use and buy it in their professional futures. College students usually need some kind of official Office product at some point in their studies, and they don't have a lot of cash. Those major forces meet up at "The Ultimate Steal," in which the Redmond giant gives away its Office Ultimate 2007 package for $59.95 to anyone with a valid .edu address. The real deal, however, is that it seems any old .edu email—including the alumni accounts usually given away for free—get you through the door. One neat combination of Office tools is used by our own Jason Fitzpatrick, who gets things done with Outlook and OneNote 2007.

2. Keep a real web site with a custom domain for $10/year.

In the way-early days of the web, having your "own web site" meant you were all kinds of experienced with servers, protocols, and rack mounting. These days, you don't even need your own hosted space to maintain a web presence—blogging platforms, page creators, and Google apps (out the wazoo) are practically begging to do all the heavy-code-lifting for you. With a $10-per-year domain name purchase (and some can be found cheaper), anyone who hasn't dipped their toes into reclaiming or parking their name online can do so without spending a penny more. Reference Gina's guide to hosting your domain with free apps. If you want to get really DIY on it, you can still host your web content yourself by assigning a domain name to your home server.

1. Choose free software and service alternatives over paid versions.

We highlight free software—both the "as in beer" and "as in speech" varieties—every day at Lifehacker, because a good software solution can save a needy person serious dough. Our compiled free replacements for paid software pulled down $225 worth of software and services, and ran through the free alternatives for Flickr Pro accounts, push email, and simple remote desktop connectors. Our readers had their own libre workarounds as well, suggesting more than $310 in savings on screen capture tools, hard drive imaging, and Slingbox-like streaming video.

What recent or evergreen deals do you turn to when you're looking to save a few dollars? What deal-finder apps or sites are your first stop for frugality? Spread the wealth in the comments.

Convert Videos with Free, Powerful Automen [Featured Windows Download]

Windows only: Convert videos from DVD or downloads into the format and size you like with Automen, a simple but powerful tool that's small, free, and relatively easy to use. I say "relatively" compared to Mencoder, the command-line utility it provides a user interface for. You will have to edit the program's INI configuration file in Notepad to get it working, so if drag-and-drop is more your speed it might not be right for you. You can choose from a variety of input and output formats (including XVID, FLV, WMV, and MP4), specify the output dimensions and even target file size, batch-process multiple videos and the software will take full advantage of multi-core processors to speed up encoding. For alternative tools, check out our top 10 free video rippers, encoders, and converters. Automen is a free download for Windows.