Christmas: scaling back and cutting costs - and a survey

In light of recent economic events, I thought I'd remind you all of a great site run by a friend of mine: In-Debt Net: Fighting Your Way Out Of Debt. It's not just for those in debt but for anyone who's trying to save money. Annie Walker offers advice with experience and a wry sense of humour.

I immediately zeroed in on Cutting The Cost Of Christmas since I'm about to head into Christmas prep full steam to avoid being caught doing my gift shopping at the last-minute again (and inevitably spending more).




This year I'm trying to make as many gifts as I can. It's time-consuming and needs planning, but I'm trying to do a little each evening. I put some music on, brew myself a cup of tea (last night it was tea I picked up in Germany a while back after having some at Ju Honisch's place), and then work on gifts. I won't be giving out as many gifts as I usually do.

What about the rest of you? Are you doing anything differently this year to cut costs? Or do you have any holiday season cost-cutting tips in general? If so, please do post them here -- I'll compile them and post them all in an upcoming Blathering.

Meanwhile, do check out Annie Walker's blog!

Emily Strange and Rosamunde Strange

Images above from Youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com

I'm not sure how many of you read Inkygirl, my blog for freelance writers, but if you're familiar with either Emily The Strange and/or the Nate The Great children's book series, you might be interested in the following posts:

First post
and
Rob Reger response to my post

Thanks to my friend Ray for pointing me to the post where I first found out about all this.

DebbieOhi.com revamped

I've converted another one of my sites to Wordpress. My newest revamp is DebbieOhi.com, which has been needing an update for a VERY long time.

So much to do and not enough time! But that's one of my motives for converting everything to Wordpress. In theory, this should make updates much easier and less time-consuming from now on.

Beckett draws

Woohoo, Beckett has made her first post in Curiosity: A Graphic Novel Project by Beckett Gladney and Debbie Ridpath Ohi.

From Beckett: "We’re in the ongoing process of developing the look and feel of this graphic novel, so I thought a description of our working methods might be of interest."

I'm SO enjoying working with Beckett, by the way.

We have a good chemistry and most importantly, we're able to be upfront with each other about what we like and don't like. Both Beckett and I tend to be introvert/empathic types, but I think we both realize how important it is for both of us keep an open communication. Our working relationship reminds me a great deal of my working relationship within Urban Tapestry in that we offer critique when asked but know how to do so in a supportive and constructive context.

We also know when to back off and trust that the other person knows what she's doing, even if we may not necessarily agree completely. There's a very fine line between giving an honest critique and being too aggressive, but there's also a danger of being too afraid of hurting the other person's feelings and not being aggressive enough.

I feel pretty lucky to have found Beckett. :-)

Anyway, do check out Beckett's post.

Testing a cross-posting plug-in

Apologies for this relatively content-less post, but I'm testing LJ-XP, a Livejournal CrossPoster plug-in. There doesn't seem to be much documentation on the website, so I had to go hunting for more info and found some here. Now let's try using the "more" tag, which should hopefully translate into a link back in LJ-land...


In theory, this paragraph should appear on a different page in Wordpress (I've used this before in my Babylon Five Virgin blog), but also NOT appear in the cross-posted LJ entry. Let's see what happens. For those wanting to see what happens on my Livejournal page themselves, follow this link.

The photo above, by the way, is of one of my new Blush card designs. More about these in an upcoming post.

Update #1: Hmmm...the "more" tag doesn't seem to translate properly. Must investigate...

Update #2: Aha! I had copied the "more" tag given on the LJ-XP site, which was incorrect (it had a capital 'M'). Changing it to lowercase fixed the problem.