Gather Little by Little

Photo by: My Wife

I am really enjoying my vacation from my “real job”. I’m getting some time with my family and my kids and gaining additional appreciation for what my wife does and deals with while I’m at work. The real fun starts today at 3:00 when the kids come home and start their Christmas vacation.

I’ve also had some time knocking out a few items on the ever growing to-do list for Gather Little by Little. Some various changes I’ve made in the past few days you may notice are:

• Made the main page show full articles instead of “teasers”. This will allow you to read whole articles from the main page, rather than having to click through.
• I cleaned up the area below the main article content and removed an amazon ad I had there. I just felt it looked too cluttered…I can’t stand clutter
• Changed from using the ShareThis plugin to the AddThis plugin as it seems a little faster. These plugins allow you to submit my articles to various social networking sites such as StumbleUpon (to which I am highly addicted), Digg, Reddit, etc. AddThis is the little oval icon you’ll see that says “Share” at the bottom of each of my articles. I’ll write more about StumbleUpon after the first of the year, but check out plonkee’s article about it until then. You can find links to all of the social networks sites I’m a member of at the bottom of my about page.
• I fixed an annoying issue with my comments that caused them to not format correctly. Was able to fix that as well. Becoming quite the CSS guru here lately.

New M-Network Member

One other big announcement this week is the addition of a new blog to the M-Network, Cash Money Life. Welcome to our network Patrick. We’re really glad to have you.

Carnivals this week

I participated in 5 different carnivals this week:

• Carnival of Personal Finance – Where my article submission wasn’t included due to the host not agreeing that it was personal finance related.
• Festival of Frugality – Where my article Money Saving Monday Tip#19 – A better shave for less money was included.
• Carnival of Money Stories – Where my article Chase doesn’t really love me they just act like it was included.
• Carnival of Debt Reduction – Where my article Thank God for Credit Cards! was included.
• Carnival of Money, Growth and Happiness where my article Money Saving Monday Tip#1 Again – PriceProtectr was included.

Thanks to all of the hosts that included my posts for doing such and excellent job!

Here are my favorite personal finance article picks for the week:

• Cash Money Life – Earn $1 Million By Not Buying a Nintendo Wii!
• The Dough Roller – To Make Good Financial Decisions, Think Like Mr. Spock but Act Like Captain Kirk
• Plonkee Money – it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep
• Christian PF – Let’s give away an iPod for Christmas
• I’ve Paid For This Twice Already… – My Goal As A Grownup Was To Have Just Enough To Not Struggle
• My Two Dollars – This Is The Reason We Rent An Apartment And Don’t Own A House.
• Being Frugal – Lessons Learned From My Hippie Brother
• Moolanomy – Are You Giving the Gift of Consumerism?
• Single Guy Money – Achieving my Net Worth Goal
• Brip Blap – Russian orphans and a generous December
• The Simple Dollar – Christmas, Money, Family, and Love
• Green Panda Treehouse – 10 Cars That Can Last 200k
• Wise Bread – I Shouldn’t Have to Pay for This! A Consumer’s Guide to your Rights – The article is great, but what I really loved about this article was the picture!
• My Dollar Plan – Why I Won’t Spend the Same Amount on the Kids
• Blogging Away Debt – Someone Who Faked His Own Death to Escape Debt