Today’s Google Starred Items: “Dress Yourself For Free: How to Host A Clothing Swap”

Sierra Black: “I spend almost nothing on clothes. According to Mint, I’ve spent $199.50 to clothe my family of five this year. They say the average U.S. household has spent $1258.62. That’s more than six times my spending. …My friends and I hold clothing swaps at least once a season. We all clean out our closets of anything we don’t love that’s still in good condition. We get together and swap our cast-offs around. I’m a walking advertisement for the aphorism, ‘One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.’” I’m sure Sierra Black sees herself writing about “common sense”—but my squalid experiences here in the luxuriant poverty of fakery-filled Los Angeles tells me that Sierra Black is dabbling in political revolution.

“How to Save Money While Traveling”

Sierra Black: “Saving for travel is relatively simple: You set up a targeted savings account and put a little money aside each week or each month. Setting a schedule and sticking to it is the key to saving for anything. Travel is no exception.”

“Do It Yourself eBooks”

Brian Suda: “Under the hood, an ePub file is basically a zipped-up set of XHTML files and a few XML files to describe the table of contents and where to find the XHTML. Joe Clarke wrote an excellent article on the topic of ‘HTML isn’t just for the internet’. So your years of HTML knowledge is transferable to creating ePub files.”