I have recently launched a parenting blog called From Rat Racer to Positive Parent. This coincided with the revamp of my London Cheapskate's blog, which has been renamed Ecothrifter. These blogs keep me pretty busy and as I have landed some journo assignments, I have decided to make this blog dormant. Do keep up through the blogs mentioned above - just click the names!

Over eight years I've been running a website called London Cheapskate (www.geocities.com/londoncheapskate), which covered all that was free (or cheap) in London. I didn't tout it around because my web design skills didn't do justice to the content but it got quite a few clicks, was linked to several websites and won an award.

True to its name, the site was hosted for free on Geocities and as I had a free account I couldn't use it for commercial purposes, making it a labour of love.

When I moved out of London in August 2008, London Cheapskate turned into a musty archive of information rather than a fresh source of what was going in the capital. As I was considering its future, the decision was taken out of my hands when Geocities announced that it was closing down its free website building service in October 2009.

Aside the fact that a paid platform for London Cheapskate sounds like a contradiction in terms, the fact that I'm not living in London any more would make it hard for me to collect new information and glean off-the-beaten track destinations, so I've pulled the plug and taken my site down.

All is not lost, though. I learnt a lot through the process and I might find some space for the best bits in the archive section of this site. Farewell to London Cheapskate and to all those brilliant Geocities' sites that made headlines and/or entertained me for many years!

"Business minister Baroness Vadera has denied she is out of touch after claiming she could see 'a few green shoots' of economic recovery," states an article on BBC News, dated 14 January 2009.

You might well wonder why I'm reporting such an old piece of news, but since then the green shoots have achieved mythical proportions. Even estate agents are using them to massage a similarly mythical spring bounce in the property market.

It has been a cold, hard winter, but, aside my garden's green shoots, I haven't spotted any other promising growths. Closures, redundancies and tight budgets have crippled the media industry.

Like many other freelance journalists, I've been tempted to join bidding sites that advertise hundreds of writing opportunities, but I'm not prepared to write 10 articles for five dollars. Instead, I've been donating my writing skills to worthy causes and tried to diversify.

I dusted off my language skills and started teaching Italian to private pupils and at an evening class. Teaching slots in well with my other activities and even if things pick up and the mythical green shoots germinate into hardy shrubs, I will keep it up.

I'd love to hear from colleagues who successfully added other strings to their bows. Get in touch by emailing simone@simonecastello.co.uk.

Best for concise proofreading: this site has a small selection of common proofreading symbols and abbreviations, plus links to subjects relating to copyediting and rewriting.

Eagle eyes needed: a site offering a copyeding text. Spot the errors and find out how good you are.

Clean up your act! Basic advice for web writers, including tips on fact checking, consistency, house style, common errors, etc.

Women do it online! This is the Women Writers Project's Proofreading Guide. The WWP is an American organisation, but the guide is particularly interesting because it features issues relating to the html code, such as how encoding issues affect proofreaders, how to treat printing irregularities, special characters, etc.

In the past few years, there has been a resurgence of marches and petitions - the most notorious linked to the Stop the War campaign, which is still up and running. However, most protests are conducted in the smaller arena of local politics.

When I was living in East London, I supported the fight to keep a local pool open (the protest made the national papers as it was the only Olympic-style pool in an Olympic Games host borough). Read more here.

Other local issues were the closure of a well-used library and the demoting of a local landmark, the William Morris Gallery, whose expert, well respected staff were made redundant to give way to part-time workforce with no relevant knowledge. Both causes generated ongoing protests. The William Morris Gallery's plight united local artists and William Morris Friends in marches, fundraising events and virulent criticism in many forms (words, songs and paintings). If it weren't for their efforts, the council would have given the collection away on a permanent loan to a museum outside of the borough. Now it seems even the Walthamstow's Dog Track is in danger. Read more about these campaigns here.

I left London this summer but found more 'civil unrest' here in Rugby, against the local firm Cemex. There are other groups in town fighting the firm's plans of burning rubbish to generate fuel but the efforts of this selfless green campaigner are certainly impressive.

I've been reading online discussions about the credit crunch. Surprisingly, some businesses are still doing well. While catching up with my forums (I'm an internet addict and I'm member of so many I can hardly do any work) I unearthed a funny blog entry called Crunch Creep. If you are not prepared to weather the credit crunch storm, here is some advice from an unlikely source (no, it's not Gordon Brown). Called 10 tips for "Battening Down the Hatches", this blog entry is a must. Quite a few suggestions win my very own thrifty brownie points.

I'm launching my site while doom and gloom dominate the news. Granted, it's not the best of times to boldly go into cyberspace, but in my career I've already weathered slowdowns so I've battened down the hatches to run my ship as tight as I can.

I'm forearmed. 'Save and recycle' has always been my motto, the legacy of an upbringing in a financially-strapped household in the volatile Seventies. Even in times of prosperity I stuck to my frugal principles. In February 2005 I started a blog called London Cheapskate on the themes of recycling and creativity. What I wrote then still rings true: 'There's never been a better time to be a Cheapskate, not only it's environmentally friendly, it's trendy, too.' Technorati Profile