On Friday evening, The Simple Dollar’s post on thirty free, open source productivity packages for Windows hit the front page of digg. I experienced a traffic flood like you wouldn’t believe, knocking my web site offline for several brief periods late Friday and early Saturday and rendering the site uneditable for most of that period. It was quite a rush to watch multiple pages being accessed every second for hours and hours and hours… I just hope a few of them stick around and keep reading The Simple Dollar. Then, on Sunday morning, a repeat performance occurred: see this post at Lifehacker. I plan on compiling the statistics on this and posting a detailed report late this week on how it impacted my blog. But all that excitement doesn’t mean that I stopped reading personal finance blogs, oh no…

Living the Life We Want to Live Let’s hear it for independent women who don’t consider a boob job to be an “asset.” An aside: I like this site so much, but the banner at the top is actually physically painful for my eyeballs, so I basically just read the feed and am scared to click over to the site. (@ no limits ladies)

As Housing Slows Down, Rental Units Soar, Guess What Happens Next? I’m guessing, based on this post, is that what happens next is the end of the hallucination. Seriously, rental prices are going nowhere because many builders are quite scared about going out of business and are renting their newly-built and unfilled townhouses. (@ the real estate bloggers)

Extra Weight, Higher Costs A brilliant analysis of the financial costs of being overweight. Informative and intelligent analyses like this one are why I read personal finance blogs. (@ get rich slowly)