As the Garden Grows

What's blooming today?


You are here: Home / Archives for Web and Technology

Free blog community at Thoughts.com

by

thoughts.jpg

I was asked to do a write up of Thoughts.com blogs – a 100% free online blog community.

Thoughts.com was given an appropriate name since it was created as a place for people to share their thoughts. It has since developed into a community of bloggers from all over the world.

As free blog communities go there are a few features that you’ll find on Thoughts.com that you won’t find elsewhere.

Unlike other blogging communities members of Thoughts.com can share videos, photos, music files and podcasts. Registered members can even rate other members videos, podcasts, blog posts and photos. In fact, if a member wanted to be able to make posts in the community blog sections of the site they would need to have been rated by other members and have attained a rating of 4 in order to post. So participation and interaction with other members is obviously encouraged.

I realize that many of the people that read my gardening blog have websites or blogs of their own, but not all of you do. Perhaps Thoughts.com might be a site to explore since you can upload your own photos and videos for others to see. If you were to sign up for a free membership you could use your blog as a journal and make entries about your plants or gardening methods.

The best feature of the site is of course that you can upload so many different types of multimedia all in one site. Other blog related communities or for that matter even personal blogs often need to host their photos, videos and podcasts on a variety of sites and then embed code into their blogs or posts in order to show others what they’ve created. Since you can store all your multimedia files right on thoughts.com I’m sure it’s easier to use photos and videos in your posts or point others to these files without having to leave the site.

Another great feature of Thoughts.com is the fact that they reward their top members with a free trip each year. This year they’ll be taking five of their most active members to Las Vegas. It’s an all expenses paid retreat. You can read all about it on the site but the winners will stay in a 4 star Las Vegas resort, have three free dinners and two free shows awarded to them, as well as having round trip airfare from anywhere in the continental United States.

Now that sounds like a pretty sweet deal. I can’t think of any other blog community that does anything like that. The best part is that all you have to do to win is be one of the most active on the site which is easy enough to do if you are uploading photos and videos, having them rating by members and rating other members items as well.

Check out Thoughts.com if you’d like to start your own free blog and socialize with others. Don’t forget to visit the community forums while you are there.






A site to find or submit great gardening articles

by

I just visited a website called Thoof for the first time. Thoof is a site that offers personalized news. By this I mean that it contains news articles, videos, websites and photographs from sources all over the world.

You can search through the site as a visitor for any topic that interests you, but once you become a registered member of the site Thoof keeps track of what you’ve been reading or searching for on the site and provides a personalized page for you that contains all of the stories that suit your personal taste.

I wanted to tell you about Thoof today because I used it to search for gardening articles and it returned three fantastic articles that I can use to get ideas for my own garden, or perhaps even write about in my own way on this site. Now I’m sure that the next time I log into Thoof it will show me any new gardening articles that have been added to the site since my last visit.

The article that I found most interesting was called “Beyond the Garden” and it discusses landscape architecture, particularly in the form of the green roof. This is something that has interested me for quite a while. I can’t create a green roof on my current home, but if I ever purchase a house where I might be able to do this you can bet I’ll be creating a green roof. Yet another area to garden in and it will help keep my home cool in the summer!

Since registered members of Thoof can actually submit articles either by filling out a short form on the site or by using a bookmarking tool in their browser I might submit my own gardening articles and those of any other gardening blogs that I find interesting and helpful.

In this way I can use Thoof to promote our gardening hobby and the authors who have written fantastic gardening related articles too. Would you be interested in doing something like that as well?

Of course you can go to the site and read any of the top stories or submit articles about pretty much any topic. Articles about Sicko – Michael Moores latest movie, seems to be the hottest topic on Thoof today. I just chose to focus on gardening because it can be hard to find excellent gardening articles – particularly on current news related sites.

Visit the site for yourself and see if you can find some articles of interest. Remember, you can always submit articles that you enjoy as well.

Major hosting troubles!

by

I’m sorry that I missed Green Thumb Sunday.

I don’t know if any of you read my other blogs but I’ve had some major problems with my web host. Last Thursday they sent me an email telling me that they had moved my domains over to another server because something on my sites was over using the CPU resources on their servers.

I’ve spent the last several days going over all my sites, directories and folders, in order to try to figure out what might be causing the problem. Surely it isn’t purely because my sites are too busy?

I upgraded the software for 9 blogs and two websites. Yeah … that was a lot of work. That’s why I was missing in action.

To top it off on Sunday something went wrong with my main blog Tricia’s Musings and my web host disabled the index file so no one could access my site. We had a guest over for the weekend and Sunday was Canada Day so I didn’t even turn on my computer until the late afternoon. Naturally I almost had a heart attack when I saw that my site was disabled!

My sites are all updated and fixed up and I never did find out what was causing the problem. To the best of my knowledge my sites are still overusing resources. I may have to move them to a virtual private server.

So please forgive me for not posting any Green Thumb Sunday posts. It’s been a rough week.

Meta