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Got a camera? Win a prize!

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Alright my gardening friends – get your cameras out. We all know you love to take photographs of your gardens, macros of your plants and flowers, birds and other wildlife- well, why not enter your photograph in a contest and win some great prizes?

Photography Corner, the sponsor of this post, is holding their 2006 Photograph of the Year Content contest. They are giving away over $14,000 in prizes. The Grand prize is worth $3,639.95 USD. I’m not going to tell you everything that’s in it because this post will just get huge, but believe me, the grand prize has 12 different prizes in it, and all of the rest of the prizes are wonderful too.

The contest actually began on December 19th, and it will run until the end of January 2007. However the your entries must be submitted by midnight, GMT on Friday, January 12th, 2007. As long as the photos that you submit qualify with the rules of the contest they will be eligible for a chance to win. The Photography Corner community will begin voting on January 15th, and only community members in good standing, with 5 or more posts on the forum will be able to vote.

So what are those rules anyway? Well I’m going to keep it simple here- you can read the full rules over at Photography Corner. The photo’s must be 1024×768 px and 2048×1446 px in size, and they must have all of their EXIF information intact. The photos should have been taken in 2006, and you should be a member of the Photography Corner with at least 5 posts on the forums in order to enter the contest. You can only enter once photography per person.

The rules don’t sound too hard. I’m already a member of Photography corner, although I’m not sure that I’ve made 5 posts on the forums. Either way that can be done, and I think I can rustle up a nice photo to submit to the contest as well. I don’t know that I have any prize winning photos but I think some of mine might be good enough to place and perhaps win some kind of prize. It’s worth a try. The prizes are very nice.

Good luck to those who enter!






Set up an online database and chat for your garden group

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I just came across a site called GroupLoop.com and I thought that perhaps Gardening clubs might be able to use Grouploop to create a central area where archive files, minutes of the club meetings, and a calendar of the clubs upcoming events could be kept. All members of the group or in this case Gardening club would be able to access the files within the group and there could even be an area in which to chat on line once the Group was set up.

Grouploop could be used by the clubs board members to organize plant sales and perhaps fund raisers as well.

I’m talking about Grouploop as if it’s only for gardeners but any group of people from a business trying to organize it’s data and created an online meeting place for specific comitees to a family planning an annual reunion could use GroupLoop and it’s easy to use tools and services too.

I signed up and took an inside look at how to go about setting up a group and it’s very easy. The site is very well laid out with easy to understand instructions as you go along. Check out GroupLoop if you’re tired of passing emails back and forth as you try to organize meetings or a big event. It’s easy and it makes it simple to get organized.

Get your Newgie News

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I’ve been using a new site to view news lately. You’re going to love the name – It’s called Newgie.com. I’ve been using the site to stay on top of the news that I’m interested in hearing about.

It’s very easy to register on the site and once you are a member (free) you can start selecting news categories that you want to see when you first visit your Newgie page. The site ranks stories based on the interest that other users have shown. Which means that when you log in you have the hottest stories of the day literally right before your very eyes.

Newgie is very easy to use. You can navigate in two major ways. You can go to your My Newgie page and if you’ve already set up your preferences all the stories from the topics and categories that you selected will be there for you to browse through. Otherwise, you can click on your My account page and set up your preferences there, see the stories that you’ve viewed most recently, and manage your categories, RSS feeds and communities.

It was easy to start selecting categories that I was interested in. You can do all of this from your account page. Just scroll down to the categories section on your account page, then click on “Manage my categories”, from there you can see which ones you’ve subscribed to already or add more categories. Once you’ve selected the types of categories that you like you can adjust the options for each one- such as how many articles it will show you, their rank, and whether it will show you the full article or just a summary to begin with.

You can pick articles that you’ve read and rate them – just hover over the title of the article and description pops up – when you see the pop up you can add the article to your favorites, rate it, recommend it for other Newgies, or discuss it.

Before trying out this news site I used to visit Yahoo News quite often. What is different about Newgie is that when you log on you see the most popular articles of the day in your categories, where as on Yahoo News you get a mix of everything and they’re not always the top stories that you are hoping to find. I think I might like Newgie better than the Yahoo News site.

Newgie also lets you submit your own RRS feed to the site. If it’s approved you can create a Newgie chicklet so that others can add your feed to their newgie account.

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