As the Garden Grows

What's blooming today?


You are here: Home / Archives for forums

Do you read gardening magazines?

by

I have two subscriptions to gardening magazines, one of which I don’t seem to have been receiving lately. I don’t know about magazines in other parts of the world, but the two major Canadian gardening magazines are pretty good. Like any magazine they have a little too much advertising but overall I enjoy the information in them.

I get Canadian Gardening – that’s the one that I don’t seem to have had a copy of recently – and the magazine also has a pretty good website and forum so if you are craving gardening info and just can’t wait for your magazine to arrive you can always visit the forums and join in on the discussions there.

They also have a lot of great How to articles as well as articles about popular plants and gardening techniques.

The other magazine that I subscribe to is Gardening Life. I enjoy both magazines, but if I had to decide which website I liked best it would be Gardening Life’s website. It’s much more professional looking and easier to navigate.

Gardening Life also has forums, great how to articles and plant profiles as well as tips on entertaining outdoors, a section called curb appeal and just like Canadian Gardening they also hold regular contests. I just entered two of the three contests they are running. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll win the trip to British Columbia!

What are your favorite gardening magazines? Do you have a subscription or do you just buy them from a store when the mood hits you?






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.

Free forum for your website or blog

by

Have you ever thought about how great it might be to have a forum tied into your website or blog?

If you’ve thought about it, but perhaps haven’t taken the steps to create a forum because some forums require installation and a steep learning curve, you might want to check out the GoBoardz – Free Forums where you can create your own free forum in minutes.

Just sign up and create your forum in a few simple steps. It’s that easy.

At GoBoardz you can use images from your Photobucket account, and embed Revver videos. There’s also support for RSS feeds. Plus, a new version of the GoBoardz system will be coming out soon. Version II will have even more features and web 2.0 type of updates.

If you do create a forum don’t forget to promote it on your website!

Meta