As the Garden Grows

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Free blog community at Thoughts.com

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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.






Major hosting troubles!

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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.

The GTS membership is growing!

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Ok, so we’ve had a number of people in the last week or so requesting to sign up for Green Thumb Sunday.

I believe that I’ve only got one more request siting in my mailbox for a person who’s waiting to be added to the blogroll. I’ll be getting to that person shortly.

Green Thumb Sunday is growing weekly. Every week there must be 10 or so people that contact me requesting to join. Not all of them seem to get back to me to tell me they’ve added the blogroll to their site though.

If you’ve added the blogroll to your site but forgot to let me know please leave a comment in this post and I’ll visit your site and add you to the list if everything checks out ok. We’re always happy to have more gardener and nature lovers on the list.

I haven’t been the best lately about getting around to visit all the participating sites. I do hope you’ll forgive me for that. I’ve been so ill for the last few months, and I earn my living off the internet so more often than not I’m slowly puttering away at the build up of work that I have and that doesn’t leave me much time to visit websites – even though I really would like to do that!

I hope to rectify my lack of visiting member sites very soon!

I do hope that the majority of you are taking the time to try to visit some if not all of the GTS websites each Sunday or through the week? That is, after all, why I created Green Thumb Sunday. So we could visit garden and nature related sites, see what other people are doing in their gardens, perhaps get some ideas of our own, and to share information about plants and techniques. You might even make some great friends too!

Just like me, I know that everyone can’t get around to the sites every week, but do try. There’s nothing better than writing a post about something close to your heart, or perhaps about a problem that you are having and getting a response from others that may be able to help.

Now, if you decide to join the blogroll and meme after reading this post I may not be able to add your site in time for tomorrows Green Thumb Sunday postings … but take the time to make your own GTS post, and visit some of the sites on the Green Thumb Sunday blogroll so that the other members will know that you’re part of our little club.

Enjoy!

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