A few years back, I opened an account with BlueHost.com and registered www.thekitchengardener.com I deluded myself into thinking that I could earn some ad revenue by posting gardening related content and showing ads through Google AdSense. I posted a series of long articles and had plans to host a discussion forum and even make my own movies. I maintained the site for almost a year, but never got enough hits to earn more than a few measly bucks from Google. It finally dawned on me one day that the basic problem is that the Web is up to its eyeballs in content. Youtube was just taking off at the time, piling massive amounts of video on top of all the other content already available. In order to stand out, you've got to do something really unique, or work like heck to develop your own mountain of content. All's well that ends well though. I registered another domain with BlueHost to start selling custom kitchen knife blocks (woodworking is my OTHER favorite hobby besides gardening!), which so far has been far more lucrative than selling ads on a gardening site. A few months ago I accidentally uploaded my knife block pages to thekitchengardener.com - woops! I haven't even bothered to fix it. :-) Anyway, I'm not trying to discourage you, just sharing my personal experience. If you're looking for a hosting company, I would have no problem recommending BlueHost. They are reasonably priced ($90/year if I remember correctly), offer a lot of extra tools to run scripts, monitor usage, etc. etc. Their tech support department has been helpful on the few times I've needed to contact them. The other nice thing about going with a hosting company is that you get your own email addresses - lots of them! I think I can create like 1,000 email accounts or something crazy like that. I only use 2. :-) For software, I use FrontPage. It took some time to get used to, but I quite like it now. I try to keep my websites simple anyway, so I only use a fraction of what FrontPage can do, but I don't like tedious tasks so using an editor is much more convenient for me than coding HTML by hand. FrontPage has recently been replaced by SharePoint Designer, which I have used once or twice. From what I can see it looks pretty similar to FrontPage. Also note that if you want all the flexibility of a hosted solution but don't want to pay a hosting company, you can host it yourself. Recipe: 1) Download a VMWare virtual appliance containing Apache web server. Also download VMWare Server to run it on. Both are free. 2) Configure your cable modem/DSL router to pass port 80 traffic to your virtual webserver. 3) Register a subdomain with a dynamic DNS provider. Most of them will work with dynamic IP addresses (DHCP), and are usually free. You can alternatively see if you can get a fixed IP address from your ISP (they will probably charge extra for this) and then point your domain to that address. This is all free, but there will be a pretty steep learning curve if you're not technical. -Diggity

Mia, I think it is a conspiracy. My husband kind of tricked me to go look at the 2012 Equinox because he thought I might like to have a newer one. The salesman quickly grabbed the keys and brought one up to the front for me to drive. I didn't drive it but I did get in and look. When we got the one I have now, I had six grandchildren here for a few days, and they ran an TV ad for zero percent financing in Joplin. He wanted me to go right then and find one. I had already driven one and thought they were OK, but we had just bought a new truck, so I wasn't looking for a car. He said what do you want on the car. Since we live in an area with quite a few hills, I didn't want to give up my four-wheel drive. My mother was still living at the time and I was having to make a lot of 300 mile trips so I said I wanted cruise control. He called from the dealer and told me they had two left with four wheel drive and cruise control. He told me the two colors they had, and I picked one. You can see how really excited I get over a new car. Needless to say, he has liked it a lot better than I have, but it's OK. LOL Now GardenWeb has this big ad, that every time I open a thread that says Chevy Equinox Sale 2012. I'm glad to know that it is on your computer too and that I'm not being targeted. LOL After hearing the forecast for this week, I probably should be shopping for an ark.

I've made this suggestion in the past, but I still think it's a valid one (although not to me at this point in my life). When we are on the main page of the cooking forum, there is a link for related forums. I think if "kitchens" was considered related and you could navigate back and forth with the two forums, that would make life easier for many people. Many people migrate from "kitchens" to "cooking" and still go back to give advice once their new kitchen is done. Also, I think it would be helpful if a thread indicated if anybody posted to it since you last visited. I know the new email notification helps that now, but there may be a thread that I am following but haven't added my two cents yet; however I would still like to know others' contributions. On the Pinterest/FB issue, I am totally addicted to Pinterest. I use it for many things, including recipes. However, I use a completely different identity because I don't want to connect it to FB. None of my friends or family need to know I just copy others' ideas and I'm really not that creative ;) I have posted so much personal information on here at a very difficult time in my life. I knew it would always be out there for the world, but it wasn't something my friends/family could easily stumble upon, so I was a little more free with my thoughts. I think of the conversation side of this as a place to b*tch out my sister when I'm mad at her or just cry with my cyber friends. I don't want that to link up to FB. Those are some of the people I'm b*tching about or am mad at. ;)

1) Better search. The current search is not only limited, but buggy (it doesn't return all matching results, even if the posts are recent, for example). 2) Ability to search multiple areas at the same time without searching the entire forum (for example, just Home Decorating and Paint, or Bathrooms and Plumbing, or Building a Home and Remodeling, or Appliances and Laundry Room, etc.) 3) If you're on That Home Site, search should default to THS, not to GardenWeb (this should be a trivial fix). 4) Additional subject areas for topics that always get a lot of questions (Fences and Walls, Roofing, Contractor Disputes, etc.). 5) GW should host its own photos so they don't disappear later -- it's so frustrating to read a thread and not be able to see the photos that go with it, or to have to create yet another account to log into a separate photo site. 6) A simpler way to add a link to a post 7) The ability to add multiple links to a post 8) The ability to designate certain posters as favorites so you could easily see their recent posts (your favorites list should be private, though). 9) A dashboard where you could see your recent activity (threads that you've started, threads in which you've recently posted messages, your watched threads, postings by your favorites, your clippings, etc.) so that you don't have to use search or go to your profile to find this information each time you log in The ability to set up rules for alerts. For example, you could set a rule that sends you an alert whenever mythreedogs (one of the Home Decorating rock stars) posts a photo. No limit on saved clippings Very often, posts aren't very helpful because the reader doesn't know where the poster is located. (This is also true on THS, not just on GardenWeb.) To solve this problem, GW should require all members to provide their zip code, which members could keep hidden if they choose. No matter whether a member's zip code is hidden or visible, GW should ALWAYS display that member's hardiness zone on their profile and posts, as well as a GENERAL description of their location. Members should be able to control just how specific the geographical description is (Greater Boston, Massachusetts, or New England, for example). Ability to edit your own posts and to delete posts that no one has clipped Please recruit forum moderators who would have to the power to delete inappropriate posts and to edit other people's posts (for example, to correct misspelled words in the subject line that would prevent readers from finding that thread The ability to tag threads as helpful or inappropriate The ability to select a font. The ability to control how GW appears on mobile devices