whaas, Late to the party, but your pics look great. LOVE your paperbark, and I did not know about the Itea either. Will take that one to my female half, to see if it is something she wants. I'm pretty much the trees, she's pretty much shrubs and beds. Our color has been screwed up here as well this year. Near record lows followed by record highs, and back again did not help this years show. Here there is actually got two peaks in color. The second of which is ongoing, and largely composted of Oaks, and a few others. Side question for you please. On FK, you said you can call them and get them to ship you small plants. Do you know if that applies to most everything? Thanks in advance. Lastly, check out the link below. A rarity that I ran across by accident last week that I did not know existed. Arktrees Here is a link that might be useful: Shocking Gold

ilima The most important thing to make sure you turn up on google, after making sure your homepage has the right search words in the opening text, is to get your site address referenced on as many other webpages as possible - directory listings, private webpages etc. Often its a case of contacting the site webmasters and proposing an exchange of links. To get a google spider to visit and catalogue your website click on 'about google' on their homepage then add URL. You only ever need do this once.

OK, most everybody probably knows this about Photobucket, where a lot of us store our pics to post, but this is a reminder to all. Go to your PB home page. On the Blue Banner that leads over to your name; move your cursor over the "Home" button;on the banner that drops down below, click on "Stats". This will show you just how many views each of your posted pics have had in a day, a week and a month. Kind of eye-opening! For example, on August 4th, the day after I started this thread, there were 155 views of the photo I posted of my mantel. That's just one day for that one pic. There were more both before and after that. You all should check your own to see for yourselves. Now, I was about to tell you to check your privacy settings over on PB, but the drop-down button for it only appears infrequently, which has me a bit concerned. Just a few minutes ago, I could go to my PB Home page. Go to the blue banner; hover your cursor over the Home button; on the drop down banner below it, there sometimes is a Privacy button. You click on that and then click on Privacy & Emails Settings; click on Privacy Settings/Content Privacy. There . . . if you can get there (they don't make it easy), check the box "when I upload, permanently remove information about where my photos were taken". Also there, uncheck if it's checked, the box that says, "allow others to copy my photos and videos". That is, if you want to keep you photos a bit more private. If you do get there, I'd strongly suggest reading all your options and making decisions then and there. You may not be able to get back to your privacy site for a while. Just a heads-up. Lynn

There are a few ways to make a web page appear on google. The basic way is to just wait.. google has "spider apps" that go out "crawling" the web adding new sites to their ranks. Defining "key words" allows you to designate the specifi information you want to be associated with your page/blog. You can also POST your blog or page to google... basically you send a request to be added to the google ranks rather than waiting days or a week or so for a google spider to find you. You can also PAY to increase your ranks-- I definitely wouldn't go that direction. SEO, Search engine optimization is a science-- and for businesses it can get tricky and complicated. For a blogger, I would just be mindful of the keywords used. Another thing is that you "retrigger" the google spider and "freshen" your listing by adding/editing pages. A more active blog will be more frequently updated. I wish your son much luck and much fun with his new project! I'd encourage him to do some of this research too. I know it isnt as creative and fun as the graphics and videos will be but it is all part of the project. It's also invaluable knowledge in this information age!