My Favorite Places on the Web.

I love the internet. Probably a little too much 🙂 It can be a bit of a time sucker-I could spend hours reading about how to be frugal or crafty and never actually DO anything to be frugal or crafty!

As everyone does, I have some favorite places on the web. I’d like to share mine with you-who knows, maybe you’ll find a new favorite.

Without question my A #1 favorite place on the web is the Frugal Living Forums at About.com. For those of you who are not familiar with it, About.com is a big site that has tons of sub-sites about, well, everything! One of their sub-sites is the Frugal Living site. Pat Veretto is the total frugal guru and host over there. She has tons of articles on just about anything frugal under the sun. She is also one of the moderators on the forum.

I have been visiting the Frugal Living Forum for about 6 years now. It is one of the nicest places I have ever come across on the web. People there are so friendly and understanding, I have almost NEVER seen anyone flame anyone else. Folks are so willing to step up to the plate for you with advice and encouragement. We have people from all walks of life, all socio/economic classes and from very varied religious, political and lifestyle backgrounds. And with the very rare exception, everyone is non-judgmental and friendly. That truly is a rare thing on the anonymous web where people seem to feel free to say rude and thoughtless things that they would never dream of saying if they had to look you in the eye. Stop by and say hello-you won’t be sorry!

Other great frugal sites are The Hillbilly Housewife (especially her recipes) and the associated forums over at Prarie Homemaker (where I read but only occasionally post). Also the Dollar Stretcher is a weekly online newsletter with great articles. You can also browse through the archives for years worth of great stuff.

My second favorite place to visit is Craftster. Craftster is an hipster “alternative” crafting board. I have only posted there a few times but love to go in and see the interesting things that folks make. I specifically love the knitting boards-it is so great to see all the different projects that people make. Some of the stuff totally doesn’t appeal to me (uh, a knitted uterus anyone? Crocheted vibrator cover? I don’t think so) but if you don’t like it, then just don’t look at it! All in all, a very interesting and creative group of women and men that truly run the gamut age wise (from young teens to grandparents!)

When I need a new recipe I always head over to Recipezaar. I like that you can have a free online cookbook, and the fact that anyone can rate the recipes with a star system and comments. I figure, if 20 people have all made a recipe and say it is great, then you probably have a winner. By the same token if 11 folks have all said to cut the salt in half, well, you probably want to consider doing that to. Most of the recipes are from members, and they are totally searchable. You can further refine your search results by such critera as method of cooking (bake etc), number of ingredients, course, special equipment (crockpot, pressure cooker, microwave, breadmachine etc) and many more.

For catching up with my family we have a standard membership MyFamily website. I visit it daily to see if there is anything new. This site was free when we started it 1999, but now the standard membership costs about $30 a year. Only one person has to pay that, and then you can have as many members as you want.

My family’s “Myfamily” site includes all of my nuclear family, as well as a few aunts and uncles. It is a preset webpage with sections for news articles, pictures, reviews, recipes, files, polls you can set up, a calendar and even your own chat room. Any member can post or make comments. In my family it is frequent to see a picture of the grandkids posted with 7 or 8 people making comments on who they remind them of etc. Since my siblings and I are spread all over the world, we use the news section to update each other on what is going on in our lives. Even my sister who is deployed to Iraq can get on there and tell everyone how she is doing, or see her nieces and nephews. I like how easy it is for everyone to use-even my grandfather gets on and posts comments! Anyone can go to the site and sign up for a free 30 day trial to see how they like it. I highly recommend it.

For search engines, I’m a Google girl. I just love mining the internet for information, and Google is always my first stop for that.

For gardening, the Garden Web site has forums on just about every topic you can think of. They even have a frugal gardening forum. I tend to do more reading than posting on that one.

For kids printables I really like the DLTK-kids site. She has tons of character themed stuff to print out. Chore charts, birthday party stuff, coloring pages, paper dolls. She also has an entire section of crafts and specifically scouting crafts. Lots to keep me occupied there.

For knitting, Bev’s Country Cottage, Knitting Pattern Central and the online knitting magazine “Knitty” are all full of great free patterns. Why buy patterns when you can get them for free!

Well-checking out all those sites should keep you all busy for a while. I think I’ll take tomorrow off 🙂 Please feel free to share your favorite sites with the rest of the readers here.