Hi gang,
I hope I'm posting to the right place. This is my first time using the forum and unsure but here goes.
I am an artist blacksmith residing and working in Knoxville, TN. I've been a blacksmith off and on since 1979 but mostly as a hobby except for a while during 2000 to 2004 when I tried making money at it. Now I have jumped in the deep end of the pool and hope to make a living from it. I have hooked up with a bunch named SCORE which is a group of retired business people who donate their time to act as mentors for people like me. I understand the basics of business because we ran our own electronics design consulting business for six years. What I don't understand is how to advertise and market my fine hand forged ironwork. We know that craft shows are not necessarily the best way from previous experience. But galleries seem to charge large amounts (in one case 60% !) for selling my work and they get a commission for anything I sell within 100 miles of them.

The ArtMetal server has been moved to a VPS account. Due to the move from one server to the other, we may see loss of entries, whether blog posts or comments, not appearing on the new site. This should only occur over the next 2-3 days. So if your posts are really important, please wait to next week to make them. I will add to this thread once the transfer is complete. Although, this thread may not appear on the new server so it may actually disappear.

Is ArtMetal going down? I sure hope not! But we are having some problems. Seems that our current isp is threatening to disconnect ArtMetal for too much usage of the CPU. I received a disconnect email a couple of hours ago stating ArtMetal had been disconnected. Some of you may have experienced this. Luckily, I kept my calm and asked nicely why such an abrupt disconnect when I was trying to correct the problem. Maybe they decided to temporarily turn us on again.

I have been making some changes to the ArtMetal web site interface and would like to know if any of the subscribed members are having any difficulties with posting or adding comments or logging into the site. I've had one user indicating he is having troubles with responding to comments and getting strange subscription notices.