This morning’s discovery:
According to the site:
metalchasers is a site that promotes and supports the field of jewelry and metal arts.
Here Jewelry and Metal Artists come to network, find inspiration and are free to express their creativity. . . .
This site is for beginners to advanced artists with absolutely no membership fees or restrictions. Feel free to browse around, or sign up and start meeting others who share the same interests.
The young site is very well put together and has quite a few members already. I decided to join.
The registration went smoothly, but I hit a snag when my confirmation email failed to arrive. (You must receive the confirmation email in order to activate your account.) You do need to check your spam filter for such emails, of course, but for some reason mine didn’t show up there either. I’ve had the same issue before when using my beadjewelry.net email account . . . so I’m beginning to suspect that the hosting company has some additional spam filter that I’m not aware of. (If so, it’s only blocking things I sign up for, and not ads for “E.D.” medications or body-part enlargement, unfortunately.)
Anyway, I submitted the Metalchasers contact form to report my challenge, and site admin Marcy emailed me back almost immediately. She had manually confirmed my registration, and her email was very courteous.
The Metalchasers site is set up as a social networking site (like MySpace). You can create your own profile and your own customizable page. (Mine is still boring because I haven’t modified it yet.)
You begin with one default “friend” (just like with MySpace), and of course you can add friends over time whose avatars will appear in the friends box.
In addition to a profile page, you also have:
- a gallery where you can upload images of your designs
- a blog, and the ability to add other blogs to your favorites list or browse recent blog entries
- a place to view streaming video related to jewelry making, and to add your own video stream (from a source like YouTube)
- access to the forum and chat
- a place to post ads to sell your wares
- groups you can join or create
- a collection of jewelry-making polls to participate in - or create your own
- and several other interesting things, including a planned “MCtv” page where you’ll be able to view video channels devoted to jewelry making and metal arts.
As you can see, there is a lot there already, and more unique services are planned. If you’d like to give it a try, and find out what the Metalchasers future holds, click here to sign up!
