I've been a little lax in the slide-scanning department (I need to get back on that!), but I've done a lot of work on the hort.net internals instead.

Probably the most obvious change that you'll see is that we now have Google ads in the image gallery. Right now it's experimental, but I thought since the ads were targeted it might help people find sources for plants that they're looking up. And of course, they should also bring in around $1000/year to offset equipment costs. If it turns out that they're too obtrusive, I might rethink that plan. Let me know how you feel!

I've also added a search box to the actual plant display pages in the gallery, so now you can easily search for plant names without having to go to the main gallery page.

The biggest change is one that most of you shouldn't even notice. I've taken great pains to update these pages to be XHTML 1.0-transitional compliant. In short, that means that they should display perfectly in your Web browsers. If they don't, your browser isn't compliant! Pages that have been updated and checked will have a little logo in the bottom left indicating that we meet the W3C standards.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who have contributed to the hort.net fund drive. Since the hort.net infrastructure upgrade is now nearly complete, we need to start thinking about features that should be added to the site. Nobody's given me any feedback yet, so I've just been working on things in an ad hoc manner. Let me know what you'd like to see here!

For those of you who missed the fund drive, it's still going on. There's more information about the fund-raising process and options at

    http://www.hort.net/funds/

Thanks, and happy fall!

Christopher Lindsey, gallery maintainer