Wordpress Questions

I relly like the NextGen gallery plug in as well.

Powerful and flexible and easy to use!

WP won't allow you to promote or advertise using their site but if you just use the software and don't have them host you can. So your URL can't be mysite.wordpress.com it would have to be hosted on your server.

phpBay i "hear" is a dang good tool for ebay affiliate action.

I fussed around with embedding video's over this weekend and found it to be a real mofo ... to do what I wanted.

Longtailvideo.com is a good place to start, and the plug in I ended up with uses tech from Longtail ....

Simple Thought Productions

I used that flash embeding plug in because ... I sent an email on a sunday eve to the owner and had 3 replies back n forth with the guy. Cool and responsive. Most other plug in developers no longer support their plug ins. I thought that was cool.

if by "them" you mean "theme" i would suggest a magazine-style template.
personally, i like the artemia: Arthemia: Wordpress Magazine Theme Released - Jubel and The Unessential
and the openbook:
Free Magazine WordPress Theme: Introducing OpenBook

which, with some modifications comes close to revolution (which is no longer free, sadly)

yep.. a pretty static index page (with only *some* updates / pics / blog headlines / latest blog entry), an updated blog page in a subdir (/your-main-keyphrase.html) and some pages with related infos (/phrase1.html, /phrase2.html, etc.)

i agree, the revolution2 is prolly one of the best out of the box themes.. but with a little bit of knowlegde you could make a free theme look just like that.. takes about a week but it's worth the time.

did you try simplemachinesforum? (Home of SMF: Free PHP and MySQL forum software) never tried it but i keep hearing it's the closest you can get to vbulletin when it comes to free software.. personally i use vbull and all i can say is: it's worth the price!

of course you'll get there! its really just a matter of time.. perhaps change your title tags accordingly to the terms you want to get indexed for and social bookmark your forum at digg, reddit, delicious, etc. ..using your forum title as news title and write some related text in the descriptional text.

like:
your forum's called: "hello kitty foums"
your forum's title: "hello kitty forums - three related words"

social bookmark (at digg or wherever):
news title: "hello kitty forums"
description: "my forum is all about hello kitty - we feature some related words and it's a great community and all.. check out my kitty forum - there's some hot cats online and you'll have a good time".

why i am saying this? ..google gives more weight to links that are "surrounded" by related text - this is also true for "social bookmark" links that are constructed like this:
"title"
"description"

man.. okay, i admit.. this really doesn't belong in this thread but i thought i'd share.. hope you don't mind!