Hi all,

I am writing to the gifted community here at PG land for a bit of advice re the establishment of a simple special interest website.

I work here in Melbourne Australia as an intensive care nurse. I'm not an employee of a particular hospital but work casually, although full time, through a nursing agency and have done so for more than ten years. It's a bit like being a freelance tradesman, and offers certain advantadges for those who are more into hunting and conquering rather than nesting and relating, as Jerry Sienfeld might say.

However, agency nurses here in my town are a fragmented and disunited bunch. We see each other on the job frequently and exchange industry gossip, but have always lacked a central point at which we can widely and easily exchange information, advice and opinions about various aspects of our work or workplaces, let alone respond to any industry developments in a coordinated fashion.

It struck me that a web based point would be the ideal answer to this problem, rather than a paper based newsletter. Now, I have never been a devotee of Facebook, My Space or Twitter etc., too old and disinterested in all that background white noise, but perhaps one of these might be the way to go for an agency nurses website, at least to start with.

I envisage something that hopefully won't need much moderating for language or libellous content, but has provision for articles of interest, and also hopefully the capacity to start and contribute to discussion threads. Naturally, it would be a bonus if it were free.

Can you guys recommend a web host or soloution that fits the bill? Eg. I seem to remember that Geocities offered free web site hosting some years back, no doubt in exchange for advertising rights on it, which would be of course OK.

Thanks for any pointers you might be able to give me.

Cheers, John