We have been trying to figure out a good way to help financially support this blog. While we don't have a lot of overhead costs, we do accrue such things as ongoing design fees, technical support, and continued tweaks to the site's functionality. We are hoping to make up for the costs of what we've spent over the past few years when we had other design and hosting fees as well. That, plus we would love to subsidize the travel to some of the industry conventions, such as ZestFest and the Fiery Foods Show.

While we have eschewed commercialism to this point, we were presented an idea which would help The Hot Zone make a little money. That is, if we have potential customers who would buy the product. Many companies have apparel with their logo on it, such as T-shirts, bowling shirts, hats, bumper stickers, keychains, and the like. We could do this, too, but we would want to add a few more logo choices than just the one we have for our business cards.

You can see

the sorta site we have

in mind, and it's already on the web. CaJohn's site is up & running, and you can visit it by clicking on this link:

CaJohns Fiery Foods apparel store

That is pretty much how the store would look as a virtual kiosk, but would offer Hot Zone Online stuff. With the price outlay being mostly the up-front kind, this begs a very simple question:

Would anyone who reads this blog on even a semi-regular basis be interested in buying stuff like this?

Regardless of your answer, please leave a comment and let us know. You may want to visit the CaJohns site first so you get an idea of what we would have. Let us know and we will go from there.

Thanks in advance!

- Joe & Linda