First of all, my apologies for the recent downtime of the site which has been a result of several problems I’m not going to go into now. I’ve moved the site to a new server and all seems to be going well. A lot has happened in the last few weeks! I’ve launched the new Design Shack, which I’ll feature at a later date. I’ve set up and continued contributing to the Our Stock Works Blog, with a great deal of progress being made on Our Stock Works itself.

I have also finished work for summer, and am ready to head off on holiday for two weeks to Austria and Germany which I’m thoroughly looking forward to. It should be a great break, and a good chance to shoot some photography. I have plenty of posts to write, and look forward to writing more over the summer. It’s good to be back!

Design Shack has been a phemonemal success since it’s launch, with over 1 million visits, and a quarter of a million clicks to our various featured designs. The current design and layout has been perfect for us so far, but not it’s time for a change. We aren’t looking to offer anything different - just integrate a couple of new features and make the whole experience easier to use. We’re adding a lot more AJAX and JavaScript for some fancy visual effects.

We’ll now have news snippets, and an easier method of submitting your site for listing. It’ll be a piece of cake to browse designs by views, clicks, type, colour scheme and more and we’ll have a wider array of RSS feeds to keep you up to date.

It’s almost ready to go, with some graphics courtesy of Veerle who has been really helpful. There’s a sneak preview on the right, but you’ll have to wait a couple more weeks for the unveiling. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope it receives a good response!

This is a really interesting tool, which effectively shows what your site looks like in the form of a graph.

The key is:

• blue: for links (the A tag)
• red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
• green: for the DIV tag
• violet: for images (the IMG tag)
• yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
• orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
• black: the HTML tag, the root node
• gray: all other tags

Found via ProBlogger