For those who may be interested, here are a couple of shots of my blogging setup, where design work is done from and Design Shack managed.

It involves a Macbook, Ikea desk, tropical plant, additional screen and Logitech Mac Keyboard & Mouse:

As the popularity of Design Shack grows month on month, we have decided to expand it further and increase it’s functionality. As well as offering the same great CSS designs as before, Design Shack now contains tutorials, news articles and a whole new way of looking at our gallery.

You now search by how you would like to be inspired - by Colour, Layout or Category. This opens up a new realm of functionality for CSS gallery websites and enhances navigation greatly. It’s much easier to submit your website to us, and navigating around is a breeze. Designs load faster and are much more optimised than before.

We hope you enjoy it, and feel free to send us your feedback!

Recently, blog spam has been getting a little out of control here. I’ve added a service called Akismet which should hopefully work to prevent most of the spam getting through, we’ll see.

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!

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

I’ve just been invited to the recently opened Newsvine as a beta tester, and am very impressed with the slick design and functionality of the website. It has the potential to be an amazing news resource, and a great ad revenue tool for those who want to write their own content.

The main aim of the website seems to be to create a huge news resource, with lots of people contributing articles or linking to other interesting content across the web. You receive your own ‘column’ when you sign up (mine’s http://mac.newsvine.com) which you can post to, and maintain as your section of the vine.

I think this is going to be big! If you haven’t yet got an account, I’ve got 20 to give away. Just comment or drop me an email and I’ll be happy to send one through.