I’m moving on to new pastures as a designer, and the stock photography website which I launched almost a year ago is now up for sale. Check out the auction or take a look at the sale website and let me know if it interests you!

Our Stock Works is a fully completed stock photography website which launched in 2006. It currently has over 8,000 photos, and 600+ contributors who have uploaded images and are registered on the website.

What are we selling?

The sale will give you all the rights to Our Stock Works, including:

> The domain names ourstockworks.com and ourstockworks.co.uk
> All database files
> All website (PHP and HTML) files
> All photographs (over 8000)

Please note that the photographs are not being sold to you - the rights to these remain the photographers, but you have the ability to market and sell them under the ‘Our Stock Works’ banner.

We have a hosting agreement with a provider which offers the technology required to run the website and 40GB disk space and 150GB bandwidth per month, for 43 (around $80) pounds per month. We recommend keeping this package as the website is designed to run on this server - but you can obviously move elsewhere if you wish.

The website uses PHP and MySQL, and an advanced knowledge of these is essential to take over and run the website.

Read more

I received an email today from PayPal informing merchants about an impending update to the look and feel of the PayPal website:

As one of our valued PayPal merchants, we would like you to know in advance that PayPal will soon be adopting a brand new look.

We thought it will be useful for you to know about this sooner, especially if you have a website, so you can prepare to use the new PayPal logos and buttons.

What to do

If your site features hosted buttons and images with PayPal logos, you don’t need to take any action. These will update automatically.

If you host buttons and images with PayPal logos, we recommend that you replace the current images on your site with the new ones. In a few weeks when the new images are available, we’ll send you instructions on how to download them from our website.

Why it’s important

We’ll be educating all PayPal customers about the new look. By updating your images soon after the day of launch, you will let your customers know you are a current PayPal merchant and it will help them feel safer making online purchases.

PayPal is such a cornerstone of modern online trading, any alterations to the design of their site will be interesting. Will they be adopting more standards based design? Integrating some more AJAX and front-end functionality? We’ll have to wait and see - should be interesting.

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!

We came fourth! So close to winning a trip to San Francisco, but not quite close enough. It does mean that I’ll receive a Dell laptop which is reward enough for participating in such a great scheme. Congratulations to all those who took part, and I’d urge you to look into the competition next year if you are young enough to fit into the age boundaries.

Have a look at the ThinkQuest site for more information, and check out our entry which almost made the mark…

In 2006, I approached a student called Kishore from India about the possibility of joining his team for an international competition called ThinkQuest run by Oracle. They have won the contest in previous years, and it was something that looked really interesting.

We worked really hard for several months, spending a lot of time on the site and meeting to chat online every week. It took a great deal of time, and we finished the project a month or so ago. The results and winners are announced on the 14th June so I’m waiting for that date with baited breath.

If we come in one of the winning positions, we will receive a laptop and a trip to Think Quest live, an event in San Francisco later this year. It would be a really great honour and it’ll be interesting to see whether our site was good enough to come in 1st, 2nd or 3rd place.

You can take a look here and judge it for yourself! I’ll keep you posted on the outcome…

Coda is the latest application from Panic, the creater of other great apps such as Transmit - by far the most popular FTP program on the Mac. It’s aim is to combine all the tools you use regularly as a designer into one easy to use application. It combines a version of Transmit with code editing features, preview capabilities and keeps track of everything you change to make publishing your site a breeze.

I’ve been using it most of today, and have found it to be incredibly useful. I’ve moved most of my projects across into Coda, and will hopefully get to grips with it more and more over the coming weeks. The only downside is that it doesn’t have any blog editing capabilities, so I’m still having to write this post in the good old Wordpress control panel. Add that to the mix, and it’d be a program I could do all my web editing in. Period.

Have a look and try it for yourself - it’s really great.