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.

Something that has been on my ‘to do’ list for a while is to create a seperate site to differentiate this blog from my web design and portfolio work. I love blogging and writing online, but I think it’s important to seperate that from my professional work. With that in mind, I’ve launched my new portfolio which is a simple one page design, showcasing my most recent work and showing how simple it is to have a website created.

This also ties in with some promotion I’m planning to do over the next couple of months. I have what seems to be a vast holiday panning out in front of me over summer and I want to make sure that I’m not stuck for something to do. I imagine I’ll be getting a job as well as designing on the side - it should be a productive summer!

I’ve just upgraded and downloaded Mint v2 for a few of my websites. Whilst I don’t really agree with Shaun charging an extra $20.00 to upgrade, he has every right to and it’s a worthy upgrade. The look and feel of the design is much more refined and everything is easier to make sense of. The new graphs are greatly welcome, and some of the new pepper is excellent. I’m testing it on a few domains before making the decision to upgrade several as I’m not sure how absolutely vital it is at the moment. Once the Peppermill starts to fill up and the community kicks in it should be a great deal more worthwhile upgrading.

I like the new bolder look. It’s much easier to navigate around and different pieces of information are prioritised better. The preferences are also slightly easier to use now. I had a brief experiment with Shaun Inman’s new RSS pepper but couldn’t get it to work - I’m quite happy with my Feedburner pepper so am sticking with that for now.

I’m going dark this evening. No email, no NewsFire, no Internet Browsing.

“What? That’s crazy!” I hear you say. “Today is MacWorld - the biggest and most significant technology conference of the year!” That’s very true, well observed dear reader. I love Apple conferences, but to be perfectly honest I don’t get the full appreciation of watching one if I’ve already heard what all the announcements are. Reading the latest news as it’s announced on a small text based ticker keeps you up to date, but it’s nothing like the effect of hearing it first hand from Steve himself.

Call me crazy, but this year I’m waiting for them to put up the Keynote video - hopefully it will be sometime tonight, but if not - tomorrow morning. I want the full charismatic impact of whatever’s announced.

Here’s to a great MacWorld!

This auction is for a fantastic condition Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F717 5.0 Megapixel camera. It’s a stunning professional digital camera, with a wealth of features. I’m selling it as I am currently raising money for education fees but am very reluctant to part with it. The lens quality it second to none, and you can see that from some of the pictures taken with it.

The DSC-F717 is renowned as being the serious photographers camera of choice.

Read on and take a look at the camera!