SCCNZ
Everyday I have this little ritual where I like to go and check out my stats. I tend to be most interested in the number of recent referrals who have come to my site. It always surprises me when I open up a new referral because you never know what you’re going to see.
Today I was pleasantly surprised and my first thought was WOW, this site was using my Pixabella 04 HTML theme. They had reworked the theme by giving it a new background color and had a custom banner designed. I also liked the idea of using the 125 x 125 advertising block for images.
I really like how my Pixabella 04 theme has been reworked and I am happy to have the Sports Car Club of N.Z using my Pixabella 04 theme.
While I am at it I may as well give them a bit of a plug as they have been kind enough to leave my link in the footer. If you’re based in New Zealand and are a bit of a rev head, appreciate sports cars or even like to restore cars you should go and check out SCCNZ site.
Pixlr Online Image Editor
Ever needed Photoshop or Gimp, but didn’t have them at the time? Check out Pixlr, a free online image editor with layers, and a bunch of filters; it’s just like using Gimp or Photoshop Elements, except there is no software to download and install.
For quick and easy image editing or banner creation this is an absolute gem of a website. All you need is an Internet connection and the Flash plugin for your browser.
Admittedly Pixlr isn’t intended for graphics professionals, in fact they say the editor has been designed for bloggers and social networkers who need to do some basic image manipulation for the web.
Despite this proviso, Pixlr is remarkably powerful and does almost everything I’ve ever needed an image editor for. It’s only downside is that it can’t (or won’t) allow you to save a layered image, they only offer jpeg or png in the save menu.
Reading the Pixlr blog it seems the application is still under active development, in fact multiple undo and redo has just been added, so maybe saving to a layered document format is on the todo list.
Be very careful selecting a web developer who offers a full service where they register your domain, provide hosting, design your site, and do the SEO on it.
I’ve come across too many people who end up with problems especially regarding their domain name because they have a dispute with the developer over something and don’t realise that their website address doesn’t actually belong to them.
My advice is to always register your website URL first, then get a developer to design and host your site. At least this way if you do have a dispute you can redirect your domain to a new host account and you won’t lose your online address.
This is especially important if the domain name is your own name or your business name, or you make most of your income from it, in fact if you can’t afford to lose your domain for any reason then I strongly suggest you follow this advice.
Imagine the cost of litigation to reclaim your URL, or worse, the cost of building a new brand while someone else benefits from your previous efforts. It’s just not worth it so make sure you have an account with a separate registrar.
Virtual machines created with Parallels, VMware, or Microsoft’s Virtual PC, are pretty much standard equipment for most programmers and web developers so that code can be tested on another operating system or browser.
Having a Mac with OS X I can’t run windows software without either having a separate windows machine, or installing a guest OS using Parallels.
But I’ve had some problems with Parallels recently, the new version won’t accept my old license code so I have to downgrade again, or upgrade my license.
Since I’m only using it to play a few old Windows games and test designs in IE, I thought I’d look around for an alternative. I hate dual booting, my reason for buying a Mac was to avoid viruses and dual booting into Windows just gives me nightmares.
Luckily Sun Microsystems have been working on a free virtual machine called <a href=”http://www.virtualbox.org/”>VirtualBox</a>, which looks almost exactly like Parallels or VMware, seems to work just as well as them, and best of all it’s FREE!
At that kind of price I can afford to test it and then not feel bad if I only use it once in a while, whereas the paid versions really need to be used often to recoup the cost in having them.
Web Design | Pixabella | 
February 17, 2009 9:42 am | 
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