Today I spent a couple of hours looking for a good source of photos for different uses.  I would like to be able to put photos in a lot of “blog” posts on various sites and other projects. 

There is only one good and worry free way to do this.  Stock photography.  Sure most of the pictures that I will be using I could get on my own, but the headache involved would be huge.  For the $5 or so per image I think that it is worth it. 

There are a lot of stock photography sites out there, the one that I finally picked had a 10% refund for your first bunch of credits, and the more that you buy the bigger the deal.  There are also a subscription plan that you can download a as many images that you need.  This would be the best option for companies or individuals that have a large need for photos.

Me, well I have enough credits for about 100 pics and that should do me for a couple of months.  If I am making money then I may just get a sub subcription.  Oh yeah, the one that I am using is CreStock as suggested by ChrisG

It will be a good method to find out if the images will help with the conversions and the readership.

I was just looking through my last few posts and noticed that I have 0 links in them.  I am starting to wonder how important it is to have links heading out of your blog.  I know that in the past it was best to limit your outgoing links while maximizing your incoming.  That is what made directories and the like so popular.  I am starting to wonder if all of that has changed, and whether if you are linking to an authority type site does it really hurt your rankings?

I am going to have to look into this in the near future, it doesn’t mean that if I find out that SEO wise it is better to link in posts that I am going to do it for every post.  A lot of topics that I discuss here aren’t really worth linking, but I will be more active in posting links to articles, tools etc…. that I use, and may even spend some time looking for interested sites to link to.

I am a sucker for designing NEW sites, with NEW content and most importantly cool new development.  There is something fun and interesting about the challenges involved with starting a  new site and getting people to notice it.  I find that the interest starts to wane after a while.  It is like my first forums, I just loved tinkering with phpBB and buildig addons trading posts and getting members to register.  However that love affair died after a while and now I rarely post on any forums, and have a hard time even logging on to my own sites on a daily basis.  In fact I sold most of them a while back.

The same was with my first arcade site.  It took a bit to get it online and when I sold it I made a profit, but I would have made a lot more if I just kept it and kept working on it, but it just wasn’t interesting any more.

That all said, I am not sure that this new project that I am currently working on is going to have the same problem.  Sure it is a new site, but it is also in a crowded niche with a lot of other sites out there.  This is a site of love more than anything.  Even the custom app that I am in the process of building is more for personal use than anything else.  I do hope that other people will use it, but if they don’t I am sure that I am going to get more than enough use out of it for myself to warrant the time and money that I am putting into it.

Afterall, I do have a day job, and everything that I do online is more about a hobby, something to keep my mind off of the day job when I am not there than anything else.  As a plus it is a hobby that keeps my mind sharp and makes a bit of money too.  Much better than all of those hobbies that I could have that ultimately just costs money.

Last night I started to realize that I don’t have a dedicated credit card for my business transactions.  Sure I have enough cash to cover just about everything and I do 90% of my online business through PayPal, but I have been finding more and more that I think that having a CC to buy that offline stuff that it takes to run an online business would be great.  Especially since I do all of my business stuff through my own name so that I don’t have to register a business number and all of the headaches that takes.  I simply claim all of my earnings on my tax return, however for the last couple of years it wasn’t a big deal since I was able to claim expenses and have the business be revenue neutral.

This year however I don’t think that I am going to have that luxury.  I have not had as much time to do investing in online properties so I have been accumulating cash, which is not a bad thing, it just means that I am going to be taxed on it at the end of the year.

Last night I had a pleasant surprise, my new bike was home.  I have a friend building me a new bike since I wrecked my old one.  I have been without for about 2 weeks, and it has been tough.  I don’t think that it is “finished” but it is more than done to get me around before the snow starts to fly.  And then I can get all of the bells and whistles finished.

As for my CakePHP project, I haven’t had a lot of time to spend on it.  I am starting to think that it would be much faster to drop the MCV, but maybe that is simply because I am not sure what I am doing yet.  I am going to work on it as is until the new year,  I think that I should have a good BETA online by then.  In the meantime I am going to start to work on a front end.  This is going to be a ready made CMS, probably Drupal since that is what I know, however since Mambo is going Cake I may decide to look at that for this site, since I am going to have a cake install anyway.