An interesting picture from the Google Trends covering the popularity of top microsotck brands in the Google search and news.

istockphoto: 1.00 shutterstock: 0.66 fotolia: 0.78
dreamstime: 0.20  stockxpert: 0.04

Dreamstime and Stockexpert are stagnating on the bottom but Fotolia competes with two other “micro-monsters” on the top. This is quite interesting because it doesn’t exactly reflects the situation with my sales. Also  according to the regular earnings reports posted by Lee Torrents on Microstock Diaries the picture looks a bit different. You never see the Fotolia in the leaders.  Very good promotion or am I missing something as a contributor?

Imagine you are a micro stock photograph. Also imagine your are not working exclusively for one agency but contributing to the top 5: iStockphoto, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Fotolia and let’s say… Stockexpert.

Here is where the problem begins: each agency has its own rules, interfaces, submitting channels (HTTP, FTP etc.). Obviously, as the microstock marked is growing, there is a need for additional services and software both for and contributors and buyers.

I also have a couple nice ideas in this area, so  I’ve done a short research on existing microstock API (Application Programming Interface).

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Constructing the custom 404 page for Diorama I was looking for best practices. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is not the best place to start in this case. The page itself, however, has several valuable instructions concerning Apache and IIS tuning.

Google instead, brought me The 404 Research Lab with its nice link collection.

Apart from this: what happens if you get lost by real artist :)

North America - the continent I have never visited before. These were my thoughts at the beginning of 2008. Two months later I was sitting in San Antonio in the Hard Rock Cafe. Now Guanajuato - The Middle of Nowhere - is on my schedule. Is there anybody in our travel department, who can spell this name correctly? I’m very curious about this fact.

There are two continents left before I stop. Still not sure whether it is a statement or a question…

Recently on O’Reilly Radar I came over an interesting data mining project. The “Books that make you dumb” tries to correlate the student SAT scores and the books they read. Apart from discussion how usable these findings are, it is worth to check the right side of the picture.

Already ordered The Freakonomics by Amazon. To be read in train this week.

First benefits from performance optimization: I have discovered  “the mother of all queries” in phpBB.

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From the first month of my employment at SAP I was really impressed how the guys in support become crazy on SQL optimization. Deeply impressed on variety of tools for doing this on Oracle and DB2 I decided to carry out the same analysis on my own projects. The first question I’ve asked myself: “Do we have any native MySQL tools for sql optimization?”.

Yes, we do.

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I started my first serious project on Wordpress basis: Chess Club Eppingen (Germany).

It is far away from it’s final shape. I believe this is only the first step of the long and exiting journey. There are a lot of nice features and ideas came up with it. I hope I have enough time to speak about some of them in the next weeks.

Wired, wired bug. It happens with Sashin, it happens with phpMailer class, it happens everywhere. As three plugins crashed after each other with the same reason on my brand-new Wordpress installation, I’ve decided to invest an evening to find out the reason.

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Before disappearing in the next project I’ve decided to review my favorite tools. Most of them could look uncool for a real geek but, you know, they work.

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