@Peaz

Fresh with a tip at ShutterStock forums, I found a book that used my photograph I sold via ShutterStock as the cover photo! See the image on the left? That's my photo I took at Colmar, Bukit Tinggi!

Whee!

The book is titled "Rabbits (Animal Planet Pet Care Library)" and upon checking, it's in stock in the Kinokuniya bookstore at KLCC. So, in a couple of hours time, I'd hope over to go and grab that book for keepsake. Haha.

If you are a regular microstock seller, try searching for your name in Amazon Books. You might just find your photos used as photos too!

If you want to find out more about this whole selling photos thing via Microstock, well, I've posted some brief information (albeit a little outdated here and there) here at my other site: Earn Microstock. It's a great way to get some side income to finance your photography hobby. That's what I do and make use of my earnings from selling stock photographs through these microstock sites.

Ever thought how great it would be if you can somehow blog on many various blog system and have it all aggregated into a single weblog? Well, wonder no more as I found a great way to do just that.

It came to me when I discovered that my Sony Ericsson mobile phone could directly post a photo blog right off my phone to Blogger and no other. There's no way to even manually configure where I can post the blog to from my phone. Thus, the only way to bring in the photo blogs would be to somehow pull it from my blogspot account into this blog which is powered by Serendipity.

Then, a quick search in Spartacus revealed a rather interesting event plugin called RSS Aggregator.

RSS Aggregator
Display entries from multiple RSS feeds ("Planet"). IMPORTANT NOTE: Updating and "feeding" your Aggregator must currently still happen manually via Cronjobs or similar. Call this URL with your custom timing interval: http://www.yourblog.com/index.php?/plugin/aggregator

Interesting...

If you're on Serendipity and have the same problem with the RSS lately (since one of the recent updates, I can't quite remember which) and gotten the following weird error, then fret not anymore! After consulting with Garvin, the creator of the Serendipity blog engine, I've been enlightened with the answer and the fix should find it's way to Spartacus soon too!

Error as seen from Firefox

XML Parsing Error: syntax error Location: http://www.blogurl.com/index.php?/feeds/index.rss Line Number 1, Column 1:Query failed:

SELECT 
^

Anyways, the error is related to the category templates event plug-in. It seems that it's still using a fixed string for the database table instead of a dynamic prefix name which it should be. Thus, a quick edit to the file and you'll get RSS back up and running. If you are up to editing the file yourself, the culprit file is at /plugins/serendipity_event_categorytemplates/serendipity_event_categorytemplates.php. See below for the codes to edit.

Old Codes:

$conds[] = ("(e.id NOT IN (SELECT e.id FROM serendipity_entries AS e
LEFT JOIN serendipity_entrycat AS ec ON ec.entryid = e.id
JOIN serendipity_categorytemplates AS t ON ec.categoryid = t.categoryid AND hide_rss = 1))");

$conds[] = ("(e.id NOT IN (SELECT e.id FROM {$serendipity['dbPrefix']}entries AS e
LEFT JOIN {$serendipity['dbPrefix']}entrycat AS ec ON ec.entryid = e.id
JOIN {$serendipity['dbPrefix']}categorytemplates AS t ON ec.categoryid = t.categoryid AND hide_rss = 1))");

That's it! Credit goes to Garvin for pointing out which is the file with the bug. Cheers!

It's pretty amazing when you put your goals and dreams down. You would eventually get it if you really want it badly. It's just a matter of when and how. Why I'm talking about this now is because I just realised I've now gotten something that I've put down for quite a while.

I've had this cool Kenneth Cole notebook bag listed in my StyleFeed for quite a while now. In fact, I just new that I wanted a nice messenger-style notebook bag. Not particularly something from Kenneth Cole, just something similar. So at the end, I chose to select this particular item that was already listed in StyleFeed into my list. The photo of the bag is as the image on the right.

3 months came and went.

Recently, my colleague had a business trip over to the states and he asked if I wanted to get anything there since he's going to check out the factory outlets for discounted items. At the moment, I was kinda shopping for a notebook bag as my at-the-time-current bag was torn quite a bit. So I just said, a messenger style notebook bag, something like the Kenneth Cole ones.

Eventually when he got back, he gave me an early birthday present, the bag of course. It turned out to be a leather Kenneth Cole bag. A nice one too. He also shared that this was the only one available in the outlet. Phew. Lucky me right?

Then came today. As I checked my blog, I noticed something familiar on my StyleFeed. Yup. That's right! The bag listed in the StyleFeed is exactly the same model as the one my colleague bought for me! I didn't even tell him what to get! Talk about co-incidence! Heh!

If this experience thought me anything, it's that dreams and wishes do come true and it's important to visualize and put them down. A scrapbook with photos of your dreams, a digital list like StyleFeed and whatever else that works for you. And no, there's nothing kiddy about this. This really is serious stuff!

Join in the pledge!

And here's what they've got to say about it.

Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We're not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome. By the way, the official date for the launch of Firefox 3 will be posted here soon - so check back! Join our community and this effort by pledging today.

I've pledged. So when will you too?