Designious sells dozens of $15 themed packs with many vector images in each one. The categories include Floral, People, Nature, Buildings, Skulls, Scrolls, Halftones & Grunges, Wings, and more. These packs are also available in Mega Packs and Giga Packs, which are great if you want to buy multiple normal packs, because you can get them for half price! They also have dozens of striking T-shirt designs for $10 each.

If you want to try before you buy, you can go to their free downloads page, where you can find free vector packs, T-shirt designs, icons, and some stunning illustrations.

My favorite floral design is “Floral vector pack 19“, which is filled with beautiful vines and flowers! Most of them are meant to be used as abstract silhouettes, but you can still color the vines and flowers separately with a little more work. Just copy and paste your image, and remove the part of the drawing you don’t need (for example everything except a flower). Repeat until you have separate images for each part you want to give a separate color to.

I have also tried the “Cartoon girls vector pack“, which contains 17 vector images of women in different poses, with different hair and clothes, and of different nationalities. My first thought when I saw them was that they would be perfect to use in personal websites and blog designs! I really love using vectors instead of bitmap images, because it’s so much easier to change the colors to my liking. I had great fun changing the colors of their hair, skin, clothes, and even their make-up! Try doing that so easily in Photoshop

Users who don’t have Illustrator might have some problems with the parts of the images that are colored with gradients - I use VectorDesigner, and some of the girls from this pack were missing clothing or hair! Luckily I also have ZeusDraw, and was able to get around this problem by importing the EPS file as a PDF, and then converting the PDF to objects. But if you’re lucky enough to have Illustrator, you shouldn’t have any problems

Browsing through the Designious vector packs has given me a lot of ideas and inspiration for new designs, and I can’t wait to get started!

If it doesn’t show up in the feed, then I really don’t know what’s wrong, as I’ve had the feed validated with no problems. In this case I will have to contact Feedburner to see if they know what’s wrong, but hopefully I can get it fixed soon. Thanks for your patience!

Update: Okay, I don’t think it’s a problem with Ecto anymore. I’m pretty sure now that the problem lies with Feedburner. I have posted in their Google group, since I couldn’t find a contact form or email address, but hopefully they will respond soon. Does anyone know how to contact them directly?

Supported sites include Amazon, YouTube, Flickr, SmugMug, Google, Yahoo, deviantART, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, and MySpace. For the full list click here. It is also possible to enable Cooliris on your own website or blog.

I have been waiting a long time for Cooliris to be compatible with the new version of Safari, and now that it has been released I am suitably impressed. The images don’t completely load until you click on them, so when you select an image to enlarge it’s a bit blurry at first, but the loading time is quite fast - and I have a terrible connection! It also considerably speeds up image browsing and searching, as there’s no need to load a new page after every few images, and it only fully loads the images that you are interested in.

To see everything Cooliris can do, just hop over to Cooliris.com, and watch the introductory video. You need to see it in action to fully understand how great it is!

1st Prize - 17,000 ECs
2nd Prize - 10,000 ECs
3rd Prize - 6,000 ECs
4th Prize - 2,000 ECs
5th & 6th Prizes - 500 ECs

Good luck!

It made me realize, though, that trying to come up with posts to write all the time is quite stressful, and decreases the fun of having a blog in the first place. I know that everyone says you have to post every day to have a successful blog, but it kind of defeats the object if blogging starts to become a chore.

So I have decided to not stress about it anymore, and just post when I have something interesting or helpful to say. This might mean less posts - although I’ve always tried to post interesting or helpful things, I won’t be actively trying to think them up anymore. So if you don’t want to check back often and would rather be notified when I update, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email.

Also, I was thinking of focusing a bit more on what this blog was originally going to be for: graphic resources, links, tutorials, downloads etc. for the cheaper Mac graphic programs like Pixelmator, VectorDesigner, ZeusDraw, Drawit, Gimp, and Inkscape.

But I will still post any interesting info I find about blogging, and any other pixelly subjects

The offer
I had signed up with RevResponse a long time ago, but I’ve been so busy lately that I hadn’t gotten around to setting up my page (or mini-site) yet. I finally logged into my RevResponse account yesterday to set up my page, and saw that they’re offering users $50 in the month of July just to write a post about them! For those of you who don’t know what RevResponse is, it’s a company that has a wide range of ebooks, whitepapers, software downloads, etc. to offer for free on your site, and you get paid every time someone downloads something.

Setting up my page
So after reading the announcement, I quickly went to the Site Setup Wizard so I could set up my page and see how everything works. You can choose between the default layout or a plainer template with a white or transparent background. You can then customize them as you wish by modifying the code in the “header” or “footer” text boxes.

I wanted my mini-site to look like my blog, so I copied my logo and stylesheet links and pasted them into the header. This changed the text size and color, but also aligned category list to the center of the page, which meant readers would have to scroll down quite far on long pages to find it. I tried changing all the alignment attributes in my stylesheets to “top”, but that didn’t make a difference. My blog’s logo was also aligned right on the left edge of the page, and I couldn’t get that fixed either. After hours of cutting and pasting various parts of my stylesheets to try and get only the relevant styles, I finally gave up - my stylesheet was just too confusing for me (I didn’t write it, and so have no idea what half the stuff is for ).

Exceptional customer service
I then emailed Karen, one of the staff, for help. I couldn’t believe it when less than 10 minutes later I received an email back saying one of the staff was working on it and she would get back to me as soon as possible! 20 minutes later Karen emailed me again with the link to my new site. They had even added my page links at the top of the page and my footer at the bottom! Unfortunately the page had the same problem with the category list that I had in the beginning, but I emailed them about it and once again it was fixed in about 10 minutes! You can see my page (and download some great ebooks and magazines in pdf format ) at http://bitsandpixels.tradepub.com/

I was really impressed with the RevResponse staff’s friendliness, helpfulness, and prompt customer service! They practically set up my page for me! Their customer service far surpasses any other company I’ve had contact with for a long time.

Are there any negative points?
So far I’ve only found 2 things I don’t like or that could be improved on, and that is:

• The downloads are not available for everyone. There are quite a few I’m interested in but can’t download because I don’t live in the USA. But I don’t think they can do anything about this, because it’s probably the companies who created the products that decide who is eligible.
• While there is a very broad range of downloads available (at least if you live in the USA), there aren’t downloads on all subjects. For example I have an arts and crafts blog I’ll be opening soon, and it would have been great if I could have offered my readers some downloads for that subject.

But these points will probably not be an issue for most of you, and they really do have a very broad range of categories. So if you like the idea of getting paid for offering your visitors free downloads that interest them, sign up at RevResponse and set up your page!

The University Kid is a young entrepreneur blog that I recommend you all check out - it’s not one of those "make money online" blogs that try to sell you everything under the sun just to get their cut of the sales. A day or two ago Jason even gave me a tip that would have saved me money and lost him an affiliate sale!

Jason has a straightforward, humorous style of writing that is a pleasure to read, and he’s also very helpful. You can also check out his blogging forum, Blog Premiere, and meet a whole lot of great bloggers.

Market Leverage is an affiliate network characterized by their great customer service. The staff is friendly and helpful, with a great sense of humor too! (check out this post)

The cause
Two Market Leverage affiliate managers, Debby Phillips and Jen Fluker, are training for a 60 mile walk to raise money for breast cancer, and have entered the Blogging Idol challenge in an effort to win and collect more money.

How to help
Gaining the most subscribers out of all the Blogging Idol contestants will win them the cash prize, so subscribing to their blog will help and get you entered into the competition. You can also help by spreading the word to help them get more subscribers, by donating money to the cause, or by donating Entrecard credits so they can advertise on more blogs. You could also buy a spot on their Scratchback widget for $5, or display their 125×125 banner on your blog.

I think it’s a great initiative - and not only will it help increase quality comments (which I absolutely adore receiving, by the way ), but it should also help reduce the bounce rate that was the only downside to using Entrecard.

I say quality comments because SezWho has a rating system, so if users post spammy comments then they will see their rating fall quickly. I haven’t gotten spammy comments on Bits and Pixels, but I know they’re a problem on many bigger blogs. SezWho also has an optional filter system that can be used to show only comments with a certain rating, so you can choose to read only the highest quality comments - this is great for blogs that routinely get dozens (or hundreds) of replies on each post.

But the best thing about SezWho is that you can find all comments and blog posts left by other commenters all over the web - so for example if you find someone who writes great posts, you can check what other blogs they have been commenting on, and maybe find more great content!

This will also be a way of getting more traffic: Person A leaves a comment on your blog, then leaves a comment on another blog. Then Person B reads Person A’s comment, and decides to check out their other comments. He then finds your blog thanks to Person A’s comment!

To read more advantages of using SezWho, see JoeTech’s post, and to read all the details of how it works, see Entrecard’s announcement post. You can also participate in the contest to earn up to 5000 EC!

I love the new "Press this" feature, and I really hope "Gears" for Safari will be available soon - I need all the help I can get with my slow connection! The word count and image captions will be very useful, and the new image control and drag-and-drop reordering of the galleries will make orgainizing things much easier. The ability to select a range of checkboxes by shift-clicking was a good idea, but unfortunately I noticed that it only works if the checkboxes you select after the first one are below it, and not above it. You can read more about the new features at the official post.

Before upgrading to the new version, be sure to create backups of your posts and database. You can use the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin, or the WordPress Database Backup plugin if you want to upgrade manually. But be warned - I have used WordPress Automatic Upgrade twice now, and both times it has failed to reactivate my plugins. So before upgrading, also make a list of your activated plugins so that you can quickly reactivate them if WAU fails to do so.

Upgrading to the new version of WordPress will also replace your smilies with the default ones, so if you have replaced them with custom smilies, be ready to reupload them after the upgrade.

I’ve also found quite a few offers for courses or software to make money online with affiliate marketing and niche stores, and they look so good! But with my recent experiences (that’s not the only one, but I’m hoping the other will still work out before I post about it), I’m hesitating to enroll. It’s also difficult to find honest reviews on the internet - everyone is promoting the products because they want their cut of affiliate sales!

The thing is, the 2 offers I’m most interested in are both on sales that are going to be ending soon (like in a few hours or less), and while I know many people say that and then don’t actually put the prices up, these 2 seem to have a solid reputation, and so will probably keep their word.

I’ve decided to wait until my parents come home and talk it over with them; after all, if I do decide to go for it, it will be their money I’ll be spending! And if the offers aren’t available anymore by the time they get home, then it just wasn’t meant to be.

Either way, I think it’s a good idea to learn more about affiliate marketing and niche stores, and I’ve downloaded a lot of ebooks on these subjects now. If I find any good ones, I’ll let you all know!