Archive

Free Stock Images

One challenge while you are blogging is to find appropriate photos (stock images) that are free for usage. While Google and MSN Image Searches will list images, they may not come with right to use. I normally try and substitute with the photos I have taken – of course this is not possible always. For these scenarios I found these sites that offer Royalty Free Images.

  1. Stock.XCHNG (Tons of Free Images)
  2. Morguefile (Also free images)
  3. iStockPhoto (Not free, but Affordable prices)
  4. Corbis (Excellent images but expensive)
  5. GettyImages (One more Paid Site with good images)

Free image downloaded from Morguefile.com Free image downloaded from Stock.XCHNG

Me and dasBlog Software

I have been using dasBlog Software for running this blog ever from its start. I am extremely pleased with the software, its:


  • ease of use
  • ease of backup. just zip four folders – SiteConfig, Content, Logs & Themes
  • zero-install. just xcopy, no databases to install or configure and
  • price point (free!)

In the last 4 years I never had problems with dasBlog, it just worked, Period. Yesterday night was different – my blog was down overnight, and it was purely my fault.

I have been following Scott Hanselman’s blog about the daily builds of dasBlog, supporting Windows Live Writer Beta2 and Akimset Comments Spam support. I got adventurous, kept copying various daily builds; on top of it I posted some pre-dated posts from Windows Live Writer Beta 2. I suppose I somehow managed to corrupt the data-files for last two days. Today morning I realized my goof-ups, deleted two days data files, came back to release version of dasBlog, posted the two entries back. (Kiran: If you are wondering what happened to your comment, you know what happened now!).

Today when I visited the Sourceforge data repository for the dasBlog builds, I saw that I could nominate my favourite project to their Sourceforge.net 2007 Awards. I went ahead and nominated dasBlog to “Best Technical Design” category. I request all other users of dasBlog to do the same. 

Finally, after nine months dasBlog is getting a new fully supported release. All the new features like Akimset support, Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Support and more are expected in the release on 18th June 2007. That’s good news and I am waiting…


BTW, I went nuts doing this post. As everytime I submitted, all the images were coming broken. It turns out dasBlog replaces all occurence of its name as hyperlinks and it can be configured in the settings.