About two months ago I sold my first website on Flippa.com, a site dedicated to buying and selling websites and domains. Launched earlier this year by a team from the internet resources site Sitepoint the marketplace is like Ebay for buying and selling websites.

The site I sold was www.ipodhistory.com, I originally bought the site from the Digital Point Forums about 18months earlier for $180 (£90 at the time), it was my most expensive site I had bought and was a relatively big gamble. Over the following year and a half I invested in search engine optimisation, added new content and grew a community. In this time I tripled the traffic and advertising revenue. 

I listed the site on Flippa and immediately received interest and a number of offers. After around two weeks the site sold for $2000 (£1300). I was paid through PayPal and the transaction went very quickly and smoothly. 

You can list sites on Flippa either with an auction style listing or where people submit private bids for a site. Flippa charge a listing fee with various optional extras (about $28 for my site) plus a final value fee of 5% (with a cap of $498). 

It's sad to see the iPod History site go from my portfolio but I'm more than happy with the return on investment. 

On Sunday disaster struck, my hard drive corrupted and OS X wouldn't boot. I feared the worst but had been backing up for the past two years using OS X Time Machine. Could it be as simple as restoring from backup to a new drive?

My first job was to install a new hard drive, this is easier said then done in the all in one iMac. Fortunately this video from camodesto went through step by step, first removing the glass front, then the aluminium case and then the screen. Finally you can replace the hard drive, I opted for an upgrade to a 1TB drive.

After booting from the Snow Leopard DVD I created a partition on the new hard drive then restored from Time Machine. The process took around seven hours to copy my 300gig of data from the External drive.

When I rebooted my Mac had been restored to 5pm on Sunday, 90mins before it had died. All my files were restored, even my Firefox tabs were saved.

For the past four months I have been developing a new service called Shopinsky. I've been excited to talk about the site (and may have let slip a day early by joining the Facebook group) however had to wait until launch before I could blog about it.

The idea is simple, each town in the country has a Shopinsky Page, businesses can join Shopinsky to be part of their local town. They can post messages via the website or sms that are distributed on the site, to the local Twitter account, a RSS feed and a daily mailing list.

For businesses Shopinsky offers a great way to connect to local consumers through social networking services. Building up a following on sites such as Twitter or your own blog is a lot of work, the idea with Shopinsky is that audience is already there for you, all you have to do is send your updates/offers.

For shoppers the site offers a great way to find out about local businesses, offers and freebies. We have made it as easy as possible to interact with Shopinsky and understand that people want content delivered to them rather than having to search for it. Therefore people can bookmark their towns page, subscribe to the RSS feed in their news reader, follow the local town on Twitter or subscribe to a daily email. 

Shopinsky is also great for tourists who want to find out what is on offer before visiting a town, they can easily see local restaurants, shops and services all from the towns page.

The site is based on Drupal 6x and heavily uses CCK, Imagecache, Views and a number of custom made modules. Where possible I've tried to keep to the Drupal api's and systems. For example messaging uses the Drupal comments system, categories uses Drupal Taxonomy and profiles are built from content types and custom fields.

By using Drupal as the starting blocks we have managed to save months (if not years) of development and adding new functionality is a much easier process.

Find out more on www.shopinsky.co.uk

I use many of these plugins on a daily basis and would recommend them to any web developer.

1. Firebug

Firebug allows you to inspect elements on a web page and see the associated attributes. You can edit in real time allowing you to quickly make changes to an elements colour, position, border or behavior. 

Firebug has a number of extensions that will be covered later on in this article.

2. Web Developer Toolbar

The Web Developer toolbar has various web developer tools. The most useful I find are for disabling certain elements on the screen such as JavaScript or clearing cookies and session data.

Clicking display alt tags under the images menu is a quick way to see if you have missed any. The resize menu lets you test your site in different resolutions.

3. Extended Statusbar

Extended statusbar is useful to way to see how large a page is to download and how long it takes to load. I often use this to help monitor slow loading pages.

4. Colorzilla

Colorzila allows you to mouse over elements on the screen to see the colour. Its very useful if you need to match a colour or check a colour is correct.

(Note US spelling 'color').

5. MeasureIT

MeasureIT simply allows you to measure elements on a screen and gives you the measurement in pixels. Very useful for checking the height of objects, text spacing and the overall width of the page.

6. Screengrab

An easy way to take screen shots of a page. Especially useful if the page includes scroll bars as it saves you copying and pasting multiple screen shots together.

7. YSlow

YSlow shows you various options on how to speed up your website. Clearly not all are suitable/cost effective for a website such as ImAFish however many are very relevant. Each item is given a rating from A to F and a full explanation on how to implement. YSlow is developed by Yahoo.

8. Page Speed

Page speed is similar to YSlow however covers slightly different criteria. As you can see for ImAFish it highly recommends combing external JavaScript.

9. Linkification

Linkification is a simply little plugin that converts any URL on the screen into a clickable link. Quite useful for those times someone has forgotten to turn a URL into a link.

10. IE Tab

IE Tab is a nice plugin to test your page in Internet Explorer without actually having to open the Browser. It's also useful if you want a fresh session for a website without having to open another browser.

TinyChat is a funky flash based chat room that allows you to chat, view webcams, share desktops and commnicate with a microphone.

You can invite people through email or by simply sharing your rooms URL.

Pro accounts allow you to use high quality video.

For more visit www.tinychat.com/

I started following too many people on Twitter and ended up with a feed of junk marketing posts, all the people I actually wanted to follow became drowned out.

Therefore a few weeks ago I setup my new Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/kingpetey

I often read comments on Digg and Slashdot about the poor quality of some news site therefore I've come up with five golden rules for any news site:

1. Put the Entire Article on One Page

This must be one of the main gripes when it comes to reading articles on-line. It frustrates me, you start reading an article then for some reason it stops and you have to wait for the next page to load. There is no logical reason to it, almost everyone has scroll wheels and the concept of scrolling is well know with operating systems so why do news sites think they need to break up an article into two or more pages?

Rarely do I click past the first page of an article unless its really good, surely their site statistics tell a similar story for most users.

Good: BBC, Techcrunch

The BBC among others get this right providing the whole article on just one page

Bad: Reuters

Reuters do have a 'read as one page' link however if its only a two page article it is defunct anyway. It's sites like Reuters that make me sympathise with Adblock users.

2. Use Large Images

Good: Boston.com

Boston.com's big picture features are an amazing way to display images. Their recent Earth Hour article even allowed you to click on the images to see a before and after shot.

Bad: BBC

In a recent BBC survey one of the main points that came up was the size of the images within their articles so in their redesign the BBC added 20% to the size of the image. Unfortunately this is still 200% too small, I wouldn't mind if it was a thumbnail link or they made use of a lightbox like on the DailyMail website.

3. Don't use Slide shows for Images

This is mainly aimed at Forbes.com, their content is good but they display it in the worst way possible.

Good: Almost every site apart from Forbes.

Bad: Forbes

Its bad enough that they use a slide show in an inappropriate way but to make it auto run and the controls barely work is a total waste of what could be good content.

4. Provide External Links Within the Article

Good: Mashable, Techcrunch, Cnet News.com
Bad: BBC, Yahoo, ITN

The BBC waste precious sidebar content with an 'External Links' section, rather than reading the article and clicking on something that interests me I have to search the sidebar for a potential link.

5.Write about something on-line without Linking to it

Bad: BBC

A number of news site do this, especially when they are covering something slightly controversial. For instance the article talks about a video on YouTube yet fails to provide a link to it. Its like talking about an architecturally stunning building/landmark without providing a picture.

This article from the BBC about Two students who dressed up as the TV character Borat then put the video online is a prime example, the BBC talk about the video online yet fail to provide a link to it.