Been a bit swamped with work round here lately. We took on a new client in the form of an agency last week and seems like they're going to have plenty to keep us occupied! Plus a couple of ongoing sites too so it's all go here. In between work I'm still trying to put the finishing touches to a new plugins site that I'm setting up with a friend, one I'm eager to get up and running and get more plugins written for.

However, I've managed to finally get all of my photos from Rome on Flickr at last. I'm quite chuffed with some of them, the beautiful blue sky and weather out there helped!

Also, don't forget you can get a nice code filled post on WordPress coding over at Blogging Tips every Sunday, or keep an eye on my own Blogging Tips Posts page which lists the posts I've written. Anyone who isn't scared of a bit of code and uses WordPress may pick something of interest up here

It's been a bit quiet around here as I've been working on our new commercial plugin site. We've now got a design for it which is being coded up into a WordPress theme, as we're going to use WordPress to power the site (obviously!). We're using Secure Delivery to deal with the delivery of the products after purchase, makes my life easier!

We've got 4 plugins ready to sell, plus a few to give away for free. I'll also be writing at least one other for use on the site which I'll also put up for sale. I've got plenty more to do, it's just finding the time! I mentioned last time about pricing products and the different structures available. For selling the standard products this is just a one off payment, but for the yearly upgrade and support license there's more involved. My plan is to sell this as a product and then manually create a user account in WordPress for the buyer. We'll then have a different page set up for each plugin and the member's account will be given access to each plugin they've subscribed to. This should be possible with a couple of plugins, although it is the trickiest part. For the payment I'll most likely set it so that if someone subscribes I'll set up the subscription via PayPal for their account and then if payment isn't received the following year their account will just be suspended for up to X weeks and then terminated.

I'm also intending to set up a demo WordPress install with the plugins available to try out so that people know what they're paying for. Obviously with a CRON job to refresh the database back to its original state every so often.nnSo things are getting there slowly. I've upgraded a couple of the plugins to WordPress 2.5 now, so I just have the others to check over. Then I'll make a start on the content and getting our subscription area sorted out. Unfortunately we've both been swamped with work for the past couple of weeks, and it doesn't look to be slowing right now, so it's a case of getting little bits done here and there when there's a spare moment. Still, should be good when it's live

The good news is we've already made a sale on 2 of the plugins for 2 multi site licenses and the yearly upgrade/support.

I know, it's Thursday, a bit late in the week for last weeks roundup. You're probably thinking I've been spending all of my time out playing with my new lens but alas that's not 100% true! Things have been a bit manic this week which I'll explain below. However, back to last week.

Last week my small win (small compared to what could have been, but big to me!) cleared in my bank account so on Wednesday I had a nice old spend online. I spent about £700 within the space of an hour! My first stop was the camera lens that I'd been wanting since the start of the year. I couldn't justify the expense up until now but with unexpected money I figured it was time I spent a little on myself for once! Whilst I was looking at the lenses I knew I'd need a better tripod for macro shots, as you just can't get away with hand holding the camera. My current tripod is quite large and isn't easy to carry, so I got myself a new compact tripod that's pretty sturdy and still opens out to a fullsize tripod. It comes in a shoulder bag too so it's easy to carry around.

Next on the list was a long weekend away. We've not been away since Rome in January, and even then I didn't get to rest and take it easy. So I booked us in for 2 nights in Bowness by Lake Windermere. It's quite a plush hotel, my parents have stayed there before and they liked it. I'm hoping for two restful days of lazying, taking a few photos and not doing much at all. On the Sunday we then head over to Northumberland where we're stopping for a night at a B&B run by someone we know.

So that ate about half my winnings, but after a bit of thinking I also decided to get us a dishwasher, as we don't have one here and neither of us enjoy washing up, plus it's more hygenic in my opinion. We can fit a slimline dishwasher in the gap we have next to the washing machine, and the plumbing is already there. Annoyingly though, this arrived yesterday but the top was cracked so we have to wait for a replacement to come on Saturday now

My Tripod and Lens both arrived last week and I've grabbed a few photos with them. I've yet to leave the house with it though! It's a fabulous lens in my opinion, the detail it can give is so amazing. The tripod is pretty cool too, I just need to buy a small ball head to go on top of it, probably with a quick release plate.

This week has been extra manic with work. On Monday we had a meeting with a new client which has resulted in new work and a potential source of future work as they are a web design company who just need to outsource once in a while. Monday evening our wireless connection went down and as I could connect to the web directly via the modem (through a cable) we assumed the router had died, but the next morning even I couldn't connect. So after calling NTL (our ISP) we had an engineer out about an hour later who fixed everything (something about too much power coming in to the modem from outside, couldn't cope with it so it kept dropping the connection). Not bad customer service really, first time we've had to call them and it was fixed on site within 90 minutes! However it did put us back somewhat. I've now got more work on my hands plus the new work starting next week and an existing client informed me they had just bought a new company and needed a website for that too! No rest for the wicked I guess!

Besides all that I'm eager to get a couple of my own sites finished and up and running but it's just finding the time and energy right now. We have a bank holiday weekend coming up so I may be able to spend a few hours doing my own stuff, despite having Dave's sister over for the weekend. I just also need to find some time to get back to my Wii fitness too! Busy, busy, busy… roll on the weekend

I managed to grab a quick half an hour this evening to try out my new tripod and macro lens. The tripod is great however I'll be buying a mini or micro ball head to go on it. Whilst you don't need one, I'd like a quick release plate as it'd be so much handier. However it's sturdy and easily supports my camera and new lens (which weigh around 1.1kg together).

I managed to find a few interesting shots to take. Unfortunately the better flowers are around the front of the house, but I didn't fancy advertising my camera gear to anyone passing by. Luckily the flowers on the herbs are starting to come out which made for a couple of interesting photos, but my favourite (and sharpest) photo is of the purple flower above. This is off a weed (they seem to make the best flowers!) that I spotted.

The result from this lens however is amazing. I saw a tiny little insect sitting on a strawberry plant leaf and did my best to try and focus in on it and take some shots. I'm not sure if the insect was dead or alive (possibly asleep), as it didn't move, but a slight breeze made the leaf tremor every so often, plus I'm still working on the sharp focusing. However the detail that this little black bug had (as you can see below) is just amazing. Whilst I'm not an insect fan, and hate even looking at spiders, the detail that you can see from this lens is just fantastic. Hopefully we'll have some good weather to go out on the weekend and grab some more shots further afield than the garden!

View all my first macro shots

I know, it's been a fortnight, I've been busy! We've been working on getting our new WordPress plugins site up and running. I originally had just a couple of commercial plugins to sell however I've been working on more and so we'll have a few more products to launch with. Luckily the plugins have all been written from requests so every plugin has been sold once at least which means that time isn't 100% wasted if it doesn't sell again!

We've worked out our pricing structure for this as we want to try and offer something for everyone. As the plugins are not anything major we're not looking at charging a lot for them, but charging enough to make it worth while. Obviously each plugin is charged according to the complexity and time taken to create it, however with a few other sites selling plugins too, we also need to keep it competitive.

Our pricing options for these plugins are going to be

• Single site license
• Multi site license
• Yearly upgrade license

The 3rd option can only be purchased if one of the first two options have been purchased in the past. This way someone who just wants a cheapy plugin can grab the single site license, but as WordPress upgrades or if we happen to add more features in, then the yearly upgrade license will have to be paid for to get an upgraded version. Of course if a major amount of new features are added then I'll probably release it as a new product as a Pro version.

To deal with the pricing we're going for simple maths ie. a Single site license costs X, the multi will cost 2.5*X and the yearly upgrade will cost 0.5*X. I think this works out reasonable. Of course the single vs multi site usage goes on trust, but hopefully most of the businesses that buy from us will be honest, as the plugins are not going to be exceptionally expensive in the first place.

We'll also be offering a couple of freebie plugins, mainly because one has been available on my own site for quite a while (and is pretty basic) and the other uses partly modified code from another plugin, and naturally I wouldn't want to be selling someone else's GPL code! Plus I think offering a couple of products for free will attract the buyers in and we'll be offering all the plugins for free to registered charity sites too.

So hopefully the site will be virtually ready to go live soon. I've just got the hard part to do now, write the content!