Add to that the ever rising number of subscribers on this blog. By looking at my feedburner shot you can see that the feed count started to increase drastically in summer and fall of 2007.

But what about all those posts published in winter and spring prior to the rise in popularity? How many of us are diligently exploring the archives of the blogs that we only recently discovered? I’m the first one to admit that I do like digging into the past articles of the blogs that made a big impression on me, but if there are hundreds of such articles, I just don’t have enough time to read them all.

To help highlight otherwise buried old articles some bloggers feature them on a monthly basis. I was thinking of doing the same, but then I was concerned about my devoted readers getting bored with having to read those monthly post reviews. On the other hand something definitely needs to be done to direct new readers to our old articles. I’m curious to read your thoughts on this issue and I’ll be dedicating a post on this as well in a week or so. For now I’ve decided it’s a good idea to feature some of my better articles from the last year. Check them out, perhaps even some of the long-time readers of this blog will discover something that they’ve missed, or wouldn’t mind reading again, and hopefully this showcase will help the new readers to dive deeper into the waters of Inspiration Bit and unveil some hidden bits.

As for the new plans for Inspiration Bit in the year 2008, I’ll be starting a new regular feature on a weekly basis: DOS and DON’TS that will cover topics on different aspects of design, blogging, relationship and life. There will be also another new monthly feature titled CONVERSATIONS where I’ll be conversing rather than interviewing a number of people who inspire us with their talent or accomplishments. I would also like to define a better focus for Inspiration Bit and I would really appreciate your input here:

1. Which past articles on Inspiration Bit were the most memorable for you?
2. What type of posts do you favour the most, what topics would you like me to focus on more?
3. What topics/posts are your least favourite?
4. What changes/additions would you like to see on Inspiration Bit, in terms of its content, structure, focus? (I’m not asking about the design, as I can predict there will be lots of requests, and I am still working on a new design, so please be patient with me on this one)

And now, without any further ado, here are the best or not bits of Inspiration Bit in 2007:

Inspiration:

• Inspiration Sources for Inspiration Bit
• The Importance of Values, Goals and Encouragement
• 5 ways to get inspired
• Captivating Photography Bits
• 8 Bits Of Evolution In Perception, Promotion And Values
• 8 Bits Of The Most Brilliant Advertising Campaigns
• How Crazy Are You?
• 8 Bits Of The Historic Byte

Design:

• Horisontal website designs
• 8 Clever Logos
• Spark Your Imagination with 16 Stunning Bits of Liquid Design
• Web Design Dissected Into 8 Bits
• Focus On Details And Get Inspired
• 8 Finest Bits Of Free Stock Photo Sites
• 8 Bits Of Perfect Geometry In Classic Logos
• Icon Resources and Tips For Styling Bulleted Lists

Typography and Colour:

• Mixing Typefaces Cheat Sheet
• 16 Best-Loved Font Bits In Web Design
• Get Inspired by 8 bits of Exquisite Typography
• 16 bits of Exceptional Typography Resources
• 8 bits of Colour Inspirations
• 16 Dates With Inspiration
• When Is It Wrong To Call A Typeface Font

Blogging:

• 8 Strenuous Steps To Get The Ideal Name
• Outstanding Posts Are Not Bestsellers
• 8 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging
• 8 Bits of Truth About Blogging
• First Rule Of Writing On Inspiration Bit
• Blogging Mistake That I Still Tend to Make
• How To Build Lasting Relationships With Your Readers
• 8 Thought-Provoking Questions From Blogiverse
• Digg vs. Reddit vs. StumbleUpon vs. del.icio.us
• 8 Smarter Ways To Blog

Miscellaneous:

• 8 Bits You Now Know About Me
• Famous Logos Converted to Web 2.0
• What Can Be Done In 15 Minutes?
• Internet Is The Devil In Disguise
• M.C. Escher in Photography

Happy new year of blogging to everyone. I look forward to getting your input on what are your most memorable Inspiration Bits and general feedback.

We’ve all heard many times that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. I wonder who said that first? A quick search on Google leads me to Wikipedia with a fascinating exposé on the origins of this phrase. In 1927 an ad by Fred R. Barnard appeared in the advertising journal that said “One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words” and was falsely labeled as a Chinese proverb “so that people would take it seriously”. Earlier in 1862 Russian writer Ivan Turgenev wrote “A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound”. And before him Napoleon Bonaparte said “A good sketch is better than a long speech”.

It’s hard to disagree with all those sayings, so it’s not surprising that the increasing number of blogs always include a picture with their posts. There are many great royalty free stock photo sites, and a picture could cost you anywhere from $1 to as high as it can go. If you post daily, that’s $30 spent just on getting your point across and impressing readers with those stock images.

So if you want to save a bit, check out two great sites with an extensive list of free stock photo sites: Freeres.info and Wikipedia public domain image resources.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve tried most of them out and found the following 8 web sites to have the best quality photos, easy to use (many of the other free photo sites don’t even have a text search option, which I find very inconvenient when looking for an image on a particular topic) and very resourceful.

1. Wikimedia Commons and Mayflower

Wikimedia Commons has a database of 1,780,830 freely reusable media files, including audio, video, photos, illustrations. It provides you with a handy search tool Mayflower to find the right image with the information about its permissions.

2. Stock.XCHNG

Stock.XCHNG definitely lives us to the site owner’s claim to be “the leading FREE stock photo site”. With its database of 326050 photos that updated with hundred of new images on a daily basis everyone will always be able to find the needed pictures for their projects. It requires a free registration and be sure to read the permissions details before downloading the file, some may require you to give credits to the photographer.

3. MorgueLife

MorgueLife contains free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use. It quickly became my new favourite site when looking for stock photos online. Many of the photos there are offered in really high quality with the sizes reaching up to 3072 x 2304.

4. Stockvault

Stockvault allows you to share and download over 8.000 royalty free, high resolution stock photos, templates and logos. It also offers helpful tutorials on anything from 3D Studio Max to Photoshop to CSS to PHP.

5. Wallpaperstock

Wallpaperstock – is an excellent resource for Free desktop wallpapers and stock photos. Image sizes range from 1024×768 to 1600×1200.

6. Photogen

Photogen stock photos are FREE for commercial and personal use. “Forget royalty-free – try totally-FREE.”

7. Everystockphoto

Everystockphoto – Searching Over 1 Million Free Photos, results include pictures from Flickr, stock.xchng, Imageafter and many other image resources. Be sure to check the license for using Flickr images.

8. Yotophoto

Yotophoto is indexing over a quarter million Creative Commons, Public Domain, GNU FDL, and various other ‘copyleft’ images. I really like how it’s returning the results by displaying three important details underneath each of the found pictures: source site, license and image size.

So here you go, hopefully those 8 bits above will help you to save some money.

When Free is Not Really Free

Important Note: Royalty-free does not mean free of charge, and even Free images are not always Free. Some images come with the requirement of a credit or a link, or are not free for commercial use. Make sure to read The Ins and Outs of Free Images On the Web that should answer most of your questions about the terms and conditions when using images from the Web.

Which web sites do you use to find photos for your blogs and design projects? For all of you photographers out there who read this blog: Do you share your photos online, would you mind your photos to be downloaded and used freely by others?

From Readers Input

David from ppleyeard has suggested another great free stock photo site – StockPhotoLibrary.

Ted introduced me to another interesting stock photo site, where all photos are absolutely free, even for commercial use: SweetStockPhoto.

If you know any other free image resources, feel free to leave a comment, and I’ll update this section, by adding your link.

Unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the book I had when I was little that was filled with many captivating stories behind words and phrases in our vocabulary. I do recall reading there about the origin of the word “hooligan”. As it turns out there was an Irish family by the name of Hooligan, who was infamous for the reckless behaviour, hence everyone else starting telling others – “don’t behave like the Hooligans”. Later on I discovered another similar book in my husband’s extensive book collection – A Hog on Ice, that talks about the “origin and development of the pungent and colorful expressions we all use”, and it quickly became our coffee table book.

I thought about sharing with you the stories behind some of the words that are computer-related.

Cyberspace

The word “cyberspace” was coined by William Gibson, a science fiction writer, in his 1982 story “Burning Chrome” and his 1984 novel “Neuromancer”.
He combined the words cybernetics (coined by Norbert Wiener to represent the study of “teleological mechanisms”) and space. Here’s the quote from Neuromancer that describes the word “cyberspace”:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…

I find Gibson’s comment on the origin of this term even more fascinating:

All I knew about the word “cyberspace” when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

Looks like Gibson would’ve been a great marketer and a blogger, since he definitely knew how to come up with very memorable and impressive buzzwords.

Robot

I first found out the origin of the word “robot” when reading Karel Čapek’s biography page in his extremely hilarious book of short detective stories packed with brilliant bits of humour – “Stories from a Pocket and Stories from Another Pocket”.

Even though Karel Čapek was the first one who popularized the word “robot” in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots in 1921, it was his brother Josef Čapek who actually invented this term. The root of this word comes from the Czech word “robota”, which means “work” or “forced labor”.

Freelance

It’s interesting to note that originally the word “freelance” in the XVIII century consisted of two separate words, in XIX century it was accepted only as a noun, and in XX century it was officially recognized as a verb. This term was first coined by none other than Sir Walter Scott in his famous novel Ivanhoe, where he referred to a “medieval mercenary warrior” as Free Lance:

I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them—I will lead them to Hull, seize on shipping, and embark for Flanders; thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment.

nibble = nybble

The computing term “nibble” is half of an octet (an 8-bit byte), a four-bit data. Because the term “byte” replicates the “bite” as in the small amount of data a “computer could “bite” at once”, the “nibble” takes it one step further by defining a “half bite”, hence an alternative spelling of this word as “nybble”.
Since a nibble equals to 4 bits, there are 2⁴=16 possible values, thus a nibble is often referred to as a “hex digit” – a single hexadecimal digit.

So, from now on, if I don’t have enough data to present you with 8 or 16 bits of information, I’ll retreat to listing only 4 bits or 1 nibble. Hope you don’t mind, do you?

If you know some other curious words or phrases with an interesting background, I would love to hear about them.

You can either create your own icons in any available Image Editing software, or download them from a numerous stock or free icon resources. In this post I will share with you 8 such icon sites and will demonstrate a simple CSS code that will teach you how to replace the default HTML bullets with the custom made icons. You can also give a quick makeover to your menu items by adding some attractive icons, but that's a topic for another post. For now, get inspired with the iconic art.

8 Icon Resources

1. Crystal Clear Icons - beautiful open source icon sets by Everaldo Coelho, presented by Wikipedia. All Crystal icons were posted as LGPL on kde-look.
2. Silk Icons - over 700 16x16 px very slick open source icons in PNG format.
3. Sweetie - "Cute and clear icons to use in your nifty web application. They are licenced under a Creative Commons licence, so commercial use is fine. Also feel free to make derivatives with the included Photoshop documents."
4. Icon Archive - various collections of Free icons for non-commercial use, with more of a cartoon-style interface.
5. Free Icons Web - another collection of free icons for non-commercial use, consists of over 15,000 high quality icons for various applications and websites.
6. N.Design Studio Stock Web Icons- designed by Nick La. The site offers various packages with very impressive collection of stock icons for blogs, websites, CMS, ranging from $25 to $50
7. Chalkwork Basic Icons - designed by Dave Shea, creator of CSS Zen Garden. The set consists of 70 royalty-free icons for $125.
8. Icon Drawer - offers various royalty-free icons for your website or software, ranging from $29 to $84, and some free icons for Mac OS X applications.

How to style Bulleted Lists with CSS

There are two different ways for styling unordered lists with images:

1. Using images to replace bullets with list-style-image: url(imagename);. This is the quickest way that gets the job done, however it comes with a pretty substantial drawback - each browser positions those images-icons differently.
2. Using Background images for list bullets with background-image: url(imagename). This is the preferred way for styling the lists, because it gives much more consistent results in various browsers. It involves a bit more coding, and requires the use of the padding property to customize the positioning.

For our demonstration we will use the following example of the HTML code with a nested ordered list within a DIV tag, and show two different CSS styling methods below.

Method #1: Using Images

Method #2: Using Background Images

Please, note that those are very simple examples just to demonstrate the two different approaches in styling bulleted lists with CSS. You should apply them to your HTML and CSS structure with any further customization as needed.
Make sure to visit an incredible online resource that covers everything there is to know about Lists - Listamatic.

I hope you found this article useful and helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. I personally would love to hear from other designers and invite them to share their tips and tricks for styling bulleted lists with custom icons, and your favourite icon resources on the Web.

Here I present you with 8 Blog Rebels (listed in the alphabetical order) who stood by me, supporting and encouraging with their insightful feedback since the infant days of Inspiration Bit.

1. Andrew, Rickmann-Design

   - the rebel who is never satisfied with his blog's appearance. His blog's interface and functionality are getting refined with the frequency of a chameleon changing his colours to achieve the transparency in the surrounding nature. A big supporter of Web Standards, for Andrew it's all about learning and sharing his knowledge with others.
   

2. Bes, The Reasoner

   - the blog rebel who questions every deranged aspect of our lives, analyzing relationship paradoxes and human behaviour all the way from moody people to immature bloggers. His cause: "Finding out the reasons for the insanity in the universe".
   

3. Brian, Epic Edits Weblog

   - the blogger who rebelled against the mediocrity of many photography resources on the Web and went on a quest to provide the best "Photography resource for the aspirying hobbyist". In less than 5 months his blog gained the recognition and respect of thousands grateful readers and hundreds of loyal subscribers.
   

4. Joey, Squeezeplaycards

   - the mere fact that a huge baseball fan finds my (the person who knows as much about baseball as a child knows about the facts of life) blog interesting and helpful already makes him a passionate rebel who refuses to live a narrow-minded life and welcomes bloggers with different interests by interacting with them on their blogs.
   

5. Ronald, Ronalfy

   - the opinionated rebel who has his own say for everything from life, religion to blogging, news, politics and everything in between. He challenges his readers to look underneath the surface, stop their busy lives if just for a brief moment and think before voicing their own opinion on the subject matter. Ronald is also a rebel-plugin writer who's on a quest of making his and others blogging experience much more efficient.
   

6. Rory, Hamelife

   - the rebel in parenting and blogging, using his unsurpassed exceptional writing skills and brilliant sense of humour, Rory educates parents "who want to be different" and bloggers who appreciate a talent when they see it. Only recently he refused to participate in Problogger's current group writing project, stating his five credible reasons.
   

7. Shankar, Shankar Ganesh

   - the teenage rebel with the drive and determination to excel in everything he does. His tenacious dedication to blogging is admirable, his natural curiousity is praiseworthy, his humble appreciation of skilled bloggers is exemplary.
   

8. Simonne, AllTipsAndTricks

   - the rebel-experimenter on a quest for finding and getting the most out of blogging and sharing her tips and tricks with the rest of the blogiverse. She is never afraid to speak her mind, and she does it with such a grace and a phenomenal sense of humour that makes you wanting to see more of Simonne's steamy tirades.
   

Initially, I've planned on submitting this article to Problogger's group writing project. However I wasn't sure if Darren would've accepted it since I was determined to stick to my 8 bits instead of his required Top 5. Nevertheless I just found that Darren stopped accepting anymore submissions (before the deadline), so you won't see it among the rest of the 893 entries. My apologies for not being able to advertise my favourite blog rebels to the wider audience, but hopefully this article would still be seen by many other visitors to this blog and will bring even more recognition to this Magnificent Eight.

What's more, I'm venturing on a mission to find more rebels in the blogiverse who are not recognized by the "upper-echelons", but who are much better than the "blogging elite" in many aspects. I'll be relying on the support of my readers and fans to help me discover more blogs that strive to be different and never compromise on the quality for the quantity of the inbound links.

So here you go - a must read for any (A-Z-List) blogger - true confessions of blogging mistakes by 48 mortals, including "moi":

• Do Save Drafts for a Rainy Day by Inspirationbit
• Don’t Make the Mistake of Monetizing your Blog Too Early by Maki
• Don’t Ignore the Basics of SEO by Simonne
• Don't Fail to Realize the Importance of Relationships with Readers by Ronald
• Don't be in a Frisky mood when commenting on other blogs. by Rory
• Don’t Handle Important Matters Lightly by Amanda
• Do not Underestimate the Important of RSS Feeds by Kevin
• Do offer email subscriptions and don't add a hyphen to your domain name by Thilak
• Don't forget the etiquette and copyright law. by Clever Dude
• Don't neglect Posting Frequency by Chris
• Do establish a focus for your blog by Shawn
• Don't desert your blog, do update it regularly by Julian
• Don't end up choosing a wrong name for your blog by Cory O’Brien
• Don’t Change Blog Name or URL by Denise
• Don't tackle too many blogs by Green Llama
• Don't Promote a contest on your Blog without enough Traffic by Nathan
• Don't run a boring blog by Madhur
• Do start blogging now. by Francesco
• Don't open links in a new Window by Nirmal
• Do Use a Smart Permalink Structure on your Blog by Leftblank
• Don’t Underestimate the Commitment by Andrew
• Don't let Blogs and Blogging to Ruin your Self Discipline by Dave
• Do be Careful with How You Tag your Posts by Shankar
• Don’t Forget to Use Blog Carnivals by Andrea
• Don't Start Too Many Blogs by Mohammed
• Do comment on other People’s Blogs by Somu
• Don't Spend Too Much Time Link-Begging by David Paul
• How to Not Run a Contest by Robert
• Why this Blog Looks this Way by Ben
• Importance of An Honest Self-Assessment by Bret
• I Almost Ruined Everything by Annie
• Five Common Blogging Mistakes by Vijay
• Five Blogging mistakes in March by Bill
• Always Install WordPress on the Root Diretory by Daniel
• Remember about the Internet Explorer vs. Firefox Issues by Mark Paddock
• Get your Own Domain and WordPress for your Blog by Andrew Flusche
• A Clear Point of View is Crucial to Increase your Blog Traffic by George
• Delete Your First Blog Post by Mark Alves
• Should’ve Gone WP Yesterday! by Jimbo
• Lack of Predictability on Your Posts by Roberto
• What to Do When You don’t Have Anything to Say by Philip Liu
• Copying, Mimicking, Duplication by Paper Bull
• Leaving the Amateur League of Blogging: the Hosting Lesson by Rene
• Be Careful with how you Choose your Domain Name by Calvin
• The Ad King by Jason
• Move to your Own Domain Now by Gaurav
• Lack of Persistence by Blake
• Why you Should Own your Domain Name by Engtech

Wikipedia has an extensive list of April Fool's hoaxes from 1999 to 2007. It's interesting to note that Wikipedia has closed down the editing of all April Fool's related pages: "Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled because of vandalism due to the fact that it is April Fools Day."

So rather than posting 8 WWW bits for the past week, I present you with my collection 8 creative April Fool's pranks of 2007:

1. Slashdot introduced a Digg and reddit-like rating system to articles, dubbed SlashRating, they even trademarked a new term "slashdottit".
2. Technorati is cleverly rotating series of new April Fool's logos from the TECHNORATI letters creating phrases like "rotaTe chin", "haterTonic", "ino chatTer", "hoticeranT", "ho cant riTe", , "Threaticon", "ricoTta hen"
3. Digital Inspiration released a hack to download movies, audiobooks and music videos and offers them for free from the iTunes store.
4. CollegeHumor re-designed their website to appear as if the domain name has expired and has been overrun with spammers. - however after 10 seconds you're redirected to the live working site, and never see that page again.
5. ThinkGeek's front page features many fake items for sale, such as SnūzNLūz - Wifi Donation Alarm Clock, an 8-bit tie, a Wii remote helmet, amongst other items. The page also features an iPhone which they are now shipping.
6. Uncyclopedia replaced their main page with a page similar to Wikipedia's, linking to semi-related articles. It also claims Wikipedia is a parody of the site.
7. newsaskew - Everything on the home page is backwards.
8. reddit.com changed it's logo to 'redacted' and added a censorship to the titles and comments of submitted articles. This prank annoyed many reddit users who ask for the April Fool's day to end early.

For more 2007 April Fool's hoaxes check Wikipedia's 2007 collection, Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time from Musemum of Hoaxes, and Urgo's list of April Fools' Day Jokes on Websites.

Have a Happy April Fool's Day everybody :-)

Same thing goes for my headlines. There are many useful articles on the internet where other bloggers teach us how to write effective post titles. What influences choices for my blog headlines is my personal perception of what I think looks interesting, intriguing enough to get the readers attention and sometimes descriptive to save a guessing game what the story is all about.

I must admit though that in the back of my mind I'm aware of using proper keywords in my content and devising catchy headlines, but it's kind of built-in, coming more from professional experience. Something like when I read a magazine, and even when watching the movie, I'm always paying attention to the fonts that were chosen for the article or movie credits. I'm sure that my headlines are far from being perfect, but then I'm not teaching you how to write newspaper like headlines, am I?

Nonetheless I'm getting quite a traffic from various search engines. What I find incredible is some of the keyword phrases that people are searching for and ending up on my blog. Take a look at these 8 keyword phrases that I'd never imagined to be found with:

1. But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that. - who knew, that my post on 5 ways to get inspired will show up as #3 when someone was looking for a famous quote from one of my favourite movies One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
2. who sang when you re smiling - I mentioned this Louis Armstrong song in one of my comments, not even in a post, and it shows as #6 on Google.
3. i want a website that actually works - I never thought that my post on Traffic generation tips would be an answer to that person's prayer.
4. grown children that don t work - sorry for disappointing you, but I wrote about 8 Entertaining Bits for Kids & Grown Ups, not sure why Google picked my post as #5 answer to your search.
5. Amazingly, these two keyword phrases what do you appreciate about people? and bloggers who respond to their readers were very close to my article's topic
6. what i wish i knew before blogging - just look at this phrase, someone else was wondering about exactly the same 8 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging
7. art for a social cause - another close-call keyword phrase I had in my headline CANstruction - When Art Helps a Social Cause
8. nico di mattia nexx - I would never guessed that so many people (over 200) will be searching for him when I posted his speed painting video.

As you can see, sometimes people will find your articles with the keywords that never would've crossed your mind. So, I'd advise you to not be concerned with keywords so much and write what interests you and your readers, and you'll be rewarded with more readers than you expect.

What are some of the unpredicted keyword phrases are you getting from people's search?

1. The Working Designer - Digital Web Magazine's new column where talented web designers go behind the scenes of their web design processes and workflows. The first article in the series is walking us through an amazing redesign of ExpressionEngine site.
2. Best of the Blogs - Web Design - I stumbled upon this Directory of blogs today. It costs $39.95 to have your blog listed there. So I'm wondering whether all these web design blogs paid to be featured there. And if yes, then how can this directory claim to call them Best Of the Blogs? They should add to their title - Best of the blogs that paid. Nevertheless, this Directory provides you with another way to promote your blog and find some other blogs in your niche.
3. The Degradation of Digg's Front Page - looks like I'm not the only one who doesn't find anything interesting and fresh on Digg's Front page anymore. MG Siegler writes about it over at Pronet Advertising
4. Online Curriculum Vitae - everyone knows that in order to land your dream job, you need to have a killer resume. However, if you are a Web designer, having an online resume in addition to the standard PDF one, will make you to stand out in a crowd. Here's one such resume to get your creative juices flow.
5. The A-List Exists. No, Its Not Easy To Break Into. - Tony Hung tells it all about the A-Listers and hardships of successful blogging.
6. Build a Photography Business in 24 Hours - Brian Auer has started very interesting series of articles on how to sell your photography online, what software to choose from, merchant accounts and much more.
7. Photoshop Tutorials - CS2 - an exhaustive list of tutorials and resources for Photoshop CS2.
8. Russian Mouse - are you tired of the same boring gray or white computer mouse? Take a look at those decorative mice designed by Russian company Russian Mouse. You can also get some fancy keyboard and a cellphone to boot.

Surprisingly, I didn't find too many original websites featuring photographer's portfolio. Many sites were based on a couple of similar Content Management System, so they had the same navigation and main features. But I did come across some really fascinating "photofolios". I was using three different resources for my research:

1. StumbleUpon - if you haven't yet installed this useful Firefox Add-on, then I highly recommend you to do so. You can select a number of various categories that you want to browse and start Stumbling upon interesting sites on the Internet. I simply selected Photography section, and was clicking my way through various photography related sites.
2. Google - searching for keywords like "photography portfolio", "creative photography", "famous photographers", etc.
3. The Photobloggies - Annual Photoblog Awards - I was very glad to find this similar to Weblog Awards website. Make sure to check out the contestants of 2007 Photobloggies, the winners will be announced on May 1, 2007.

While looking for some creative good-looking photography sites I came across some very interesting website with unusual topics. So I'll be sharing with you both kinds of websites. The photography itself is a work of art on most of these site, and there are so many stunning photos, that I won't be mentioning about them in my review - I'll leave them up to you to discover.

8 Elegant Portfolios

1. Donata Wenders - a fascinating portfolio piece with three main categories each presented in a unique way: works from Galleries section are displayed as pictures on the walls of a Gallery-like interface; People and Places shots are hanging in a photographer's studio; Movies section is showcased in a theatre-like layout, on a big screen.
   
2. Whateverland - a beautifully designed photoblog with carefully thought navigation: you can browse the archives, or visit today/yesterday's photos, find out all about the photographer's equipment and even browse other photoblogs from author's collection.
   
3. Visual Relax - a nice photoblog featuring works of 3 photographers, the navigation presents a long bar with linked dates and months. Later on I found several other websites that used the same type of navigation, so I'm assuming they're using the same CMS for these sites. I must admit it works really well, easy to use.
   
4. PHOTOMO - such a clean and poised website, very simple to navigate and pleasant to explore. Make sure to check out the Guestmap and Links sections after going through the photos.
   
5. Eolo Perfido - this website comes with a very effective horizontal scrolling for browsing the photos from various Galleries.
   
6. Kim Gottlieb-Walker - it's a must see website for both design inspiration and the fascinating collection of celebrity photographs.
   
7. Steve McCurry - an exquisitely designed website in Flash with gorgeous burgundy colour scheme.
   
8. Michael Muller - another Flash website with an extraordinary way to view photos within a category - just mouse over the featured photo from different directions and you'll see what I mean. You can spot many celebrity photos here as well.
   

8 Original Topics

1. Self-Portrait Day - I could've easily placed this site in my Beautiful sites category, if not for the peculiar topic of this photoblog - members of this site are sending their self-portraits. However the goal of this blog is much more than a "15 seconds" fame: "We hope that Self-Portrait Day functions as a way for people to find new sites. For those of us who find we're following the same circle of Web sites every day, we hope that this will act as a way to discover new places. Basically, it's a launching pad: almost every portrait should lead you somewhere new."
   
2. Express Train - I really like what this website is all about - photos from the author's daily commute (three trains, 11 stops, and 45 minutes each way) to work in Manhattan and back home to Brooklyn. I wonder how do people on the train react when he takes their photos?
   
3. San Francisco Daily Photography - the title says it all - riveting photographs of urban life in San Francisco. This website has inspired me to start a similar site for Vancouver. Now all I need is to finally get a professional DSLR and start polishing my photography skills. I also found another blog with a similar topic: Buenos Aires Daily.
   
4. Outafocus - I never thought that out of focus blurry pictures can look so good and be so mesmerizing.
   
5. The Mirror Project - featuring site members who "have photographed themselves in all manner of reflective surfaces". There are some very finny and clever shots.
   
6. Cara Barer - Her Book Project started from finding a deserted soiled copy of the Yellow Pages. Now she works with many other books (some bought at discount, others are found or donated by friends), transforming them into organic sculptures.
   
7. Drive Back in Time - Don't be deceived by these photos thinking that they were taken in the old days of the last century. Most of the photos were shot between 2002 and 2004 for a Russian automotive magazine. Dmitry Popov carefully researches the era when the cars for his photographs were produced and then arranges the photo shoot accordingly. "The actors, costumes, hair, makeup, setting, and props are all fashioned to the standards of the era."
   
8. Nick Brandt - His photographs of Wild animals are the most spellbinding photos that I've ever seen. I would love to visit one of his exhibitions and see the photographs in full size.
   

So here you go. Hope you've enjoyed my photography bits as much as I did. And if you know of any other amazing photography portfolio sites, please, share them with us here.