The term stock photography is used to describe the supply of photographs often from professional photographers) that are licensed for specific uses. Stock photography is used to fulfill the needs of creative assignments instead of hiring a dedicated photographer to do a photoshoot and thus reducing costs and time significantly and still getting the images you need. Stock images can found in many place in the form of online databases, categorized and easily searchable with an easy option for the users to purchase and then directly download them, something that proves to be very convenient. When talking about stock photography we are often referring to royalty-free images, but here the word free has a bit different meaning and it is that you pay just once for the image and not every time you use it. Luckily for us there are also quite some places that do offer free (as in completely free) to use stock photos or licensed under CC license (Creative Commons) that also can be a great help for you for any web project you might be working on.

List of useful places for free stock photos:

1. flickr
This is one of the most popular photo sharing websites online and here quite a lot of the photos are free or CC licensed so you can use them in your projects without problems. No need to register to browse or download them. Flickr also offers royalty-free stock photos so be sure to carefully check the license of the photos you might consider using…

2. stock.xchng
stock.xchng is one of the biggest communities for free stock photos online — there are over 2,500,000 registered users and around 400,000 photos available online that you can browse trough and download. You need to register an account in order to be able to download the photos.

3. deviantART
DeviantART is much similar to Flickr, but the community started around the idea of users to show off their artwork and not just digital photos they made, but becoming popular worldwide you can as well find a lot of free stock photos there, just be careful to reed the usage limitations if there are such on each photo. No need to register to download the photos.

4. openphoto

5. freerange

6. stockvault

7. morguefile

8. pixel perfect digital

There are some times when you need to register for a free service or website just to check something that is usually not available without registration or to download a single file and after that you just start getting unwanted email messages. So instead of using your main email address in such moments you better go an take advantage of one of the following free services offering you temporary email addresses just for cases like these. Here is a short list of some of the most popular and good such services:

1. YopMail
2. 10 Minute Mail
3. Guerrilla Mail
4. Incognito Mail
5. FizMail
6. AnonymBox
7. Mailinator
8. My Trash Mail
9. MailEater
10. MailCatch

Personally I prefer to use the first three in the list, but sometimes there might be a problem opening a certain mail or a message simply not being received by one of the services, so then you can just go and try the next one… ;)

Building a blog and trying to turn it into a community of some kind is not an easy thing to do, especially if you want to have your visitors opinions’ on different topics you write about. Sure, Wordpress has a nice comments system, but it does not allow you to really utilize the potential your blog might have in terms of communicating with the readers. You just have some sort of simple commenting system, but if you really want to build an active community in your blog you should provide them with more options, making your blog more like a forum where all topics are being started by you, but the visitors can comment and discuss them all they want almost like in a real forum. So here comes the IntenseDebate Comments Plugin for Wordpress that can help you make just that…

IntenseDebate Comments is specifically designed to enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website, so that once a visitor comes and leaves a comment he’ll return to read the following discussion. The plugin has custom integration with your WordPress admin panel making moderation a piece of cake, almost like moderating a forum. With IntenseDebate Comments plugin you get comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting functionality, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations to enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you. There is a full comment and account data sync between Intense Debate and WordPress to ensure that you will always have your comments even after upgrading or removing the plugin for some reason. IntenseDebate Comments plugin requires WordPress version 2.5 or higher and is fully compatible with the latest version 2.8 so check that requirement before installing it in your blog and if needed you shpuld upgrade the version of Wordpress you have currently installed.

- Download the current version 2.2 of IntenseDebate Comments Plugin
- View the official website of IntenseDebate Comments Plugin for more information…