This year’s MacHeist bundle is available for another few days, if you haven’t heard about it yet. For $29 you can get a bundle of Mac software that usually totals up to $975…and 25% of every sale goes to one of a selection of charities you can choose from.

As more bundles are sold, MacHeist will up the value of the bundle, adding more software to the package. As I write this 17,211 bundles have beend sold, and $157,553 has been raised for charity. Nine of the twelve applications are “unlocked.”

According to the FAQ thread on the MacHeist forum, you can buy the bundle at any time and still get the locked applications when they’re unlocked.

The new Espresso editor is among the yet-to-be-unlocked applications. That and WireTap Studio are a tempting combo (plus several other neat-looking apps, like Kinemac and BoinxTV to sweeten the deal).

The offer ends at the end of the first week of April, so if you want to score some cheap Mac software, you’d better act quickly.

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Millions of people who blog don’t want to deal with hosting their blog themselves, so they use a blogging service instead. There are many things that factor into the choice of blogging service, but one of them should always be site reliability. After all, if people can’t access your blog, it won’t get read.

Though services like Blogger, WordPress.com, and TypePad don’t give you as much control over your blog as you would have hosting it on your own (paid) hosting account, their uptime is quite impressive.

Pingdom did a recent test, over four months, to determine the reliability of various “instant blog” solutions. WordPress.com, Blogger, and TypePad all had no more than twenty minutes of total downtime. Some of the other services (which were polled every minute for the duration of the test) didn’t fare so well. Blog.com had over a day of downtime. Vox and LiveJournal were a bit excessive too, though their problem periods weren’t so excessive.

Not bad considering most of the services are free, or have free plans. They’re certainly a good option for smaller blogs, as they’re more stable than a lot of cheap shared hosting providers. (And you won’t be cut off for using “excessive CPU resources.”)

PHP Link Directory, one of the advertisers here at Webmaster-Source, would like to announce version 3.4 of their phpLD product. phpLD is a paid product, but it’s still one of the more popular web directory solutions.

The link directory script has changed greatly since I first heard of it. It’s grown into a whole CMS-type system with posts and pages, besides it’s primary link directory functionality. It also has support for RSS feeds, paid link inclusion, and integration with Google/Yahoo sitemaps.

It’s kind of nice to see that the web directory isn’t entirely dead yet. It used to be that trawling through the Yahoo directory or DMOZ or some smaller directory was one of the more popular ways to find interesting new websites.

WooThemes is running a contest to design a T-Shirt for them to take to the Future of Web Design 2009 conference.

We’ll hopefully be taking some t-shirts to the event to giveaway and that’s where we need your help – in designing them. We are looking for a kickass design that people want to wear, not your typical promotional tees that get thrown into a cupboard never to be worn. Your design can be trendy, humourous or professional, or even all three – we open to suggestions.

The winner will recieve $500 in cash and a 6-month WooThemes developer license. The runner up will get $250 and a 3-month developer license. Third place will get a 6-month developer license, but no cash prize.

The rules are fairly simple. The format should be a PSD, or Fireworks or Illustrator format; no stock images; you must follow the design guidelines so print will work properly; submit through the Flickr pool before April 3rd, 2009.

It sounds like a fun opportunity, and I might enter if I can think of a suitable idea. Everyone likes a funny T-Shirt.

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