Wednesday, May 30, 2007

New Auction Site ! Not your normal auctions

Ok I know this is not really tech news but it does deal with auction sites. I have decided to
go out on a new venture. I have always been into animals all types dogs, cats, reptiles, birds, and even fish. So I was randomly searching Google one day for pet auctions, animal auctions etc.. and low and behold nothing showed up, well nothing worth looking at.

So it came to me why not make a new site for animal breeders and dealers to sell their stock. Called www.breederauction.com I decided I wanted it to be in an auction format, and I wanted it to be open to the public. This will give anyone looking for a new pet or a new breeding venture a place to go, and hopefully save some money in the mean time.

Oh the challenges! I wanted to start the site on a shoestring budget and lets face it, you can tell from my post I have a short attention span. Well there are many choices out there of software to run an auction site, PHP, Perl scripts you name it. For the most part though they were horrible, both in function and visual appeal. I finally decided on a revamped script based on Everyauction. Everyauction is a open source auction script that is functional and is for the most part aesthetically pleasing. Is it the best auction source? That I am not sure of I know it was a bit tricky to get configured but I got it going, as far as updating the site it is not to hard to do. In total I spent only 6.99 for the domain name and 10.00 for a cheap host.

The auction software is now working well, and hopefully I will start getting some visitors to the site and some auctions listed.

You can check out the site www.breederauction.com
if you sign up in the next 30 days you will get $5.00
credit toward upgrades. Oh yea did I mention I decided on not
charging a listing fee. And the commission is super low compared to
ebay. You can get a front page featured listing for only $2.00 as well.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Whales lost in California River are heading to ocean

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Two humpback whales that swam from the Pacific Ocean far up into central California's inland waterways appear to be heading back toward open ocean, wildlife officials said on Tuesday.

The whales, presumed to be a mother and calf, have been in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for the past two weeks, at one point swimming as far north as the state capital of Sacramento after entering inland waters through San Francisco Bay.

After efforts to coax them out of the delta failed, the whales on their own began swimming toward the bay on Sunday and by Tuesday morning they were about 25 miles from the bay's landmark Golden Gate Bridge, where the bay and Pacific Ocean meet, an official with the California Department of Fish and Game told reporters.

Concerned about the health of the wayward whales, which have wounds likely caused by boats, wildlife experts on Saturday injected them with antibiotics.

The whales are believed to belong to a group of humpbacks which migrated from Baja California, Mexico, to spend the summer near the Farallon Islands off the coast of California.