galew

I wonder about people that are so concerned about giving out their email, if I go to a site and they ask for my email and I don’t want to give it, I don’t. If that means that I can’t use their product then so be it. But why complain to the world, just don’t use the product.
As far as I know no one will force you to use their product.

Buy another domain name and use it for your shop, don’t mix the two

I would go to elance or rentacoder and hire someone to write the code to take any size picture and make it into the different sizes you want. Perferably automatically. so you would enter the photo as a jpeg or other common format and it would spit out the 6 different jpegs.
I don’t know how much you would have to pay, but I have gotten so good coding on several projects for 30 to 50 dollars.
Good Luck

Add the plugin “advertising manager” to your plug ins and you can then put in the adsense code and add it to your blog.
It also lets you add any ad copy you wish.
I agree that starting with the hosted wordpress is by far the best way to go.