I’ve been thinking about the Future of Online Advertising Conference the whole day. In a previous article I wrote about how ecstatic I was when I got a $995 ticket for free. The thought that was playing in my mind all day was that I don’t have the funds available to go to New York from Paramaribo, Suriname, South America and to take care of my expenses. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like letting this one slide.

Then I came across Wayne Hurlbert’s article Sponsorships to events: Attendence may be required. His following words really got me thinking again:

Because of money shortages, many bloggers simply don’t go to any or all of the blogging conferences they might enjoy. Instead of mentioning their financial situations, the cash strapped blogger quietly avoids the issue, and stays at home. As a result, more people than the non-attending blogger are the losers.

The bloggers who elect to remain silent about their financial status miss an opportunity to learn more about the strength of blogging. Ideas that the stay at home bloggers possess about starting, building, and enhancing an online business are not shared with others. Everyone loses as some golden information sharing opportunites are lost.

I decided to ask for sponsorship to try not to make this chance go to waste. But then other questions started arising: How would people donate to me? How will I get the money? How fast will I be able to gather $3000 - $4000 in sponsoring/donations? I am confident I could get 400 individuals to donate $10 each, but how would I get the money?

These questions come from the fact that the most used (and probably cheapest) way of sending money is via Paypal. People from Suriname can’t apply for a Paypal account, since Suriname is not listed. A similar service by Moneybookers which does allow Suriname users to have an account. But since this service seems to be used by only a few compared to Paypal, this could scare off those wishing to donate.

My offer
But these problems won’t stop me from at least trying to get the funding to go to NY. So here’s my offer:

• I will make a detailed report of the conference and everything I learn there in an effort to share this information with my readers and their readers. I expect this information to be very valuable for growth of an online presence.
• Since I’m planning to attend the Problogger/b5media 1 day conference in NYC the day after the conference (June 9, 2007), I’ll have an extra day worth of information to share, which I also expect to very valuable.
• I plan to share all the details of my planning for this trip with my readers, which might give some more insight on how things work locally and in the US when visiting for conferences. This information might be as valuable as the above mentioned.

My plea
I need to raise $3000 - $4000 in a couple of weeks: $1500 - $2000 for transportation, $750 - $1000 for lodging, about $500 for food and another $500 for other expenses.

I believe that, if 300-400 people each donate $10 for the valuable information I might be able to supply, my trip to NY is a go!

What can you do?

• Chip In: On the right in the sidebar and on the bottom of this post you see a ChipIn widget, which you can use to send me a donation via your PayPal account.
• Donate money by sending it via Moneybookers to rehuel@stretsh.com. If you have no Moneybookers account yet, you can create one.
• Buy advertising space on this blog.
• Spread the word about a blogger needing the help of his fellow bloggers to get to a conference, so everyone can benefit from what he learns.
• You can place this ChipIn widget on your site/blog, so people can still donate while reading your articles.
• Help me to find ways to get donations

Extra offers

Think about all the exposure my blog will get during my trip to NY. This might be a good way of advertising your blog/product/service.

I will keep everyone updated as much as possible on the progress of project “Get Rehuel to FOOA”.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE
If for any reason I don’t get to go to NY, the money that was donated to me will be send to a charity organization. So this money will either be used to send me to FOOA or for charity.

Since my blog is now link loving, write about this project in your blog for a linkback to yours. Help me to spread the word, who knows what other benefits could come from this.

Update: Thanks to Nathan Metzger of Not So Boring Life I now have a ChipIn widget to receive donations from visitors with a PayPal account. Just click the ChipIn! button to pay securely.

Earlier I spoke about winning a free ticket to the Future of Online Advertising Conference in New York, a $995 value.

What’s this conference about?
This conference is the place where you can hear from leaders in advertising what you can expect from online advertising in the future. You can learn from their experiences and analysis and they could inspire you to come up with your own ideas. This is also an event where you can make valuable connections.

Even before the conference, you can start to connect with other attendees in “The Lounge”, an online section for registered users only.

Some topics that will be discussed will be:

• How to guarantee the success of your online ads
• Tips for packaging your inventory and maximizing ad revenue
• Online Advertising Basics - Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask
• Advertising in RSS feeds - the next big thing?
• Marketing Beyond Google, Yahoo, AOL & MSN with Scale, Quality and Safety
• It’s all in the creative - how to create successful online ads
• Targeted Ad Networks - Cost Per Influence Vs. Cost Per Thousand
• Ads in Online Video - the future of interactive advertising?

Some of the speakers at this conference:

• Erick Schonfeld (Business 2.0)
• Henry Copeland (Blog Ads)
• Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners)
• Mike Hudack (blip.tv)
• Jay Adelson (digg/revision3)
• Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.net)
• Greg Stuart (IAB)
• Carla Hendra (Ogilvy)
• Matt Freeman (Tribal DDB)
• Jeremy Allaire (Brightcove)
• Chas Edwards (Federated Media)
• Steve Rubel (Edelman)
• Andrew Goodman (Page Zero)
• Michael Walrath (Right Media)
• Brent Hill (FeedBurner)
• Alyson Racer (New York Times)

Get 10% off
Are you interested in attending? Before you register, contact me to get 10% off the registration fee. Use this code 10p3rc when you register and get 10% off the registration fee. Contact me if you do to let me know, maybe we can meet up.

Yesterday, while I was doing some work, a notification popped up letting me know that there is a new article in one of the feeds I’m reading. Because I was in the middle of getting a code to work, I didn’t pay attention to it right away.

A couple of minutes later I was done with this part of the script, so I went over to my Akregator to see the feed. I saw a new article name Five Free Tickets to Future of Online Advertising - First Five Win! from Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog. I was mad at myself for not checking it right away when it popped up.

In this article Darren said he had 5 tickets to give away for the Future of Online Advertising Conference in New York. In order to win you had to write an email to the organizers saying that you are a Problogger reader and you would like to attend. But only the first 5 would win the ticket.

I checked the FOOA website and noticed that the ticket was worth US$995. More reason for me to hit myself on the head for not checking earlier, because in my opinion, Darren’s reader base is so huge, that the first 5 would have been mailed already. This was about 10 minutes after the article was posted.

I still went ahead and wrote an email. Why? Because I figured that Darren might have some benefits to all the mails going to the organizers saying that they’re Problogger readers. Plus, maybe my assumptions about not being one of the firsts to read the article were wrong, so why not give it a try?!

And that paid off. I received an email from Ryan Carson telling me that I’m in. I stared at that sentence for a couple of seconds, while slowly the smile on my face was getting bigger. I could not believe it! After a couple of seconds I continued reading the mail. It supplied me with a code I should use when registering and the conference would be completely free for me. So I clicked on the link to the conference site to get registered.

It felt like the world froze. An unfamiliar feeling of excitement grew upon me while I was filling in the registration form. This was an experience of a lifetime, just seeing that I was registered for a conference. I can’t even imagine what I will feel when I really get to the conference!

Conclusion
Don’t discourage yourself from doing things you would like to do, even if they seem impossible at the moment. Unless it’s a fact that you’re too late, give it a try, because you don’t know what good it can bring you in the (near) future.

Darren can’t come close to imagining what good he has done by writing this article. He might’ve had different reasons for writing the article but it affected me differently. To me, going through this process is already life changing. It is a confirmation that I’m on the right track of getting ahead.

Today, when I checked Technorati, I noticed some changes.

Some terms changed
“Incoming links” are now called “Authority”, those who favorite your blog are called your “Fans” and blogs posts linking to your blog posts fall under “blog reactions”. I’m not sure yet what they try to do gain with the term changes. Gary’s guess is that ‘using the word “Authority” makes it easier for people to differentiate between Google and Technorati when talking about backlinks now’.

Design changes
Previously, when you searched for a blog in their blog directory, the information of that blog would be displayed in approximately the same way they are, when you searched for the blog in blog posts. Now this view is changed. On a page headed by a title like “Everything in the known universe about Rehuel punt kom | Writings of a web developer” you can see most information of the particular blog at a glance.

Check out the results of a search for my blog in the blog directory, while the result of a search in blog posts still looks the same.

Conclusion
I have the feeling Technorati listened to those bloggers who mentioned that the Top 100 Favorited list is actually useless, and are changing the system. While doing this they cleverly hide te major changes in smaller changes to the design and terminology AND they give users a chance to get used to the new terms that will be used in the new system.

This is just a guess. I also think we can expect more changes to the design of Technorati in the very near future.

Update: As I hit submit to post the article, I see a similar article by Maki pop up in my feed reader. The main difference is that he noticed that the WTF voting is more “Web 2.0″ as he puts it.

Book
For people who are new to Internet marketing, Street Smart Internet Marketing - Tips, Tools, Tactics & Techniques to Market Your Product, Service, Business or Ideas Online seems to be a good book.

After reading around about the nofollow attribute, I decided to remove it from my comments.

The “nofollow” attribute is added to a link, when you want to let the search engines know that you don’t vouch for that specific site. This way, the search engines won’t count this particular link as a “vote of confidence”.

As many of you know (those who don’t know, I mentioned it in previous articles), I promised my readers to only supply links to sites I trust. I cannot expect my readers to trust me, when they get send to sites I don’t trust. One exception to this rule is when I provide a link to a bad example, in which case I’ll clearly make a note of it.

Comments
So if this is my way of thinking, why should I not give the people who comment on my articles my “vote of confidence”? If people take their time to participate in my small community, I can only look for ways to reward them. When you help me build my community, I give you my vote.

Exceptions
This, however, is also subject to my own discretion. If I, for whatever reason, think that a link does not deserve my vote, I will add the nofollow attribute to that link, whether it’s a link in my posts or the comments.

Most web designers look for ways to get the websites up and running in less time. Nowadays there are a lot of Content Management Systems (CMS) to download on the net. They all have their benefits.

The problem with existing CMS is that you need to customize it to suit the needs of your customer. It is very important than to ask yourself if the time you spend modifying the existing CMS is worth it. Can you get a site up and running faster than you modify an existing CMS?

I had this dilemma twice already. Once with a classified real estate ads site and the other with a tour company.

Classified ads
This customer wanted a site where visitors could place real estate ads for free. These free listing should include the name, telephone number and email address of the advertiser, the type of listing he was offering and a brief description.

Advertisers who wanted to add pictures of their property and give a more detailed specification, could do so for a small price. Since Suriname does not have a lot of options for online payment, the advertiser would then get an order number, which he could use to go pay for the ad at the office. As soon as payment was done, the ad was placed for the period for which was paid.

The catch: Visitors shouldn’t have to log in to place their ads. Since the Internet is not is widely distributed in Suriname, forcing visitors to login could scare off some potential customers, the client argued against my advice.

I found some nice content management systems that would allow me to do this. One of them is Drupal. But I spent so much time getting this to work that it all didn’t seem worth the price the man paid. I especially had problems with displaying search results of ads with picture only.

After spending days trying to get Drupal to work, I gave up. I decided to write this from scratch. I did this in half the time I spent on finding the right CMS and modifying it. This site is currently still under development, since there was an addition to the work. The customer eventually decided to separate properties for sale from properties for rent.

Tour/adventure site
I really thought this one would be a quick fix with some CMS. This was supposed to be a simple tour operator website with a list of tours, a descriptive page, where there would be information about the tour, pictures of the tour, what you can expect to see there, the price, just the regular tour operator stuff.

For this tour site, there had to be made so many links on the description page. It should b the page where you can find almost anything you need to know about the tour, some of the information only a click away. But, this site needs to be multi-lingual. And this is where I got into trouble when trying to use a CMS.

Most of the wishes of the customer could have been met with some CMSes. Even though it took me a lot of days to get everything linked to each other, there were 2 things that gave me problems: making it Multi-lingual and linking pictures to specific tours and other resources.

I spent weeks trying to get this to work, but then the customer was starting to breath down my neck. A couple of days ago I decided to ditch the CMS and start from scratch.

Starting from scratch was not really starting from scratch in this case, because I’d already built tour operator websites, like for Oetsi Tours and Sun and Forest Tours. Since the Sun and Forest site was my first completed project where I used PHP and MySQL to produce a standard compliant website, I could easily reuse the code used for this site.

It’s been three days, and I’m almost finished with this site, from scratch. The admin section is almost finished and the template is ready. I just need to finish the picture upload and linking section, then I’m ready to put everything on it’s place in the template. The admin section will be finished tonight, so I’m expecting the site to be ready by late tomorrow. The customer will then enter the content via the admin section. While he’s doing that, there may be some more tweaking and fixing needed to be done, which could bring the launch date to about half way this month somewhere.

Conclusion
If you are sure that a content management system will be easy and quick to adjust to the needs of your customer, that is probably the best away to go. But as soon as you realize that you’re spending more time adjusting than it would take to build the site from scratch, stop putting energy into the CMS and start from scratch. Most web designers I know have code lying around which they can reuse, so building from scratch doesn’t necessarily means that you will need to start anew.

Book
According to the reviews of this book, Content Management Bible is a very handy reference for those who work with content regularly.

In the recent update of PageRanks by Google, my blogs, this one and A few good notes were promoted to PR4. You can’t imagine how happy this makes me.

In the 2 months I’ve been blogging, I managed to raise my unique daily visits to an average of 150. I hit 450 once when I tried submitting my OpenOffice.org vs. Open Office article to Digg, del.icio.us, Netscape and reddit. The next day I submitted my article about the different Ubuntus to the same sites and that brought me 680 unique visits. With this I was trying to get some of those many visitors to keep coming back. I did see a rise from 90 daily to 150, so who knows, maybe it worked. Or maybe it’s because my post about my real favorite blogs was mentioned on Darren Rowse’s blog.

ReviewMe
I was delighted to see 2 messages from ReviewMe pop up telling me that both this blog and A few good notes were accepted to provide paid reviews. My rate is set to $40 at the moment, but I am more than satisfied with that. More on ReviewMe later.

Poetry Meme
I started a poetry meme on A few good notes, a blog I converted to a poetry blog. I want to use this blog to experiment a little with poetry in the blogosphere. I myself are no poet, but I admire poets and their spoken words. I will try to see how my blog can help uplift poetry, because I think this combination of art and expression is one worth cherishing.

So far the poetry meme delivered 16 poems of which I know. I decided to give these first 16 a chance to win a 2 GB USB stick, if their poem was voted the best in the Poetic Bloggers Contest, part 1. Part 1, because I expect more poems to come in and I want to give every batch a chance to win something. Maybe after a couple of contest I’ll hold a “Best of the best” contest to give an even bigger price to the winner in a contest where all the winners are entered.

If you haven’t expressed yourself through a poem yet, please check out the rules for the meme and get poetic.

Affiliate sales
If you noticed on the bottom of my posts, I’m experimenting with affiliate marketing. Every time I write an article I find a book that relates to the topic and I add an affiliate link to the book. Patience proofed to be a virtue: I made my first $1 on referral fees when one of my readers bought Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional).

Slowly I’ll be experimenting with more ways to get more out of affiliate sales, without torturing my readers with ads.

Conclusion
The recent developments around my blogs have made my day. I have the feeling I’m on the right track here. I start to see benefits of the hours I spend on my blog and I love the feeling!

Book
Yes, I’m going to try to sell you a book! What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting: Real-Life Advice from 101 People Who Successfully Leverage the Power of the Blogosphere

I am working on a website for a local tour operator at the moment. On this site there will be a list of available tours. Since it’s a simple list, with the name of the tour, a short description, the number of days the tour takes and the price, I decided to make list the tours in a table.

As you will see, this is a simple table, without too much code. This is a great example of how design is separated from the content.

The table
So I started with the basic HTML for the table.

<table class=”tour” cellspacing=”0″>
  <caption>Available Tours</caption>
  <tr>
    <th>Tour</th>
    <th>Duration</th>
    <th>Price</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><a href=”tours1.html”>Brokopondo Tour</a> This is a short description of the Brokopondo tour. This tour brings you at a resort close to the biggest lake in Suriname.</td>
    <td>3 days</td>
    <td>$150 per person</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><a href=”tours1.html”>Brokopondo Tour</a> This is a short description of the Brokopondo tour. This tour brings you at a resort close to the biggest lake in Suriname.</td>
    <td>3 days</td>
    <td>$150 per person</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><a href=”tours1.html”>Brokopondo Tour</a> This is a short description of the Brokopondo tour. This tour brings you at a resort close to the biggest lake in Suriname.</td>
    <td>3 days</td>
    <td>$150 per person</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Since I want to leave room for using other tables to display data, I don’t want to make the styling of this table affect the other tables, so I assign the “tour” class to it.

By defining the cellspacing attribute for the table, we eliminate spaces between the cells. This could also be done with CSS using border-collapse: collapse;, but not all browsers know how to handle this CSS property.

As you see I used the tag in the first row instead of <td>. The th tag defines a cell that contains header information.

Also, I will use the caption tag to display the title of the table.

The styles
In my CSS document I added the following styles for this table:

table.tour {
  width: 100%;
  border: 1px solid #000;
  background: #fff;
}

table.tour th, table.tour td {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 8px 10px;
  text-align: left;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #b5b5b5;
}

I make sure the background of my table is set to white, because I have a very light image set as background of the site. I give all the cells a padding (space between the border of the cell and the actual content of the cell) of 8 pixels on the top and bottom of the content and 10px on the left and right. Then I put a line under the cells. This creates a nice dividing line between the rows, because I removed the space between the cells by setting cellpadding to 0.

Alternating the rows
Let’s give the rows alternating colors. This helps to make a clear distinction between the different tours. First I assign the “alternate” class to every other row. So in this case I change the second and the forth <tr> to <tr class=”alternate”>. My CSS code looks like this:

table.tour tr.alternate {
  background: #f1f1f1;
}

Now the rows with the “alternate” class will have a very light gray background, while the rows without class will be white.

Styling the tour name
To make it look better, I want to name of the tour to be displayed on it’s own line, with the description on the next line. However, I don’t want to use <br />, so when viewed in a browser that does not support CSS or with styles turned off, it will be on the same line to avoid confusion. In this case, I don’t touch my HTML at all. All I do is add another definition:

table.tour a {
  display: block;
  font-weight: bold;
}

This makes sure that the link (the a tag) is displayed as a block, using the full available width, even if it’s not that long, forcing the rest of the content to the next line. Bolding the link makes it stand out better.

The header row
The header row may need another color to make a clear distinction. I also need to make the black text there a little lighter, to make it stand out less, since the tours need the attention.

table.tour th {
  background: #ffcf0;
  color: #999;
}

Styling the caption
As you can see, the caption still looks out of place. This is how I take care of it:

table.tour caption {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 10px;
  font-size: 16px;
  font-weight: bold;
  text-align: left;
  border: 1px solid #000000;
  border-bottom: none;
  background: #fff9f9;
}

Here I give the caption a padding of 10 pixels on all sides. Generally the caption is aligned to the center, but I need it to be left. You can choose wherever you want it positioned.
I give the caption a black border, but I remove the bottom border, because the caption is stuck to the table, so it can use the top border of the table as its bottom border. Not doing this will give a fat black dividing line between the caption and the header row.

So there you have it. You can see an example of the final work here.

One small addition: change the header cells from <th> to <th scope=”col”> to make it more screen-reader-friendly. Adding the “col” scope clarifies that the underlying column belongs to that specific header.

Conclusion
With a little HTML and some CSS you can style simple tables to look very nice. Make your tables look cool in CSS friendly browsers, while they are still readable with CSS-unfriendly browsers and software used by the not-so-abled.

I learned this way of styling my tables from Dan Cederholm’s book Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS. This is one book i personally recommend to anyone who is in web design or aspires to design websites.

I need to point out that Dan has published a second edition to this book, which will be available in August. But you can pre-order Bulletproof Web Design: Improving Flexibility and Protecting Against Worst-case Scenarios With Xhtml and Css, Second Edition so it can be shipped to you as soon as it’s available.

May 1st is Labor day in Suriname. This is the day labor is celebrated. A lot has been going on in Paramaribo, but I decided to spend my day cuddling up to my wife, watching TV.

Around 4:30 pm I went to the Independent square, where our Telecommunication company had organized a walk/run event. I had some fun, met some nice people and went back home.

This post is to explain why I have no decent post up for today, but my first post for tomorrow promises to be a good one.

This post is guest blogged by Nathan from NotSoBoringLife.

Have you ever had a really great idea but just didn’t know how to make it happen? Maybe you just don’t have the time to code a site from the ground up. I spend the majority of my days in front of a computer and still couldn’t code a site or application. I’m guessing you may be in the same boat. You should consider outsourcing your project. Outsourcing may not seem like a viable option because it’s to expensive you because you don’t have enough contacts. I’m here to let you in on a little secret.

Head over to RentACoder or GetAFreelancer to see exactly the type of outsourcing I’m referring to. These type of sites offer the people with the skills to make your vision a reality. All you need to know is exactly what you want. This is important because in order to hire someone you’ll need to document exactly what you want them to do. Making concrete and distinguishable requirements is key to outsourcing on these type of sites. You can save hundreds of dollars and end up with a very high quality product.

Here’s how it works
You document your requirements and post a maximum price you’re willing to pay. Coders will bid how much they’re willing to complete the task for based on your requirements. You can ‘interview’ the coders to ensure they are qualified and accept a coder you feel can complete the work. Both sites have a decent arbitration system in the event you and the coder can’t meet eye to eye. Here’s where it really important to document all the requirements of the site or program.

My most recent outsourced project to RentACoder was the Field of Dreams theme you’ll find currently running on NotSoBoringLife. This project ended up taking a little longer than I had hoped but in the end I received exactly what I wanted and for a very fair price. In the past I’ve had log files parsed into a database for analysis and photoshop work for some marketing material.

Conclusion
Next time you’ve got a million dollar idea don’t let the ‘how am i going to do this’ stop you.