hey all

Firstly, YEuth is coming. It should be ready for launch in the next few days, after-which I’ll put up a countdown timer till official launch and start drumming up support.

But, I’ve been side-tracked having recently stumbled across a massive revolutionary idea in the online advertising arena.

I’m currently pulling together all my notes and creating a business plan etc before I start looking for funding.

I’m also looking for a founding team to help bring the idea to life. The team will definitely get a % stake in the company, and possibly even a salary and full-time position if I can manage to obtain funding (only looking for around $100K startup investment - which is very reasonable for this idea and the amount of cash being thrown around in the web2.0sphere).

The team I’m after includes:

• PHP/MYSQL Programmers (around 2)
• Sales Person
• Marketing Person
• Possibly another Manager

I’m preferably after people located in or around Sydney or Wollongong (Australia folks). And will be looking at getting this cracking within the next 2 months.

If you’re interested or know of ANYONE who might be, please let them and myself know. Also if you know of anyone interested in funding an innovative, web 2.0 online advertising startup… please let them/myself know.

Cheers
Nathan

YEuth! is nearly finished. The only thing remaining is I have to find a registration/login mod for vBulletin and then everything else should fall into place nicely.

I tell ya though, the site is looking very, very sexy. You guys will love it.

Stay tuned

hey everyone

I’m finally putting together YEuth.com after 2 years of “hmm should I start it now, or wait till I become a more established young entrepreneur… but then others will miss out on the benefits of YEuth and have to go through the same crap other young and aspiring entrepreneurs go through, etc”.

Anyway, YEuth is a non-profit organization dedicating to assisting young and aspiring entrepreneurs to achieve their potential. The plan so far is to get a website up and running where we can get a community together and start collecting donations, working out how the organization will run, and what activities/things we will do etc. It may take a year or more of planning and fund raising before we can start doing some cool stuff… but it’s worth the wait.

I have many ideas etched down for what YEuth can do and become, and I’m sure they will only improve and more will be added once the community starts getting involved.

The thing I need help with right now is I need some programming work done. I’ve already hit-up rentacoder, elance and a couple of other places with no luck (I think because my budget is so low… i.e. <$200).

I need someone to do some integration/bridge work… i.e. I have most of the website setup already, but want to add things like a forum and blog. And I need them integrated so that you register once on the site, and can then login/logout once to access the forum, blog, etc.

As I said my budget is under US$200, but it would be great if you could do this for free (remember, this is for a non-profit).

In return I will put a link to your website/business in the website footer until the next major site update, I will write a blog post about your generosity on this site, and also on YEuth.com, and I will include you in the credits page on YEuth. So if the site does become popular, think of all the potential YEs needing coding done, who will see your website in the footer or blog or credits page.

If you can help me out, or know of anyone who can, please let me know.

Cheers
Nathan

Yay

Yep I’m still here. Long story short: after uni finished I moved back in with the family on the coast and after a few weeks they decided that they were going to cancel our Net connection because they couldn’t afford it and because my younger brother and I were spending too much time sitting in front of our computers. So that was annoying.

A few more weeks later I moved into a new house back up in Wollongong with some mates and also managed to land Centrelink payments. So now I’m getting some very nice money from the government to study, which is an awesome base as I can now focus on building a business/es for the long-run without the stress of trying to magically grow money from nothing.

However we signed up with this 24mbps plan through www.letsgo.com.au which looked pretty good. The reviews I found said their customer support was horrible, there was about a 3 week signup waiting period and also the speeds and pings were slow. But for the price it was awesome. But… it ended up taking 77 days to get connected after a bunch of issues popped up. Finally got connected up yesterday!

And so I just finished sorting through about 1000 emails, most of which were SPAM. So if you sent me an email that I haven’t yet replied to, please send it again.

Now, business stuff…

Haven’t been doing terribly much sadly. pixTower I gave up on a while back and have been meaning to try and sell it on eBay or somewhere but haven’t got around to it yet. With YEBlogger I have no idea what’s happening there. The site and many other sites Daniel/akula runs have been down for a long time and I didn’t get a reply from him the last time I sent an email and PM. I’m still keen on working on that site as there is still a lot of very cool things that could be done with it. Though we were having trouble finding more YE bloggers to add to the database and so we were planning to include other “entrepreneur” bloggers. Plus we weren’t making any money from it which was a bit of a downer.

The near-future…

I’m STILL (yes I know) working on DropBuy.com.au and hope to have that working in it’s very basic form within the next week or two. The last thing I was doing for that was looking for some wholesalers/dropshippers of books, but found that rather than the industry having a few large wholesalers, it’s actually made up of all these small distributors you have to individually signup with to access a wide range of titles.

I’ve also got a niched, digg-like idea in the works which I also hope to have out soon.

Overall I think (hope) I’ve now moved past the typical stage of an aspiring young entrepreneurs’ life where they try all sorts of small, poorly-thought-out business ideas - mainly websites in my case. I’m now all about focusing on just a few big, but low-risk (at this stage) ideas and really putting a lot of effort into making them long-term successes.

Oh, I’ve also succumbed to the masses and actually half-created a Facebook profile (I also have a Studentface.com.au profile too) so feel free to search and add me as a friend.

Nathan Waters
Keeping It Real.

HTML = childs play… it’s the most basic coding for a web page, it’s easy to learn and it’s the foundation for any sort of web development. I learnt mainly by looking at the source code on various sites: just right-click, view source.

CSS = ironing… it’s something that you’d rather not do or learn, but doing it definitely makes everything look nicer/neater. You may produce/find some burn marks, but practice makes perfect. I’m still a little rusty on CSS, but I’ve just been learning by looking at what other sites do: right-click, view source and then the CSS code will either be in there or look for a bit of code in the “head” section that has “style.css” (or similar). Copy that path to the end of the domain and your browser will open up the CSS stylesheet.

PHP = public speaking… you know that learning and perhaps mastering it will produce some very cool results, but you’re scared to even learn the basics. You know everyone uses it in some form or another, but your fear gets the better of you and you push the learning aside.

I have known for a long time that just about every decent website uses PHP ranging from simple to advanced uses and integrations. But I have always put off learning it, thinking “oh, I don’t want to have to spend hours and hours trying to learn this new language when I can either use HTML or pay someone to do it”. I have a tonne of web bookmarks for php tutorials which I’ve just added in the hopes of going back later on and reading/learning it (never happened).

Well yesterday I forced myself to look into it.

I was working on the template/logo for Drop Buy which is up now, but still under development. I knew that a lot of websites have a separate header php file for the website header and one for the footer. So that you only need to make changes in the one file for it to apply to all other pages on your site. But I had thought that even this PHP coding was difficult… to the point where when I made pixTower I actually manually copied the header and footer to each and every page (yes very sad and lame lol).

….

Actually it’s easy, here’s how:

Have a search for PHP includes tutorial

In my template for Drop Buy, I only needed a header and footer (as I just included the navbar in the header). But you can “include” numerous files like a separate menu.

Soooo, what I did was:

1. Copied all the HTML code that included the top section of the site (so everything from the starting “html” until the end of the navigation bar I have)
2. Paste that into a new text file and save that as “header.php”
3. Now do the same for the footer. Copy all the HTML code which includes the footer (including the final “html”) and save that in a separate text file as “footer.php”
4. So now all that’s left is whatever content was in the middle (between the header and footer)
5. Start a new text file and save it as “index.php”
6. Add this code at the top: < ?php include "header.php"; ?>
7. Then copy the middle content beneath
8. Then add this at the bottom: < ?php include "footer.php"; ?>
9. Save, upload to your host, done.

So now when the index.php file is loaded (i.e. when someone goes to your main page) it automatically fetches the header and footer and adds them.

You can now repeat the same process for other pages, but save the file as about.php instead of index.php for example.

To display the .php pages you need to have them on a php server. So you can either set this up on your own computer using something like Apache or if that’s too complicated (as I’ve found) you can just edit the files using FTP (so upload them to your host and edit via FTP).

….

A few other tricks:

….

Notice how the URL to my pages are www.dropbuy.com.au/about instead of www.dropbuy.com.au/about.php?

Download this file (make sure it is name “.htaccess” only) and upload it to your root directory. It’s a .htaccess file which basically tells the server to treat /about as going to /about.php.

….

Need to change the page titles dynamically?

In your header.php file replace the title tags with:

…and change the title to what you want for your main page.

Then in each other file (e.g. about.php), add this at the top: < ?php $title = "About :: Drop Buy"; ?>

….

Want to change the link colour to tell people what page they’re on?

If you click on the “About” you will notice it goes to the About page and highlights the About page which helps notify the user as to which page they’re currently on.

Add this at the top of your header.php file:
< ?php
/* Set a value for $PHP_SELF (for v4.2+) */
if ($PHP_SELF == "") $PHP_SELF = $_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"];
?>

And then for each link add this code:

Then in you CSS file add styling definition for the class .herebar, e.g:

So what that does is it looks at what the current page is and if it is the About page then it adds the class="herebar" to the link, otherwise it adds class="contentsbar". So you just use CSS to say: highlight the text if it’s class is “herebar”.

….

Erm, damn even that simple stuff sounds pretty complicated when writing it down lol.

Hope it helps you somewhat and was understandable enough

Sorry about the messy display of code. For some reason WP was spitting out all sorts of random things, so I had to create images of the code.

I’ll post some updates on Drop Buy in the coming days/weeks. I have some more fun ahead of me trying to implement a blog and a few other little features.

edit: Now reading through this great tutorial. And these, ones.

Nathan Waters
PHPerifically something