In rural Papua New Guinea one in seven women die in childbirth! Yep, that’s right, 1 in 7 women die in childbirth! That’s a shocking statistic to say the least. To give birth to a child a mother has a 15% chance of dying, can you imagine?

A friend of mine, Adriel Booker, in Australia works with YWAM Ships, a ministry that is currently working on delivering medical help into Papua New Guinea. She is a Mom, blogger and fellow YWAMer who has a strong passion for helping other mothers in need. To help expectant mothers in Papua New Guinea she has started a program called Bloggers for Birth Kits to help reduce maternal mortality in rural Papua New Guinea.

The way to help is so simple that anyone can do it…

For as little as a $2.00 donation you can purchase a Birth Kit. The Birth Kit is very simple, but according to the Birthing Kit Foundation can greatly help to reduce the incidence of infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. The kit includes:

• 1 plastic sheet to provide a clean birthing surface
• 1 bar of soap for clean hands during the birthing process and to clean the umbilical stump
• 1 pair of plastic gloves for clean hands
• 1 sterile scalpel blade to cut the umbilical cord
• 3 cords / pieces of strong string to tie the umbilical chord
• 5 gauze squares to clean the baby and mother

The kit is simple, yet effective. Adriel made up her own (which you can watch on the video at the bottom of this post), but I think the most effective way for us to help is to donate.

If you do want to help with this great project, and for only $2.00 who wouldn’t want to help, you can read more about it at Bloggers for Birth Kits.

This post was originally posted on my personal blog at Help Prospective Mothers in Papua New Guinea – Bill Hutchison

Gametrainer.com provides training for anyone wanting to improve their gaming skills. They will work with anyone from first time “newbies”, to “professional” gamers. They provide training for these games:

• Battlefield: Bad Company
• Call of Duty 4
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Guitar Hero III
• Halo 2
• Halo 3
• Madden NFL 09
• Rainbow Six: Vegas
• Rainbow Six: Vegas 2
• Rock Band
• World of Warcraft

There are featured tips on the site, as well as on-line guides for the games. They even provide hourly lessons for the games by their “Gamertrainers”. There are trainers specialising in the above games, and there is even opportunity to apply to be a trainer yourself.

The pricing for the hourly lessons are quite reasonable at $30.00 per hour, $80.00 for 3-hours or $130.00 for 5-hours.

If, unlike me, you have time to play games, but are not all that brilliant at them, this might be a service to look into.

As for me, I’ll stick with my once a month game of SimCity 4 (also available for the Mac) …

Last week Google released Ad Manager. We’ve been using Adspeed to host all of our inhouse ads on the reeftooutback.com website. Adspeed served us well for a while but I found the administrative interface poorly designed and very difficult to use. I’m a huge fan of intuitive user interfaces and Google provides that for the most part through Ad Manager. Also Adspeed was costing us $20 a month and Ad Manager is free. I will not go over all the features. I’ll focus only on the necessary ones to set up inhouse ads for your company’s website

Inventory

Once you log into Adm Manager you’ll notice four tabs at the top labeled Order, Inventory, Reports, and Admin. First lets focus on the Inventory tab. This is where you’ll set up you actual available ad slots for your website.

Click ‘Inventory’

Click ‘New Ad Slot’

Name your ad slot something descriptive like, RightColumnTop125x125. This name cannot contain any spaces. Select the size of the ads that will be displayed in this slot and fill in an optional description. You can uncheck ‘Allow AdSense ads to compete for remnant inventory’ because these are your own inhouse ads and they aren’t costing you anything, therefore it wouldn’t make sense for adspeed to compete with your own ads. Don’t worry about placements yet. We’ll get to that.

Scroll to the bottom and click Save

Placements

Now lets create a placement. Placements are groups of ad slots put together. Lets say you have one ad slot named RightColumnTop125x125 and another named RightColumnBottom125x125. You could group these two together in a placement called ‘Right Column’. Placements are useful for reporting purposes and for specifying where our creatives (our actual ads) will show up.

Click ‘Placements’

Click ‘New Placement’

Enter a name and again uncheck ‘Allow Google advertisers to target’ since these are for our inhouse ads. Below you’ll see your ad slots. ad the relevant ad slots to the placement.

Scroll to the bottom and click Save

Orders

Lets head over to the Orders section. This is where we’ll actually upload our ads.

Click ‘Orders’

Click ‘New Order’

Fill out all the fields. For Order Name put something like ‘You Company inhouse ads’. Don’t worry about external ID for now. Make sure to set end date to unlimited.

Click the ‘Advertiser’ drop down menu

Create a new advertiser with your company name

Click Save

Orders -> Line Items

Next we’ll create our line items. I like to think of line items like categories for our order. For example if you’re order may be for Toyota Cars, and your line item would be ‘Toyota Corolla’. This is important because you can only apply targeting (which we’ll get into in another article) at the line level. Inside the line we’ll place our actual ads.

Click ‘New line item’

You should be getting good at filling out these forms by now. On this page ‘Delivery Priority’ is the key field. Make sure to set it to ‘House’. This will allow you to set an unlimited end date. Also your start date must be in the future.

Below you’ll see our placements. Select which placement you want this line item to display your ads.

Scroll down and you’ll see targeting. This allows you to target your line item to specific countries, browsers, day and time, or even bandwidth. I’ll get more into the advanced features of targeting in another article.

Below targeting you can set your ‘Delivery Options’. I set Delivery rate and Creative Rotation to ‘even’ and left the other boxes unchecked.

Click Save

Orders -> Line Items -> Upload Creative

You should see a link that says ‘Needs Creatives’ in the status menu. Click this link and now we’ll upload our actual ads.

This next screen is pretty self explanatory. You can name your ad and choose the correct ad slot size. You can use flash or static images. You can even insert your own code under ‘Rich Media’. For most of you you’ll probably have a static image or flash file. If you’ve already uploaded your image/flash to a server choose ‘Standard image redirect’ or ‘Flash media redirect’ and you can put the appropriate link to the actual file. You can also specify where you want the ad to link. Manual weight will be grayed out because we’ve selected even distribution for this ad slot.

Click Save

Generate HTML

Now all we need it the actual HTML to place on our web page. Head back over to ‘Inventory’ and click ‘Generate sample HTML’. Select which ad slots you want to generate code for and click ‘Generate Sample HTML’.

The Generated HTML will show up below and you’ll notice that it’s a complete web page with head and body tags. Just copy and paste the javascript in and your done.

Remember your ads will not show up until they reach the begin date for you line item. Even then it can take 10min to an hour for Google’s cache to update itself so be patient. You’ll know everything is good when you go to your order page and see the status set to ‘Delivering’.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions please feel free to comment below.

I have just such a project underway and my preference was to be able to use a command similar to wget on a linux VPS (it might be called imagewget) that returns a jpeg instead of the page’s text. I figured that someone somewhere had packaged Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine into a command line app but I have been up one side of Google and down the other without any luck. If you know of such a command line tool please leave a comment!

However, back in Windows land, I am in luck. Pearl Crescent’s Page Saver Firefox plug-in is magic and can be driven from the command line. It is up-to-date with version 3 of Firefox, well documented and the basic version is free! Very user friendly. Here is a sample of how easy it is to save a web page as an image.

firefox -saveimage http://www.mozilla.com/

Done! Check it out!

<%@ Register TagPrefix="CustomValidators" Namespace="CustomValidators" Assembly="filename_of_DLL_file" %>

Which I change to:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="cv" Namespace="MyCustomValidators" Assembly="~/bin/CustomValidationControls.dll" %>

However as soon as I compiled the page I received: The given assembly name or codebase was invalid. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80131047) After searching Google some more I wasn’t any better off with a solution. What is wrong with my code base? Recompiling didn’t help renaming it didn’t help. However after some careful reading of the on-line help related to the @ Register directive I found this statement:

assembly

The assembly in which the namespace that you are associating with the tagprefix attribute resides.

Note
The assembly name does not include a file extension. …

That was the clue I need combined with another post I had read. I had added the full path and extension for the assembly but what it was looking for was ONLY the assembly name it self with no extension or directory path. .net assumes that the path for the assembly will be the bin directory. So the correct @ Register directive should be:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="cv" Namespace="MyCustomValidators" Assembly="CustomValidationControls" %>

As soon as I did that the page compiled with out errors and I now can validate my CheckBoxList.

As an aside note you can also solve this by putting the source file in the App_Code directory and then register the tag prefix this way:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="cv" Namespace="MyCustomValidators" Assembly="__Code" %>

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