Het is hier zodanig druk, dat ik gewoon niet geraak aan meer schrijven. Voor de mensen die toch nog foto’s/verslagen willen zien: om de twee dagen minstens wordt de project website geupdate. Daar kan je een dagelijks verslag lezen, samen met een selectie aan foto’s.

Projectwebsite Nepal

Onze eerste volle dag in Kathmandu. Na de drukte van de eerste indrukken en het installeren, kom ik te weten dat Evelien haar bagage helemaal niet kwijt is. Een verwarring op de luchthaven, etc, maar alles is nu terecht. We staan op om 8 uur om aan onze dag te beginnen. We hadden zaterdag al gehoord dat de Maoisten niet tevreden waren, maar er was tenminste nog enig verkeer. Zondag werd ons verteld dat er een algemene strike was en alles plat lag. Geen verkeer, niets mocht rijden, niets mocht open zijn… Dan maar te voet de toerist uithangen. We zijn zondag Swayambunath, de apentempel, en Durbar square gaan bezoeken. Zondag avond zag het er even naar uit dat we een paar dagen vast gingen zitten in Kathmandu. Het was de bedoeling om maandag met de bus naar Pokhara te vertrekken, maar die reed helemaal niet…

Maandag ochtend wisten Lut en John ons echter te melden dat ze een binnenlandse vlucht te pakken hadden (voor toeristen werd vaak een uitzondering gemaakt op de geen-verkeer-regel). In de voormiddag zijn we nog Pashupatinat gaan bezoeken (waar de lijkverbrandingen plaatsvinden) om ‘s middags een tourist-only bus te nemen naar de luchthaven. Turbulentie, luchtzakken, het bijhorende gegil en 30 minuten later stonden we in Pokhara (de busreis ging normaal tussen de 5 en de 7 uur duren). Onze aankomst in Pokhara bevestigde nog maar eens dat we ongelooflijk veel geluk hebben. Tot nu toe nog niets van problemen met ergens geraken, geen problemen met de Maoisten (die toeristen nooit iets zouden doen trouwens) en nu zagen we ook nog eens de bergen in de verte (normaal gingen we deze niet te zien krijgen)… De eerste indruk van Pokhara was een fantastische. Govinda, de eigenaar van de Butterfly lodge, had voor ons een busje geregeld en niet veel later kwamen we aan in het paradijs.

Lakeside (de regio van Pokhara waar we zitten) en dan zeker onze Butterfly Lodge is prachtig. De zon schijnt hier een aangename 30 graden, de vogeltjes fluiten en het meer ‘s avonds is prachtig.

De strike is echter hier ook goed te voelen, alle winkels zijn dicht, we kunnen geen geld afhalen (wat voor sommigen een probleem wordt) en het is lastig om ‘s avonds iets te vinden om te eten. Veel winkeltjes riskeren het zich toch te openen maar het is een heel raar zicht om plotseling een hoop straatkinderen te horen schreeuwen, waarop iedereen prompt alles dicht doet. Als 2 minuten later een Maoistische betoging passeert, is niemand nog verbaasd. Gisteren avond zorgde zoiets voor ietwat bang momentje bij sommigen: we hadden een restaurantje gevonden dat toch open was, maar als de Maoisten passeerden werden de lichten uitgedaan (het is om 7 uur hier donker) en werd ons vriendelijk gevraagd te blijven zitten en stil te zijn. De schrik zit er precies toch wat in. Nu hoeven we als toeristen absoluut niet bang te zijn. Volgend jaar is het het Nepalees jaar voor het Toerisme, waar nu trouwens al een pak reclame voor wordt gemaakt, een evenement dat de Maoisten sterk steunen. Toeristen lastig vallen is dus wel het laatste wat op hun agenda staat.

Wat erger is, de Maoisten zijn bijzonder streng tegenover het Tibetaanse vluchtelingen kamp. De school daar is ook gesloten en daar controleren ze blijkbaar toch sterk op. Nu gaan we er toch proberen les te geven aan de Tibetaanse kinderen (normaal komen er ook Nepalese kinderen, maar die blijven nu thuis omdat het anders te veel zou opvallen dat de school open is), maar dat betekent dus kleine groepjes en binnen les geven met de luiken toe. Ook kunnen we nog niet onmiddellijk gaan lesgeven, daar we fietsen of taxis nodig hebben om er te geraken. De fietsverhuur is echter gesloten en taxis rijden niet… Vandaag hebben we dus nog een dag om voor te bereiden en voornamelijk: te genieten van de prachtige omgeving.

Foto’s van de eerste dagen (Kathmandu vooral) zijn te vinden op Facebook, foto’s van Pokhara volgen nog.

Onze vluchten zijn allemaal perfect op tijd aangekomen, nergens vertragingen whatsoever. Alleen is Evelien jammer genoeg haar bagage kwijt. Voorlopig nog geen idee hoe we dat goed gaan krijgen/// Tegen 16u plaatselijke tijd waren we in Kathmandu. Momenteel staken de Maoisten hier echter en ligt het leven relatief plat. Zo moesten we bijvoorbeeld 100 roepie meer betalen voor onze taxi, omdat ze beboet  zullen worden omdat ze reden vandaag… Vanavond wordt er gestemd, maar staat het hen niet aan, gaat het land in staking. Ofzoiets… We snappen er voorlopig zelf nog maar de helft van.

Toeristen lopen echter totaal geen gevaar of wat daqn ook. We hopen gewoon dat we in Pokhara geraken (bussen rijden momenteel niet).

Het qwerty toetsenbord doet pijn aan mijn polsen, het internet is hier belachelijk traag en ik wil iets gaan drinken. Tot later(!

Foto’s volgen later.

• Stressen omdat ik een continue panische angst heb van dingen te vergeten. Het leven is daar spotgoedkoop, als ik iets vergeet, kan ik het dus perfect daar kopen. Maar toch!
• Holder de bolder nog om voorschriften lopen voor wat medicatie. Better safe than sorry.
• iPod synchroniseren voor op het vliegtuig.
• Beseffen dat ik niet mag vergeten m’n ticket af te drukken.

Bon, vanavond, 30 april 2010 vertrekt de vlieger om 22u20 in Zavemtem. Om 7u00 plaatselijke tijd landen we in Abu Dhabi. Onze vlucht naar Kathmandu daar vertrekt om 10u10 om dan om 16u15 daar toe te komen. Aangezien ik nog nooit gevlogen heb, ben ik nog een beetje extra zenuwachtig. Ik hoop gewoon dat m’n plaats wat meevalt, oordopjes heb ik al mee voor de zekerheid.

Bon, tot zover een korte inleidende blogpost. Tot schrijfs.

Feeds are in no particular order, I just plucked them from my Google Reader.

Beyond Coding

I have only discovered this blog a while ago. Under the category “what’s in a name”, this blog is about: coding. D’uh. Some geeky stuff is being discussed here. Looks promising!

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Webdesigner Depot

This website is pretty new, but already has a ton of great articles. Some non-conventional things (like “Why mood boards matter“) are being covered here.

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Web Design Ledger

A great site with a lot of inspirational posts, freebies and even some give-away contests! Don’t miss out!

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Max Voltar

Blog and portfolio of fellow Belgian Tim Van Damme. This is a great site with a great design. He also often posts links to other very useful articles. This one is a must!

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Michael Wales

Blog and portfolio of Michael Wales. He might not be as known as others, but his recently updated blog has a few very useful articles on CodeIgniter. Especially his CodeIgniter Advent series was really interesting. If you’re into CI, you really should follow this one.

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WPCandy

Founded by an old contact of mine, Michael Castilla, this website has grown to one of the biggest and best WordPress-dedicated websites. There are tons of useful articles, a little gallery and lots more. If you’re using WordPress as a blogging platform, you cannot not follow this blog.

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Usability Post

If you’re designing your own interfaces, this is one blog you cannot go without. Dmitry Fadeyev has a huge amount of knowledge and loves nothing more than sharing and discussing it with the world. “Tips and insights into good design practices” as Dmitry puts it, I couldn’t have said it any better.

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Smashing Magazine

This was probably the first feed I ever subscribed to. Smashing Magazine is maintained by Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. They’ve been doing a great job since two years, frequently publishing high quality articles (often guest-written), varying from “simple” inspirational posts to coding tips and ajax tutorials.

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Six Revisions

An excellent for the developper: lots of links to handy tools, video tutorials. But also loads of freebies for the designers among us.

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PSDTuts

PSDTuts is my one-stop-spot for anything Photoshop related. They have awesome tutorials that learn you some pretty nifty Photoshop tricks. They also have a handy freebies section with brushes and textures!

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Pattern Tap

Built on the excellent CodeIgniter framework, Pattern Tap is the place to be when you’re looking for inspiration. Everything is divided into handy categories and what’s even better: sign up and subscribe to your personal RSS feed that notifies you whenever one of your favorite contributors adds something!

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Noupe

Don’t ask me where the name comes from, what I do know is that Noupe is an extremely handy resource for webdeveloppers alike. They have tutorials, resources, freebies, inspirational posts… Everything you need when you’ve hit a design block.

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Nettuts

The seconcd Envato-network website covered in my list. Even the veteran coder is likely to learn something new here. They cover so much, it’s uncanny. Looking for some PHP tips? No problem. Would you rather like to learn a new framework? Don’t worry, they have it covered!

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Just Creative Design

Home of Jacob Cass, a 21 year old Australian designer. He has a great portfolio you should check out. Other than that, he also writes about logo design, the business side of being a designer and much much more.

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Elliot Haughin

Another CodeIgniter enthousiast, Elliot is probably not someone you allready knew, but if you’re looking for some fresh insights into the world of webdevelopping, you really should read his blog.

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Devlounge

Devlounge is a site for people working and enjoying the web. We want to be the online magazine for web designers, web publishers, and web workers overall. They write about lots of things and you’re likely to find something here that suits your taste.

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Design Reviver

Talking about “quality, not quantity”. The people behind Design Reviver don’t post that often, but when they do: boy! They have awesome tutorials on anything from designing to xhtml and css, jquery or even WordPress plugin development.

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David Airey

Home and portfolio of David Airey. He talks about branding your company, logo design and the business of it all. His articles are guaranteed high quality.

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CSSplay

Stu Nicholls’ CSS Play offers tons of CSS menus and demos. If you’re looking for some kind of CSS trick or a nifty little gadget for your CSS menu, you’re bound to find it here.

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CSS Newbie

CSS Newbie is another handy CSS related website. There’s tons of tutorials and demos, even some jQuery love. Their stuff is really worth checking out!

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Abduzeedo

This blog has it all if you’re a designer. There’s inspiration (how about their lengthy “daily inspiration” series?), tutorials on how to achieve some effect in different software programs. They also have some articles that’ll help you get started with your very own Virtual Private Server (VPS). If you haven’t subscribed to this blog yet, you should be ashamed!

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24 ways

For the last three years, 24 ways has been posting ways to impress your friends from december first untill december 24th. This feed might be a bit useless, as we’ll to wait another 11 months before they start again, but you really should check out their previous articles. You’re bound to learn something new!

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Matt

This is the blog of Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, our beloved blogging platform. His posts aren’t that long most of the time, but it’s rather fun reading up on what he’s up to. Don’t subscribe if you’re easily jealous, Matt travels more than anyone I know. Probably richer than anyone I know too…

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Explosm

All work an no play make Jack a dull boy. These last two feeds are pure entertainment. Explosm posts daily comics that are just too funny in their series “Cyanide and Happiness”. Don’t subscribe if you’re easily offended.

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Robotpony

Geek humor. Oh yeah. Robotpony doesn’t update frequently, but you really should have a look at all their previous charts.

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A few days ago, I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. My biggest mistake probably was not checking properly (or even not checking at all) if my homepage was displaying properly. I saw no errors in the back-end so I presumed all was okay.

Today I checked my Google Analytics account and saw that I’ve had 0 visitors for the last two days and only 14 three days ago. Now normally I hover around 40 – 50 visitor / day, so I was a little surprised. I decided to go check my homepage and what do I see? A blank page. Nothingness.

I googled the problem and quickly found a blog post describing the same problems. It only mentioned the Super Cache or wp-cache plugins, but I remembered the PHP Speedy WP plugin also caches everything. Turning this plugin off immediately fixed everything.

I’d like to apologize to anyone who might have come across my white blog the last three days. I promise I’ll check my upgrades better next time.

This website is hosted on a shared server. When I started it was just what I needed: cheap, nothing to worry about etc etc. Though as time progresses and my skills grow, I feel the need for better control. A while back, I had a discussion over at the CodeIgniter forums about hosting etc and a lot of people mentioned VPS hosting. I didn’t know what it was about, but got curious and googled it. What did I learn? I wants.

I started looking for some cheap VPS hosting but my search came up empty, as a student making some money off the side with my webdeveloping, I simply can’t afford 50$ / month.

A while back however I discovered Webbynode. They’re a new company planning to launch an astonishing VPS service in a few weeks. And what’s the good thing? They need BETA testers. A free VPS to beta test it, chances of winning lifetime memberships, iPod’s or 50% off on further deals. I say: don’t hesitate, go sign up! It’s easy, just enter your e-mail address.

For those of you who really don’t have a clue about VPS, some extra info: with a VPS, you basically get a server with a Linux distro for yourself. You can do with it what you want, everything’s possible. This means however that you have to configure everything yourself too. I won’t go into it too much, because there’s simply too much about it, but I know you can “learn” to manage your VPS by playing with a Linux distro in a virtual machine on your computer. Your distro then acts as your VPS. You won’t be able to put your sites live etc, but you’re able to test the whole thing and learn. I’ve only started gathering information myself, but I’m planning to write a few articles about my experiments, so check back later for more info on that!

This post was written for the $11,000 Prize Giveaway at Just Creative Design

A while back I decided to set a standard signature in GMail. I got as far as “Bram Van der Sype” and I knew I wanted my URL in it too. But then I was stuck. Do I put webdesigner or webdeveloper below my name? I consider myself a webdesigner. I have designed all my websites myself (unless clients provided a design that only needed coding). I’ve never outsourced my designing. I like the feeling I get when I finally hit that design I like. I love to browse through dozens of blog posts, looking for inspiration and I love experimenting with photoshop.

On the other hand, I don’t like designing as much coding. I love to puzzle images together with HTML and CSS. I love the intricacies of PHP and I certainly love the possibilities the CodeIgniter framework offers me. I like thinking about security measures, passwords salts, complicated foreach loops and database abstraction. The real geeky stuff.

So what to put down there? Designer or developer. The answer is actually a simple one. It includes a slash. I decided to go with webdesigner/developer. I want to promote myself as much as possible, attracting as much clients as possible. So far all the clients I designed for new little to nothing about making websites and whatnot. Those people don’t go looking for developers, they probably don’t even know what that means. And that’s why I promote myself as Webdesigner, to address those clients. But I’d also like to attract bigger projects, bigger clients that need an extensive backend, people who know what they’re looking for. And I’d like to be found by them too.

So what did I end up with?

Bram Van der Sype
Webdesigner/developer

http://www.bramme.net

The e-mail signature is offcourse a small part of a bigger problem. How do you promote yourself? How do you come out to the world? Do you promote yourself with idea of getting as much clients as possible or with the idea of getting clients that need work you love doing? This entire situation relates to one of my previous posts too, about getting a new portfolio. I got some good advice there and made a few decisions since then. I have decided that I’m gonna make a new website: with a very specific portfolio, no blog whatsoever. And I’m getting a new name too. Even though a lot of people have told me that Bramme is a good name, I believe I can attract more clients with another, a better, name.

If you have ever had to ponder these issues, I’d love to know how you handled them!

Don’t worry, I haven’t really. But as you’ll probably notice, there is now some ad-space under the search box. I’m not going to clutter the entire site with ads, do not worry, I’m merely trying to see if I can get any response on this. If I can, I might make a little buck out of selling ads and pay back my hosting costs that way.

To make up for this blight, I will try to write more posts and deliver better content.

If this doesn’t hit off, the ad space will, offcourse, disappear.

However, today I am in that business (at least a bit) and I feel that bramme.net is a little too unprofessional to profile and advertise myself. My clients so far have almost always been Belgian or Dutch and most of them know nothing about the web except that they want a site of their own. However, when they contact me and ask for a portfolio or more information, I have to direct them here, because I have nothing else to show. And that feels kind off awkward. This site isn’t a portfolio, it’s a blog with a portfolio category that stands out a little more. And then some more random stuff.

So I’m thinking of starting up a new portfolio, maybe with a Dutch name and Dutch content to profile myself more around here. And that’s where the thoughts start to go crazy. What about the name? Should I just pick my full name or something fancier? What about the design? I can hardly design, though if I’d like to profile myself as a designer, I’d need one of my own…

Say I do find a suitable domain name and manage to create a good looking template, what about bramme.net? Do I depart from it, giving up the name it’s allready built up and start with something as blog.mydomain.com? Or do I keep it, linking the portfolio to the new site…

As you can see, a lot of questions, a lot of thoughts and no direct answers. That’s why I’m looking for some input from other people. Maybe they have had similar issues in the past, how did they handle it etc.

So if you have anything to say, any comment at all (preferably something useful though), please: do comment!