Last night Netenberg updated Crafty Syntax Live Help, Moodle, Open-Realty, TikiWiki, Typo3, Joomla and WordPress. Updates:

- Crafty Syntax Live Help: 2.15.0 -> 2.16.3
- Joomla 1.5: 1.5.14 -> 1.5.15
- Moodle: 1.9.4 -> 1.9.6
- Open-Realty: 2.5.7 -> 2.5.8
- TikiWiki: 3.2 -> 3.3
- TYPO3: 4.2.8 -> 4.2.10
- WordPress: 2.8.4 -> 2.8.5

If you are using these software’s I suggest you upgrade.

During our last instalment of this series, we began talking about organizational tables. This time around, we’ll be discussing some of the more advanced portions on tables in HTML.

If you’re using a table to organize data, you’ll likely have column headers that identify the type of data contained within that column. Using what we’ve previously covered, you could simply use a tr at the beginning of the table and use CSS to stylize them. However, there is a better way.

HTML contains a method to specify a table header, footer and body. We can use this method by wrapping the appropriate rows in thead, tfoot and tbody tags, respectively. In the thead section, cells must use th instead of td. The order of these “groups” is also vital. The thead and tfoot groups must be before the tbody group (the footer will be still appear below the body).

This method has a number of advantages over simply ordering your rows to create a header and footer. For starters, these three tags provide semantic meaning to your table. Having the footer above the body, in the code, allows the browser to render the footer before the (potentially long) body has loaded. Additionally, when you’re generating your body via a programming language (such as PHP), having the (likely) static header and footer before your dynamic body code will be neater.

Example:

[html]<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>ID</th>
<th>Surname</th>
<th>First Name</th>
<th>Email</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tfoot>
<tr>
<td>ID</td>
<td>Surname</td>
<td>First Name</td>
<td>Email</td>
</tr>
</tfoot>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>192<td>
<td>Smith</td>
<td>John</td>
<td>john.smith@example.com</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>193</td>
<td>Doe</td>
<td>Jane</td>
<td>jdoe282@example.com</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>[/html]

It’s time once again to see what the blogosphere had to offer us this week. This collection of blog posts is quite varied, offering a little something for everyone to enjoy. Have a good weekend!

Zac Johnson is known in many circles as a super affiliate, but what does he know about the offline world of marketing? While pulling into the parking lot for a basketball game, Zac noticed Gary Vaynerchuk’s billboard advertising his book, Crush It! Do billboards still work or do most of us turn a blind eye to those giant signs these days?

Damien Riley finds that children these days are not treated in the same way as they were in the past. They seem to be too sheltered sometimes, because we’re starting to raise them with a culture of entitlement. Everything is given out for free and the kids seem to assume that they automatically deserve everything they get.

Rebecca Bollwitt may be a proud resident of the Greater Vancouver area, proudly covering all sorts of events and happenings in and around our city. Did you know that we’re not the only Vancouver though? Miss604 offers us a glimpse into Vancouver, Washington. It’s nothing like Robson Street and Yaletown, that’s for sure.

Joseph Planta had the opportunity to chat with Michael Smith, host of Chef Abroad on the Food Channel. Smith was there to promote his new book, The Best of Chef at Home, talking about the “essential recipes for today’s kitchen.” All the foodies in the audience should be interested in this interview.

Dough Roller takes a moment to provide us with some very interesting and possibly useful information. Have you ever wondered where does your movie ticket money go? Assuming a ticket price of $10, advertising and marketing takes up $2.11. This includes TV spots, newspaper ads, billboards, and so forth. On average, the theater takes a 45% cut.

You have many options available to you when it comes to attracting new customers. You could offer a two-for-one sale that can bring a great deal of value to potential buyers. You could offer a free bonus. Or maybe you could try your hand at using a loss leader.

A loss leader is when you advertise one or more products at a significantly reduced price. This could be at or even below cost, so you won’t be making any money directly from the sale of this loss leader product. The idea is that this can stimulate sales in other areas that are much more profitable.

You’ll find that strategy used by a variety of retail stores, particularly around competitive shopping seasons like Christmas. By using a loss leader, these businesses are able to attract customers into their stores and, hopefully, these customers will buy items above and beyond the loss leader.

There will certainly be some people who will only buy the loss leader and you may suffer a loss on these transactions. However, in the overall scheme of things, a well-designed loss leader promotion could generate much more total revenue than a sale without one.

There are a lot of fun things that you can do with your WordPress-based blog. Some of the plug-ins are designed to expand the functionality of your blog, making it more secure or more user-friendly. Others are there to help you connect with the online community in some interesting way, including Twitter, Facebook and more. The Fortune Kookie plug-in is neither of these.

Instead of offering something that is inherently functional, this WordPress plug-in is more about bringing something fun to your blog. The Fortune Kookie adds a sidebar widget that displays a random fortune cookie fortune. These fortunes come from a database with over 1500 unique fortunes.

These fortune cookie fortunes not only offer the regular fortune that you’d see inside a regular cookie, but also the back word(s) and the lucky numbers for your lottery purchases. This could be quite fun for some of your readers, but this will obviously depend on your demographic.

For more information and to download the Fortune Kookie WordPress plug-in, head over to FortuneKookie.com.

Whether you are running a brick-and-mortar store or you are only selling virtual goods over the Internet, it is important that you clearly lay out your company’s return and exchange policy. Some customers may not be completely satisfied with your product or maybe they just don’t need it anymore. How do you handle this?

On the one hand, you can try to avoid as much fraud as possible and offer a no returns policy. This way, any money that comes in through the door will not leave if a customer tries to return something. All sales are final and you don’t have to deal with that side of the business. The downside of this is that some customers may choose not to shop at your store at all, because they want to have the assurance of being able to return their purchase if needed.

On the other hand, you can have a very lax return and exchange policy, guaranteeing your customer’s satisfaction. This way, if the customer is not happy with their purchase for any given reason, they know that they can come back and return it. The upside is that this can improve the customer experience, but the downside is that you are potentially opening yourself up to fraud and massive losses.

What approach do you think is better in the long run? Is customer satisfaction worth the risk of the occasional fraudulent return? Or would you rather not bother with returns at all?