I will be travelling this summer quite a bit (more detailes to be disclosed later!) and for starters I had to book a rental car as well as a hotel room in Seattle for 1 night for next week. While I was looking at options through my BCAA membership website (they give me some discounts), my friend told me about www.priceline.com. And no, this is NOT a pay-per-post or a review-me-post. This is simply a review out of my own personal experience, referred to by a friend.

The concept is this - you can either book the hotel at the regular rate (usually for 4-star hotels, over $200 US a night), or you can call your own price.

Here’s how it works : you can select an area (for example, Seatac Airport, or downtown Seattle) and then start the star scale (they tell you what the median price is for that class of a hotel in that region). Once those are selected, you call a price. In my case, I tossed in $100 US as my offer, while the median price was $239. After that, they inform you that there are service charges of $22.xx or so, which brings this to a total of $122.xx.

Now, here’s the exciting catch : once you make the bid, you must put in a credit card # and full personal information, and when you click the button, the system starts searching. If the system happens to find any available hotels within your price bid range/area/star scale, it will automatically book it for you, charge your credit card, and it’s a done deal. You cannot change or cancel your reservation and there are no refunds. For giving you a great deal, you cannot treat this like a generic booking with tonnes of freedom. Oh well, not a bad thing at the end!

So yes, there’s how I scored a room at the Sheraton Seattle for myself for $122 a night!

How can they afford this? I suspect that every hotel has surpluses of rooms and instead of letting them sit at $0 a night, they may as well toss it out at half price without publicly advertising it (which will piss off other customers who paid full price), they give a certain portion of rooms to priceline.com, which brings them some revenue rather than none. Besides, chances are I will be using other services at the hotel (drinks, food and more) so it should be a good way to scoop up some extra revenue for the hotels, while I get a killer deal.

I owe a lot of reviews from my post on how to kill a dog. The responses were overwhelming, and everybody came up with some great ideas that I was very impressed with.

Unfortunately I am bound by laws and cannot commit such crimes, and I ended up having a nasty chat with my roommate and she boo-hooed at the end, and now I see marked improvements in the behaviour of the dog.

Nonetheless, reviews are owed to these people. Instead of picking 1 winner (it was hard to tell) I’ll just do a pooled review of a bunch of you guys.

1. Leo Chiang

   He’s an interesting figure. He’s a big, bulked up healthy Asian guy (duh, his last name is Chiang), who is a stunt actor (go figure) and also a film specialist. He writes about the not-so-typical blog topics, such as on how the food chain works (w/ video), whether Viagra enhances your workout (although, being at the gym with a raging boner is a questionable move), and about his brand new Hummer brand BBQ (I love that thing)!

2. Ed Lau

   Ed is another fellow blogger, within the social circles of John Chow and all. Ed often comments on my blog on other things. He recently wrote about how a guy lost money investing in real estate, and then tried to blog about it and lost even more money, somehow. Also, be sure to check out the video on the Microsoft Surface Computer.

3. Gary Lee

   Gary is a friend I met through the blog world of things as well, and a very interesting figure. Unlike me, he is an Apple fan. He’s the one who started the Technorati Faves Train, and recently he got into email marketing campaigns. He is also running a blog contest for the best home workstation.

4. James (digitalkeyto.info)

   He has an interesting domian, that’s for sure. He talks about changes to Google’s search structure, which will make changes to SEO. Also he discusses the many different ways to make money online (not just blogging).

5. Nathan at http://www.nathandrach.info/ wrote a comment too, but his site is down right now, so I’ll have to get to it later when it’s up again.

I’m sure so many people have been talking about this, and I will pitch my 2 cents in to this concept which is one of the greatest pinnacles of Web 2.0 - “Segregation of Data and Presentation”

You guys are all going “What…???” if you don’t know much about web design. And even if you do, if have been focusing only on the small stuff like how to make that PNG show on IE or how to apply transparency on objects, you won’t get this right away - here’s an opportunity for you to think bigger and wider.

A while ago when the internet was first developed, data was kept within a website, and not transferred externally very often. And even when it was, it was done thorugh each individual’s own ways of doing it rather than in a universally accepted formet. In other words, data was not transferrable. If you want to read something, you go to that site - there’s no other way. Also, before the CSS2 days, there was a time when modifying the design or controlling the whole layout was such a pain in the ass. Now it’s all changed. And here’s how :

1. XMLXML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It is extendable, self-definable, and most importantly it carries PURE DATA. JUST DATA. It requires external files or parsing to be formatted into a visual layout. Well, that sucks, no? No, it does NOT suck. This gives flexibility. Same data from 1 source can be parsed and presented in a gazillion different ways on a gazzilion different platforms. It’s awesome. It rocks.How do you think RSS feeds work? Blogs all spit out an RSS feed that looks something like this :

   <item>
   <title>The Most Brutal, Most Honest Review Me Post Ever</title>
   <link>http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/JeffKeeConsulting/~3/117634970/</link>
   <comments>http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/05/17/the-most-brutal-most-honest-review-me-post-ever/#comments</comments>
   <pubDate>Fri, 18 May 2007 06:14:23 +0000</pubDate>
   <dc:creator>Jeff Kee</dc:creator>

   <category><![CDATA[Stupid People]]></category>
   
   <category><![CDATA[Comedy]]></category>
   
   <category><![CDATA[Cool Websites]]></category>
   
   <guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/05/17/the-most-brutal-most-honest-review-me-post-ever/</guid>
   <description><![CDATA[While a lot of the PayPerPost items force you to be postive about a product in order to qualify for the payout, Review Me does not ask for that. You can be completely honest with any kind of reviews for anybody, and I found one that made me laugh at the end.
   Who did this? None [...]]]></description>
   <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>While a lot of the PayPerPost items force you to be postive about a product in order to qualify for the payout, Review Me does not ask for that. You can be completely honest with any kind of reviews for anybody, and I found one that made me laugh at the end.</p>
   <p>Who did this? None other than a fellow blogger, and also my client (one of the bigger accounts!), <a href="http://www.johnchow.com" target="_blank">John Chow</a>!</p>
   <p>He was asked to serve up <a href="http://www.johnchow.com/seven-day-system-for-making-money-online-but-for-who/" target="_blank">a review for this scam of a pyramid scheme</a>, and he cleanly exposes the dark sides of it - about how ONLY the guy who owns the website will leech off your efforts while chances are you won’t get any back!</p>
   <p>This review is a MUST-READ, just so you can read the last sentence on John’s review - and I won’t reveal it here! <a href="http://www.johnchow.com/seven-day-system-for-making-money-online-but-for-who/" target="_blank">Read for yourself about this scam</a>!</p>
   
   <div class="feedflare"><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?a=ux3UbqQ8"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?i=ux3UbqQ8" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?a=8F2o8VPA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?i=8F2o8VPA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?a=0qrO7oFl"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?i=0qrO7oFl" border="0"></img></a></div>]]></content:encoded>
   <wfw:commentRss>http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/05/17/the-most-brutal-most-honest-review-me-post-ever/feed/</wfw:commentRss>

   <feedburner:origLink>http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/05/17/the-most-brutal-most-honest-review-me-post-ever/</feedburner:origLink></item>

   OK, I know this just looks like gibberish. But this file defines the data. This files defines the title, link, date/time, author, content, categories of my blog post. Based on this XML, any engine can display this any way it wants to, without any security risk to my actual data on my server!

   This is also the backbone of how aggregator sites like Technorati works. It collects the XML data from selected blogs (such as your favorites) and displays it all together in the Technorati-crafted format! How amazing is that?

   Newspaper websits now offer this. You don’t need to visit the actual site to get the news - now you can put the XML feed, or more commonly known as RSS feeds, on your RSS reader/aggregator and you can get it all!

2. AJAXThis has more emphasis on the performance and presentation within a website. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. AJAX works like this :AJAX is a technology that allows you to interact with the server using minimal amount of data (just the data that you need to send in) and then get the results back without refreshing the whole page. Usually, to indicate success, or for the functional purpose, the AJAX code includes scripts to update a part of the existing webpage that you already have open on your browser. That way it reduces the amount of time you spend waiting for the whole page to reload when you input a comment, or fill out and submit a form etc. It makes things go faster, easier, and also it reduces bandwidth for mega-sized websites like Facebook. I already raved about how much I love and respect Facebook because they follow the Web 2.0 trend with AJAX and all.
3. CSSUsually a lot of Web 2.0 pitches do not include CSS, because it is not as new and fresh as XML and AJAX technology. BUT. Why is CSS important?You can build a website out of purely DIVs, with content in it. By itself you’ll just have DIVs after DIVs piled up in rows. However. With CSS, you can define the presentation of the entire website!!! Check out the CSS Zen Garden for more details on how that works, if you’re not sure.What does this mean? Well, that means, once again, the data is segregated from the presentation. While this is different in nature from XML parsing, this still gives the web developers option to design the same content in many different ways. This means that when you want to re-design your website, you often don’t even need to touch the HTML files - you just modify your CSS and all the elements can be defined (if you’re savvy enough with CSS!).

   While this technology has been available for years, as it developed from CSS1 to CSS2 and what not, this is becoming more and more prominent of a technology as computers are no longer the only devices that surf the net. My Blackberry can surf the net. So can Palm Treos, and cell phones, and, well, of course, computers. These devices have different screen-size capacities, as well as different functionalities (my Blackberry cannot run Javascript). Obviously, to spit out the same website layout as you would on a computer wouldn’t look too good on any other platforms, nor would it work very well.

   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="screen.css" />
   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css" />
   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="mobile.css" />

   Here’s how the multi-CSS works. Basically, when this code is inserted, the same bloody page will render differently in different type of equipment it is being read by. When a printer tries to print it, it will display it based on print.css. When it’s from a hand-held device with limited screen size, and processing functionality, it will use the mobile.css presentation.

That’s Web 2.0. Segregation of data from presentation gives flexibility, transferrability. It makes data transparent. It makes data fluid.

The internet revolution has barely begun.

While a lot of the PayPerPost items force you to be postive about a product in order to qualify for the payout, Review Me does not ask for that. You can be completely honest with any kind of reviews for anybody, and I found one that made me laugh at the end.

Who did this? None other than a fellow blogger, and also my client (one of the bigger accounts!), John Chow!

He was asked to serve up a review for this scam of a pyramid scheme, and he cleanly exposes the dark sides of it - about how ONLY the guy who owns the website will leech off your efforts while chances are you won’t get any back!

This review is a MUST-READ, just so you can read the last sentence on John’s review - and I won’t reveal it here! Read for yourself about this scam!

I lost my bet to Geiger in regards to the Buffalo Sabres and the Vancouver Canucks. While the Canucks got eliminated by the Ducks last round, the Sabres moved up to face the Ottawa Senators. And hence, I owe Geiger a blog review, which I hope would help him, coming from a PR5 site with a couple hundred readers a day.

So. Geiger, unfortunately, does not have an “About” page that gives me an overview of him, but his posts say quite a bit. His blog has quite an history - the archives link go back as far as early 2006, so this has been around for quite some time, and according to the bottom tags, it’s still on Wordpress 1.5. I started blogging when Wordpress was at 2.0xxx, so I don’t even know what it looks like.

Geiger seems to be into web development, just like myself - check out his post regarding W3C Standards validation for his websites. Also, he posted a vintage photo of what Digg used to be like back in 1940. And then there’s the hilarious video of Mac vs. PC on a Southpark theme. Also, a very useful and handy thing he found out was that Iframe tags work differently on IE7.

I’m really not sure what he does exactly for a living but he’s kept up his blog for a while consistently with a good blend of information.

Please visit jaygeiger.com!