Former villager to speak in London

Denise Jacobs, daughter of villager Deloria Jacobs, grew up in Yellow Springs and now lives in Florida. Her book, The CSS Detective Guide, was published last month by Peachpit Press and is now available on Amazon.com. It is a technical book on web design and development, and specifically on CSS (Cascading Style sheets), a code that accompanies HTML. The focus of the book is on teaching troubleshooting rather than providing pat solutions and has a fun twist: it is written more as a detective guide with cases to solve rather than as a technical manual.

Being an author is opening doors for Denise. She was on a panel at a media conference in Austin Texas last month. Next month she is scheduled to be a speaker at the FOWD (Future of Web Design) conference in London, England. Her presentation is entitled "The Graceful Degradation of CSS3." FOWD is featuring a new track called “Rising Stars” which is designed to give aspiring speakers the opportunity to present at a large conference. Of the 20 presenters at the conference only four of them are women, and Denise is the only African American.

This will be a fantastic opportunity for her to get more exposure in her field and become known as a speaker. Although the conference usually pays the presenters to speak, speakers in the "Rising Star" track are not paid, although, the registration cost of the conference is covered.

Since the expenses for an overseas trip are more than Denise can cover right now, she has set up an ingenious method for people to make donations to the trip on her blog. She has calculated that if she can get 500 people to donate $5 each, she will have enough to pay for the trip. She posted her story on her blog and also twittered her contacts. She then asked each person she twittered to twitter her request to their following. In just one hour after posting her blog she had 25 donations deposited!

Here are the links to her blog and the posts that talk about the campaign:
http://www.denisejacobs.com/2010/04/19/help-send-me-to-fowd-london-in-may/
http://www.denisejacobs.com/2010/04/20/social-media-community-true-support/