Get 5 books for the Price of 1 and Aid Victorian Bushfire Victims

Below I want to highlight an opportunity to help some Aussies get back on their feet after some horrific bushfires AND get some great books to help you improve your blogging.

Many of you will be aware that over the weekend and in the days since my home state of Victoria here in Australia suffered one of the worst natural disasters in the history of our country. Bushfires swept across many part of our states with many separate fires on the hottest day in our history (where it reached over 47 degrees celcius (just over 117 degrees fahrenheit) and on a day where we had an incredible northerly wind.

Today – 3 days after the start of this disaster the death toll is 181 people with 750+ homes destroyed. Authorities fear that the death toll will rise to above 300 as many people are unaccounted for.

Some of the beautiful little towns around the outskirts of Melbourne have virtually been wiped out with barely a building left standing and large percentages of residents either dead, horrifically injured or missing. Some of the stories emerging from the areas impacted by fire are truly heart breaking and quite terrifying.

Much has been written and reported about the fires – some of which still burn out of control – you can read some of the reports in our city’s two major newspapers (The Age and The Herald Sun) or follow much of it on Twitter via following the hashtag #bushfires or @774Melbourne (ABC radio’s twitter coverage). You can see some of the amazing pictures and hear some of the powerful stories from the last few days here and here.

Many fund raising projects are underway – most of the donations are being funneled to the Australian Red Cross bushfire Appeal.

An Offer to Get You Some Great Books and Help the Bushfire Appeal

One fundraiser that I particularly want to draw your attention to is something that I had the opportunity to participate in in a small way today at the local offices of SitePoint.  

They have today worked around the clock to put together a promotion where you can not only help raise money for the bushfire crisis – but also come away with some great teaching.

The offer is simple – you choose any 5 of their books (they have a great range to choose from) and order them in PDF format sometime between now and Friday of this week (3 days from now) and they’ll give you them for the price of 1 AND give the money that you pay to the bushfire appeal.

This isn’t a publicity stunt.

The team at SitePoint have a genuine passion for this cause and some have been personally impacted by it through the loss of loved ones. The management basically gave all 30 staff members the day off normal duties today to dedicate to putting together some kind of project to raise money – and this is what they came up with. You can read more about their motivation for this offer at the bottom of their offer page.

Their goal is to raise over $50,000 USD in the next three days. I’d like to see that go higher.

Personally I think it’s a great offer and has the potential to raise a lot of money. You can view it here.

Books that you can choose from are from a wide perspective of topics (there are 26 to choose from) including some pretty techy/geeky/coding type books on CSS, AJAX and HTML – through to books on web design, freelancing, firefox and project management.

Here are the five PDF books I’ve chosen for my $29.95 USD:

1. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
2. Principles of Successful Freelancing
3. The Photoshop Anthology
4. Everything You Know about CSS is Wrong!
5. Build Your Website the Right Way Using HTML and CSS

There are plenty of others to choose from and you can mix and match them as you choose to get the bundle of books that is right for you.

If you’d like to take advantage of this offer and support the victims of this natural disaster in my home state then please do head to SitePoint’s offer page here. If the offer is not for you – please consider a donation to the Australian Red Cross bushfire Appeal.

Please also consider tweeting, blogging, emailing and passing on this opportunity in any way that you see fit.

PS: thanks to everyone for your messages of concern, sympathy and encouragement over the last few days. I’ve lost count of the amount of emails and tweets I’ve received from people asking if my family are safe. In short – the answer is yes – we’re 40km or so from the nearest fires. We live in the middle of suburbia and the fires are on the outskirts of Melbourne and rural areas – we’re fine and feeling fortunate for that.