Foreign Perspectives

We had quite a busy weekend pretty much filled with shuffling the websites around which is always a depressing thing to be doing as you spend hours moving things and at the end you’re hoping that it all looks the same as it did to begin with.

First off was the establishment of our foothold in America which currently consists mainly of our French vacation listings site, our French B&B site, our global accommodation site and our global travel guide. That’s our initial collection and we’re hoping that over the next few months the traffic on those will start to catch up with that on their Europe counterparts.

Next was an upgrade to the new version of the listings which gives the property owners a little six page website instead of the previous single page version. That’s phase one of a more significant upgrade which’ll let us offer to build custom websites for vacation properties.

And finally, now that we’ve a proper American hosting service it was the turn of a couple of blogs to head west as their content is more appropriate for an American audience.

Where does all this stuff live now? Well, to give us a bit of contingency we’re using Lunarpages for most of the sites but have kept 3ix for one site as a backup in that one thing that was very clear when we read the various reviews of sites was that it was always prudent to retain a second hosting service. For that purpose, 3ix seems ideal in that their base plan is all of $12 per year which is comparable to the monthly charge of some services and frankly seems the ideal service if you’ve only got one site and don’t mind that it’s hosted in America.

That’s us basically settled down now though I see that WordPress have yet another new version out so we’ll be moving onto that with the various blogs over the next few weeks or so (no big rush though).

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you’ve ever been left wondering if you really needed the specific insurance that you were sold, then FinanceGenius could be the site that you’ve always thought should be somewhere.

Basically what they do is collect together a series of short guides as to what the various insurance contracts actually mean in reasonably clear terms (it seems to be impossible for insurance ever to be entirely 100% clear). For example, their little articles on Automobile Extende Warranty gives you a rundown on what you can expect from new car warranties, extended warranties and insurance and gives you some pointers as to where you can save money and some of the loopholes in each of these.

It’s not 100% exhaustive on the options but then that would be pretty much impossible for a general site.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Somehow or other I seem to be about to run off the end of my modern languages degree and have started to think about what I’ll do next.

I’m not quite sure how I got to this point as all I really wanted to do was to be able to speak French better and six years down the line it looks like I’m on the home run with the modern languages degree.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about several different plans as to what I might do after this one is out of the way of which the major options are

1. sit back and relax (there’s a lot to be said for this option!);
2. get going on German (out of curiosity as to whether a Germanic language would be easier to learn than the Romance ones);
3. do the creative writing course (always useful for blogging!);
4. carry on with the English courses and do the degree in English (not too keen on the literature choices with this though);
5. get going on the science degree that I always meant to get around to.

I really don’t know which one I’ll go for at the moment. Technically, I am already signed up for both the English and science degrees at the moment in that I’ve already done one course for each but there’s not commitment to complete either. The creative writing option seems quite scary to be honest and as it’s a full credit course it would be awkward to schedule in with the graduation ceremony as indeed would other full credit English course options. There’s a half credit science course which would do quite nicely though and the German would be a relatively easy fit too.

My thinking at the moment is that perhaps the science half credit course would be an idea as it would give me a fairly easy year and let me choose a full credit option in either English or science the following year.

Popularity: 4% [?]