Foreign Perspectives

When you’re plugging away on your own with a bunch of websites, it’s easy to fall into the trap of not keeping things up to date. After all, the websites are doing quite nicely, so why bother messing with them?

Thankfully, I have a friend who runs a smaller stable of websites who acts as the competitive spur for me and, sometimes, I for him. For instance, I was quite happy with the adsense income that I was getting ’til I heard how much he was getting so I started working out why he was getting lots more and ended up having quite a jump in income from that source as a result.

Where we differ is that his sites are more general travel guides whereas mine are more concentrated in the accommodation listing area which means that it was fairly simple for him to slip in affiliate links supplying accommodation listings to his sites but it’s much more difficult for me. Or, at least I thought so. He’s moved on to his second generation version of integrating the accommodation feeds into his sites which looks like being a lot easier than I had expected it to be.

Sooo, I’m just about to start work on the “second generation” integration level that he’s already using which should ultimately let me popular my sites in most of the countries around the world.

Funnily enough, it will be simpler for me to do that integration as my little stable is database driven whereas his are hand written pages for the most part. This means that adding one bit of code to a single page will be enough to populate all of the pages of each series of sites that I apply it to. Now, “all” I need to do is to get that one bit of code written and working!