Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

I’ve been moving my domains away from their previous host and now have all the easy ones moved over.

Stage two is starting as you read this and involves re-registering the domains with the new registrar.

The snag is that there’s obviously a period when things are in limbo between the two so the idea is to reduce the extent of that as far as possible. You can pretty much eliminate that limbo stage if you take care in the move and do it in three parts.

1. setup the domain on the new hosting service and load all the HTML, databases and whatnot (add a little note to yourself on the homepage of the domain to the effect that it’s on the new host);
2. login to the old registrar and set the name servers to point to the new host;
3. initiate the domain transfer to the new registrar and setup the nameservers to point to the new host.

If you follow the three steps, the transfer should be seamless which is why in step one it’s handy to add a note to the homepage so that you know the transfer has happened.

I say, “should be” seamless because, of course, chances are that the software on the new hosting service isn’t exactly the same as on the old one. Typically, I get caught out by my use of globals in PHP and I nearly always forget to set the relevant option which has somewhat peculiar effects on the sites. To avoid this, it’s best to have a test domain which you can try out on the new host before moving over the live sites.

It’s been far too long since I was at a rodeo.

Last time around was pre-digital so I’d love to get back in the equivalent of the infield to get some great photos for the site. Up close is definitely the way to go if you’re heading for a rodeo as otherwise you really miss out on the upclose action. It’s totally different from a ballgame where back a bit is often better as you can see the overall movements of the game; for a rodeo it’s very much an up close and personal experience so that’s the place where you need to be.

I could easily be talked into some Houston Rodeo Tickets as it’s quite a serious rodeo (some events are a little too laid back) and there’s lots to do in the surrounding area too in case the family tire of the rodeo. This particular one also packs in a concert after the rodeo itself is finished for the day with the country music that you’d expect to hear but also artists from rock hip hop and latino music too.

It’s best to book early for these things as the best tickets go surprisingly quickly even in a large venue such as they have at Houston.

Airline charges are such a ripoff these days, aren’t they?

I’ve just booked a flight where the flight charge was EUR 3 yet the plane ticket actually cost EUR 24 courtesy of the basic charges. And that’s not even including the EUR 9 that the checked luggage is charged!

OK, I can accept that taxes are the bulk of that and in some ways it’s good to see it separated out. The snag is, of course, that the airlines get blamed for the tax charges rather than the government who see it as an easy way to collect money and appear environmentally friendly at the same time.

But what about the EUR 6 “processing fee”? How come that’s a separate charge from the ticket itself? After all, presumably they wouldn’t let you fly if they’d not “processed” you, would they? How come, for that matter, it costs EUR 6 per person when the passenger is the person typing up all the information?

Of course in some ways we’re all to blame for this business of separating out of the charges. Psychologically, we’d rather see a headline price of EUR 3 than the real charge of EUR 30. It is incredibly misleading though.

Things were trundling along quite nicely with the business of sponsored posts until a couple of weeks ago when google decided to pull the rug from under a promising cottage industry and downgrade the pagerank of thousands of blogs to zero.

Ordinarily, pagerank (the little green bar you see if you have the google toolbar loaded) for a particular site would typically go up or down by one each time google loaded the revised pageranks ie usually about once a quarter. However, this time around they decided to target bloggers who wrote paid posts and dropped those targetted down to PR0.

The effect of that to those bloggers hit by such a downgrade can be quite devastating. For example, a typical PR2 domain would be able to make around $20/day vs $5/day for a PR0 domain and that’s just the bottom end of blogs. A PR4 domain can pull in $40, PR5 perhaps $100 per day and remember that some blogs went from PR7 to PR0 overnight. Remember too that many bloggers run multiple blogs. Say they were pulling in $500/month per blog with four blogs running that would equate to a reasonable wage of $2000/month which may have dropped to more like $200/month if all their blogs were targetted by google.

The biggest player in this market is PayPerPost with over 100, 000 bloggers signed up for their service and they’ve hit the panic button of course. Ironically, they were about to roll out a new blog ranking scheme just as google struck and that’s been speeded up somewhat. Unfortunately, the other players in the market probably won’t be able to access the stats from that ranking system directly and certainly wouldn’t be keen to use a competitors ranking.

Google’s answer? Add nofollow to your links. I did that a few days ago and now find that already one other blogging service won’t accept my posts anymore. Shame really as their posts were almost always interesting to do. I suspect that effect will roll out across a number of other sites too which’ll just serve to concentrate the power with PPP. Surely that can’t be a good effect from googles actions?

One dilemma that the business about sponsored reviews poses is that of the money on offer influencing what’s written but it isn’t like that in the vast majority of cases, at least for me.

Yes, it’s true that I’ve written things for money on specific topics that I’d not otherwise have covered here but in a lot of cases I might well have written about those things had I come across them via some other means. Take, for example, the previous post on the villas in Costa Rica. Would I have written anything about Costa Rica had I not been asked to write that article? Well, yes, I would have eventually. After all, I’m working my way around the world on Whole Earth which will eventually cover Costa Rica.

Would I have written about those villas though? Hard to say. I run accommodation listings sites and I mention properties on them now and again so if those villas were listed there then chances are that I would write about them in due course. After all, they’re quite unique so it’s fairly easy to run up something about them.

Did the money influence what was written? Sort-of to the extent that the advertiser asked that one or two specific pages be mentioned but it didn’t affect the content of what was written as such.

What if it’s about a travel site that I don’t like though? Well, you’re about to find out that doesn’t influence me either!