Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

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!

My parents are missing James and John so we’re thinking of taking a short trip over to coincide with my Dad’s birthday next week.

Ordinarly, such a short time before booking the flights would mean crazy prices but, of course, we’re in the lull before Christmas and in fact the return tickets are a very reasonable £50 each including taxes for a flight from Barcelona direct to Belfast.

The snag is that James is now at school so we’ll have to have a think about that as Santa’s coming to the school sometime fairly soon and they’re in the midst of preparations for the film that they’re producing of the kids.

One of the perennial problems that you have when trying to use information from someone else’s database is that they never code the information in quite the same way.

If the external database is one from an unrelated company on the Internet then the only way around that is to create a little translation routine or, if you’re lucky and it’s only the names that are different, a translation table.

From a purely practical point of view, the table is the way to go if that can be accomplished and that’s what I’ve done in stage one of the roll-out of the integration of a propery feed for my listings sites. Simple things such as my use of the proper name for the Algarve (ie “Faro”) whereas they use the more popular “Algarve” are easy to allow for like this and indeed just doing that this morning as bumped up the percentage of information that I’ve been able to include quite considerably.

Why not just rename things in my own database? I could do that at the moment but the problem is that I intend to integrate other databases in due course to improve the coverage of my own site and at some point I’ll need to be able to translate terms as there’s no common usage of terms across the various databases that I’m looking for.

Where things get much more difficult is if the basic structure of the information provided by the external system is radically different from that which your own system uses and then you can potentially be talking of quite a bit of work. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way around this.

Although I’ve been running database driven websites for a couple of years now what I’ve not done before is to access other peoples’ sites from my own until now.

A common way to offer people access to corporate databases via the Internet is by way of providing an XML feed. What’s XML? Well, it’s a way of holding offering both the data and the data structures via a webpage. It looks a little bit like normal HTML in that it uses the <angle> brackets but other than that it’s completely different.

The problem is that it’s a very general purpose format and not tied to any particular language. In my case, the site that I wanted to access provided examples in ASP but I use PHP so they weren’t a whole lot of use to me. Neither as it turns out was the big book on XML that I’d bought to get me on the road with the development.

However, as always there’s a lot of help around on the Internet if you look in the right places. After a few abortive attempts I found the PHP routine clsParseXML which provides a very simple yet powerful interface to XML data. Essentially what it does is to read the XML file and return it in an array or rather an array of arrays.

The database I wanted to access is essentially one large structured list of place names around the world each of which have a list of diffent accommodation at them. So, first of all I had to read the entry which listed all the regions ie Africa, Asia, Europe, etc., then choose the code for the region I was looking for and run the query again to get the countries in that region, and so on down to counties. Within the lowest level there’s a link to properties in that area requiring a whole new qyery.

Sounds very complicated, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s very simple and the high level queries run to only a few lines of code:

• region_id=get_region_id(“0″,”Europe”);
• region_id=get_region_id(region_id,”France”);
• region_id=get_region_id(region_id,”Languedoc-Roussillon”);
• region_id=get_region_id(region_id,”Pyrenees Orientale”);

Which gets me a region_id for the properties in the Pyrenees Orientale. With that I call another routine to scan through the properties in that region and return an array containing all the information of properties there.

With that, I was able to run up the HTML to integrate the properties on the external database with those from my own database thus giving, for example, the Languedoc-Roussillon page where the only way to identify the properties from the external database is by the “VR” prefix to their reference numbers.

How long to complete? Well, I started yesterday afternoon and had the test version running in a couple of hours with the live version completed in under an hour this morning. However, in reality it took much less than that as a lot of the time went in looking for that critical routine to read XML into a PHP array.

The game plan was to roll out this development to my sites listing properties around Europe but unfortunately the external database isn’t structured in the same way as my own outside France so I’ll need to run up some code to translate between the two structures first.