Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

It’s always interesting to look at statistics on the websites. They never fail to turn up surprises.

For one thing, if you strip out ourselves, the majority of the visitors to this site are from America with the UK coming in second place. Or at least that’s what google says. For alexa on the other hand, it’s abot 35% from America and under 5% for the UK which reflects the greater use of the alexa toolbar in America as compared to the UK.

But that’s not too accurate either as the number of readers that arrive via Reuters dwarfs everything else yet isn’t counted by either of the above systems.

In theory, that means that I should be targetting the articles towards the Reuters audience but I’ve not worked out how to do that just yet (suggestions welcome!).

Something that’s very typical of any technology is that those producing it use some of the terms to describe it in a way that it completely at odds with the understanding of the users of that technology.

Perhaps the highest profile example around at the moment of this divergence in understanding is “pagerank” or PR. You’ll likely have seen that as a little green bar if you have the google toolbar loaded.

For google, it is a measure of the authority that they assign to each webpage on the Internet and runs from PR1 to PR10. If it’a a very new site or one that google have “issues” with then it’ll have PR0. So, a PR4 site has more authority than a PR3 site. The problem is that google measure this authority by reference to the number of sites which link to each page. Thus a PR4 page will have more links to it than a PR3 site.

However, a considerable number of people have confused the issue of “authority” with that of traffic coming to the page. So, they, by and large, assume that a PR4 page will have more traffic than a PR3 page. In fact, that’s far from always the case since at a very simplistic level you could have a PR10 site exclusively writing about, say, dust on tables and it would be the site with the most authority about dust on tables. It might get virtually no traffic though. Whereas, you could have a travel booking site with loads of traffic but relatively few links.

This difference in understanding has meant that advertisers have been willing to pay more to have things written about them on sites with high pagerank than they offer for low pagerank sites. For example, a typical article might get $10 on a PR2 site but you’d get $50 for the same article on a PR5 site. Yet, as noted, that PR2 site might well have a lot more traffic than the PR4 one does.

But google don’t want their pagerank algorithm being manipulated by those companies that buy articles and links so what they’ve done is to artificially drop the pagerank for many (but not all) of those sites which get paid to write articles. So, for instance, we see JohnChow.com now sitting on PR4 when previously he was, quite rightly, on PR6. Somehow it does seem something of a nonsense to have his site sitting on the same pagerank as mine when he quite clearly has a considerably greater amount of traffic on his site than I do and the links to go with that too.

Google people actually refer you as having broken the Terms of Service of google by taking payment for writing posts. The problem with that is that very, very few people (if any) actually have a contract with google. In fact those Terms of Service refer to the use of specific tools on google and I fail to see how a totally separate website could breach Terms of Service when it wasn’t using those tools at the time. Strangely though, the google people can’t see the problem in that stance.

I think this is something that will run for a while yet!

It took ages but I’ve finally got the images for the listings sites uploaded to the new host and the domains that I’ve transferred seem to be operational too.

That leaves me with about half a dozen domains to do today to complete the move of the listings sites. They’re the simple ones so there shouldn’t be any problem in moving them over.

Next up are the blogs and the directory which are a little more complex in that they both use databases. There’s a surprising number of photos in the blog too but nothing like the amount that the listings sites use.

Once they’re over, I’ll be able to delete the databases from 1and1 and downgrade my hosting plan which’ll save something like £10/month as the only pre-database plan I needed was all of £25/year. That’s actually the biggest problem with the charging structure on 1and1 – if you need a database then you’re immediately looking at a jump from a reasonable £25/year up to £10/month.

Learning a new language and running a business might seem to be very different tasks but they have one thing in common: a need to be stubborn.

To learn a language you need to be stubborn enough to just keep going when you hit difficulties from time to time. In fact, often it seems to be the case that it isn’t so much an aptitude at languages that is required but rather an ability to be so stubborn that you’ll go on regardless of how bad you think you are at a given time.

It’s little different in most businesses of course. There are difficulties that arise from time to time and you need to develop that stubborness to just going because you know that you’ll be able to sort out whatever problems have arisen or are likely to arise in the future.

One thing that I’d not allowed for in changing my hosting service was the sheer size of the photographs that have been uploaded by those on my B&B and self-catering listings sites.

They don’t seem terribly large individually but when you’ve got over 1800 of them that amounts to a hefty chunk of discpace which in turn means that it takes AGES to transfer across the Internet. The sheer length of time means that you get heaps of time-outs on the FTP transfer so I’ve been plugging away at the transfer off and on all afternoon.

Oh well, perhaps another day will get it done.