Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

One of the problems that you find when you’re blogging quite a lot is in keeping the quality of the posts up.

Many bloggers seem not to bother with quality and end up producing a steady stream of short posts that are barely in English and often total drivel. OK, I’ll admit that the “drivel” comment is a subjective one and some of those that write what I’d call drivel seem to have quite substantial readerships so clearly there’s a market for that out there.

What I try to do is to write about a number of separate themes that are intertwined here in the one blog. So you’ll see posts about finance, travel and daily happenings with very little linking them apart from them having been written about by me. That lets me write about three separate topics in a day and keeps things relatively fresh.

On a separate tack, I also have a separate blog over at The View from Arnold which has a similar mix of things but which treats them in a more indepth way and I’m currently limiting myself to five posts a week. What would appear here as two or perhaps three posts appears there as just one. I’ve also adopted the policy that every post will have a photo there which is turning out to be harder to keep up than expected: quite how the daily photo blogs manage it year after year I don’t know.

I’m thinking of doing a creative writing course next year so I’m also toying with adding a “writing” strand to the topics here but haven’t really got further than thinking that I’d like to do that so far.

It took five and a half hours to download yesterday but finally I’ve got a DVD with Ubuntu (Linux) on it.

Setting up the computer to run both Vista and Ubuntu turned out to be surprisingly simple. All that I needed to do was to shrink the partition that contains Vista to make some room to install Ubuntu (you do that from disk management in Windows XP or Vista).

Next up was installing Ubuntu which was very simple and after the usual language and timezone selection, it installed and configured itself leaving me the option of loading up Vista or Ubuntu when I power up the machine.

The one problem so far is that I’ve not got the wifi card working but I’m installing the Ubuntu updates as I write this so perhaps it’ll be operational afterwards. As usual, there are a few drivers to be loaded so I can’t watch my videos ’til the updates are all installed for example.

Interestingly, you can use the Vista partition just as if it were part of Ubuntu. If I were doing the install again, I’d be inclined to just create a big enough partition for Ubuntu and hold the files in the Vista partition rather than try and make the Ubuntu partition as large as possible.

Is it just me, or does everyone out there think that Vista is rubbish?

I’ve a nice new Vista ready computer that came with Vista Business installed yet it will only run for about two hours before it hangs up. Not only does it hang up, but it stops working in a very peculiar way: when I start using it, many keyboard shortcuts work yet after an hour or so they stop working.

And then, there’s the updates. Every single time I need to reboot it (which is easily three times a day) it has more software updates to install.

Now that the “two hours” before it hangs seems to be reducing, I’m seriously looking into scrapping it altogether and installing Linux. The one thing that’s stopped me doing that so far is that I’ve a lot of information inside Outlook which I don’t think would transfer into a Linux setup but since Outlook constantly stops working anyway, I figure that I’m going to lose all that information sooner or later anyway so I’ve started looking into dual boot options to easy the transition.

I think Microsoft have squarely shot themselves in the foot with this one: not only is the file format not compatible with older versions but the keyboard shortcuts that we’ve all learnt don’t work and to cap it all the software is the most flakey that I’ve come across for many years.

Ah, now, that’s the question, isn’t it?

The original idea for the plan was hatched when google started offering to let you label sites as being targeted at specific countries. As a trial, we popped the twins of some sites on either side of the Atlantic and monitored them to see how things went.

Naturally, the profile of the site visitors changed depending on where they were notionally hosted. So, an American site would obviously pull in more Americans and a European site would pull in more British. However, the google trick only works for google of course and we sometimes get significant traffic from other search engines and, as always, there’s a lot of traffic that you can’t pin down to a specific source.

In the meantime, we were running down the sites hosted on our original European host which was going to save us something like $20/month once that exercise was complete (European hosting services are mostly complete ripoffs). So, we pencilled in some of that to establish a beach head in America. In fact, for under $100 a year we managed to get both a primary and a backup hosting service!

Obviously, the new sites won’t do overlly well to begin with so our little experiment will need to run for at least a year before we’ll know if it was a worthwhile experiment. Somehow I think that it will: already we have picked up one new property listing in America and they’ve already got a booking from us!

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).