Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

It’s surprising just how much mileage you can get out of a database driven website template.

Our B&B and self-catering listings sites have been held on the database for around two years now and we’ve been able to run up several new variants of them since, each taking just a few weeks to get operational from the time of the original concept.

Of these, our new-generation template is proving to be the most flexible. We’re still adding enhancements to it but already we’ve been able to launch our Whole Earth Guide based on in and we’ve been working on yet another variation, Inns4U, which for the first time includes all our properties rather than separating them out into B&B and vacation rentals and thereby creates a website with a much larger footprint than the others.

Tidying up Inns4U will probably keep us out of trouble for the rest of October and perhaps into November though we’re also plugging away with the new-ish blogs at An Age of Magic and On a Postcard of course.

Jame’s bed has finally given up the ghost so we’re hoping to have a look for a new one today.

In France, bedding like all furniture can be very expensive and if you see something at a sensible price, it’s often just poor quality. This, of course, makes the search that much more difficult.

There’s also the not inconsiderable problem of the size of the beds. As anyone who has been on holiday in France will know, the beds are smaller than the norm in other countries. Still, we’ll not need to worry too much about the size of the bed we get for James for a while.

Anyway, I suspect that we’ll need to head off to IKEA at some stage although that brings with it the problem of how to actually get the bed back here.

Good, yet affordable, health insurance is something that we all want but it’s something that’s not always easy to find.

In America, one way to reduce the costs considerably is to insure via an HMO since they negotiate lower prices and seek out lower cost alternative treatments thereby making their own running costs much lower and allowing them to pass these savings on to you and your family.

For instance, you can apply via the Kaiser Permanente online application to the Kaiser insurance company which is the leading HMO in the America and offers cover in most states. It’s important that they’re the leading one as their increased buying power relative to the others will help ensure that their charges are lower too.

As the number of people writing paid posts goes up, the quality of some of the new writing appears to be going down.

One consequence of this is that a number of the sites offering paid posts have started adding quality markings to bloggers or are in the course of implementing schemes to let them do that. Interestingly though, the quality of spelling and grammar that the advertisers use is also going down. In fact, in most cases those saying that they will reject posts with bad spelling or grammar display the very worst examples of both themselves.

That bad spelling and grammar even extends to the links that you are required to use. In a growing number of cases they don’t work yet we have to use the link as specified or the post gets rejected.

Perhaps the worst source of these is PayPerPost although that’s probably a side-effect of them having so many paid posts on offer.

One we’re about to do has the conflicting requirements that they’ll reject posts with spelling mistakes yet the link that I have to use has a spelling mistake in it which in turn is reflected in their website!

It took a while but now that James has stopped saying that “Daddy’s doing his French” and gotten the hang of “Daddy’s doing his Spanish”, it’ll soon be time for him to be saying “Daddy’s doing his English”.

This time next, all being well, I’ll have just completed my Modern Languages Degree and so ’tis time to think of what to do next…

A very long time ago, I’d a choice between doing a Computer Science degree and a Chemistry one and chose the computer route seeing as it was easier and the pay was better. So, I thought I’d have a go at the other route and not too long after Easter next year I’m planning on enrolling for the first course of said chemistry degree which looks pretty interesting and should keep me out of trouble for the next six or seven years.

On the other hand the physics degree looks quite interesting too although it sounds a whole lot harder at this point. Still, both French and Spanish sounded impossible to me seven years ago so who knows?