Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

James’ nursery school is in the throes of producing a film based on the Arabian nights tales.

Well, we think it’s on that as James is less than forthcoming about his role in the production beyond mentioning the other day that he had to hand a lamp to two of the other children in his class. We’ve also seen various shapes of swords laid outside for the paint to dry and there was a photo of the little girls in Arabian nights type costumes in the newsletter last week.

Anyway, we’ll know soon as opening night (probably day I expect) is in a few weeks time.

Post offices in many countries around the world offer a range of banking services these days, but are they really up to it?

Typically a small post office will have one counter to do everything. That works well when “everything” is mainly posting letters and parcels which take a few minutes to process.

Add on banking services and you’re into a whole different league in terms of the time that it takes to process a transaction though. For one thing, opening an account takes ages and delays everything. OK, it’s not something that happens every day but it happens fairly frequently: I spent getting on for an hour in a queue in a post office today which ended up snaking right round the available space and out the door because two people were opening accounts.

The problem really stems from the practice of governments to consider post offices in country villages to be a “good thing” and therefore worthy of support. That in turn leads to them being considered a job creation scheme so, of course, you wouldn’t want to add too much automation into them as then you wouldn’t create so many jobs. What automation that there is often is counter-productive: posting my three letters took nearly five minutes because the stamps had to be scanned in and destinations entered into the computer.

So, no, I don’t know that it’s really true to say that many post offices could be considered banks.

Launching a new blog is a peculiar thing to do in many ways.

This blog for instance has been running for a little over four years now. From before that time I’ve had a domain sitting around which I basically just used for e-mail so I thought that I’d use it as something of a soapbox for a change.

It’s odd in some ways as it seems like forever since I started a blog totally from scratch.

What’s involved?

Well, registering the domain is the first step normally but I’d done that 10 years back for the new blog. Next is to get some hosting but then I’ve that already done. Then, it’s loading the software which takes about 20 minutes and another 20 or so to get the various plugins sorted out.

At that point, it’s ready to go but it looks pretty plain so you end up spending ages searching for a decent template for it before making that historic first post.

After that, you need to register it all over the place eg at FeedBurner to handle the subscribers, Technorati to get some blog type stats. Then you’ve to start adding it to blog aggregation services to pick up a little traffic although you can short-circuit that process by using one of the manual submission services to do it for you ($23 well spent).

Then it’s down to the slog of writing posts with no feedback from an audience for the first few months (which is why most blogs stagger to a halt after 2 or 3 months).

Oh, at some point you need to pick a topic for your blog too. In this case, not so easy as “soapbox” usually doesn’t appear as a blog category!

You might not think it, but it makes a substantial difference because google and other search engines use geotargetting.

This is fine if your website is country-specific (eg .co.uk) but not so good if you’re using a non-geographic domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) as many people do these days because then they will assume that your target market is the country in which your site is hosted. For example, if you own a holiday property in England and rent it mainly to the English then your target market is the UK. However, if you have a .com hosted in America you may not even appear in searches done by people in the UK using google.com or google.co.uk.

It’s not always obvious where your hosting service actually is as many are rebranded. The easiest way to find out is to go to www.whois.sc/yourdomain.com and scroll down to “IP Location”.

What if it’s in the wrong place? Surely it won’t matter that much?

Well, when we moved our sites from American hosting to UK hosting the traffic went up THIRTY fold so, yes, it does matter quite a lot.

I thought that we were home and dry with the various blogs on the new hosting service and had just one last blog to move.

Apparently not though as the feed for this blog ain’t working which is probably why the number of subscribers has dropped off somewhat. Feeds are, of course, something that you don’t normally look at yourself so everything seems fine even if they aren’t and it was only when I tried to sign up for a new blog aggregator that the problem surfaced.

Anyway, I’m having another go at installing this blog, this time starting from scratch so it should be a clean upload but as the problem is related to some odd characters that WordPress saw fit to insert itself it might be a little while before everything is back the way that it should have been.

That’ll “just” leave the forum and the two directories to move over. I’m not really that bothered about the forum as such and it wouldn’t be a great loss if I just dropped it. The directories are rather larger though and need moving over.