Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

Last year we had quite a noticeable dip in traffic on the sites from November onwards but this year we’d simply a small dip over part of the Christmas period.

In fact, it would seem that people have been booking much, much earlier for 2008 than they did the previous year. We’ve had pretty much level traffic on the sites from August right through to now with, as I say, a small dip over part of Christmas.

Part of that is probably due to us starting our marketing programme for the sites in November but even so we still had pretty much summer level traffic on the sites before we started which is pretty unusual as the B&B site traffic usually drops like a stone after August and the self-catering traffic drops up to a month earlier than that.

In fact, the traffic is up so much that I suspect that I’m going to have to upgrade the hosting package for the sites as soon as Easter when ordinarily the upgrade that I did in December would have seen me through at least a year.

After promising people for ages that I was going to upgrade the maps on the listings sites, I’ve finally gotten around to making a proper start on it as you can see from the first edition of the new map of Europe that appeared on the site this afternoon.

That European map is long overdue as I’ve been adding a couple of countries each year as I’ve gone along which had made the original format less and less viable. I say that it’s the first edition because I’ll need to add a couple of countries further east than those on the map here and, of course, there’s the entries in China and Thailand.

So, in practice, that map is merely stage one of the sites going global with the maps but that’ll need a bit of restructuring of the database so it’ll be a “while” before all of the planned changes come online.

Still, a good start with the graphics pad I think. Next up is France which needs some tidying up and then Spain which needs a lot of tidying up.

One of the things that I thought would be hard to do with the graphics pad was the business of looking at the screen yet drawing with the pen on the pad.

In fact, it doesn’t seem to require any adjustment at all. Within a few seconds I was drawing away no problem at all.

Simple things are very simple with the pad but there’s a lot more capability that can be brought into use with the pad that I have. For one thing, the heavier you lean on the pen, the heavier the line becomes. Vista adds a whole bunch more functionality too but I’ve not even scratched the surface of that yet.

Retouching photos looks like it will be somewhat easier too though, so far, I’ve not attempted that with the pen yet.

One of the surprising things is how naff many computer shops are when you’re looking for something even marginally out of the ordinary.

We decided to upgrade the maps on the listings sites a while back and when I saw the prices being asked for what was, in almost all cases, a fairly primitive map for use online I figured that the best route would be to buy a graphics pad and run up custom maps myself. After all, they’re not particularly intricate for the most part but with custom maps it would be nice to be able to add special features to the maps – points of particular interest for example.

So off I went to untold numbers of computer shops and the best that they could come up with was a fairly naff A5 pad at best and in most cases just the A6 version which is rather small to be drawing maps on.

In reality there’s only one graphics pad to go for and that’s the Wacom Intuos range yet not one single computer shop had them so I ended up ordering from Amazon.

Google’s widespread dropping to zero of the pagerank of sites that accepted payment for links has kicked off quite a debate on the issue on various sites including their own webmaster blog.

For technical reasons, they would much prefer that all links between sites on the Internet are purely for altruistic reasons with no payment or other persuasion used. That was, to some extent, the case when Google Inc started up and when the initial university research project that led to the creation of Google Inc began but that’s eons ago in Internet time.

As we all know, the Internet is full of commercial sites these days with numerous sites selling everything from books to bookings for holidays. With this in mind many personal sites are approached by commercial ones asking for a link and offering money for it. Sure, there are commercial sites that ask for a link with no money on offer, but they don’t usually get too far unless they particularly stand out from the crowd in some way.

And then there are various types of directories that abound these days. I have a particular interest in the accommodation directories in that I run several of them myself. Much as I never considered these as selling links (and my sites don’t) it would seem that in Google’s eyes even the likes of Gites de France is selling links. After all, they charge something like EUR 1000 per year for a listing and isn’t that just selling a link?

Sure, GdF and the many other accommodation listings sites have a lot of text around that link but at the end of the day, how is that different from a blog that accepts sponsored posts?