Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

When Wendy started off her blog we just used the domain wendyreid.org for it as we already had that registered.

That was back in February but by the Summer she was well into writing paid posts and it seemed like a good idea to a) be using a dotcom domain and b) using one that was related to the blog content too.

Why the dotcom? That’s because a number of the paid post opportunities specify that you have a dotcom and therefore moving to one would increase the number available to her. Also, and related to that, for reasons that are far from clear a dotcom is better than a dotorg in terms of search engine positioning (which is why we’re also in the process of moving Our Inns to Inns4U).

Having the blog name related to the content is just a sensible thing anyway but it also helps for those paid posting sites where the advertiser chooses the blog.

Anyway, we registered Cultured Views and aliased it with the existing wendyreid.org domain so you can access the content by using either domain. Then we started telling the various sites that she’s signed up with.

No problem ’til we did PayPerPost. When we did that, the number of available opportunities dropped like a stone. Although nothing had really changed about the blog, they took the current pagerank of the new domain and used that to filter the opportunities. Naturally, that was PR0 therefore there were next to none available. So we asked them to change it back ’til we managed to transfer the pagerank over.

Ironically, just about the same time as the pagerank transferred over, somebody else in ppp noticed that the blog didn’t match the domain and changed it back. Well, tried to because they didn’t do it properly and Wendy’s not been able to post anything with them for days.

Finally, they replied to her support ticket and the guy said he’d changed everything including the URLs quoted in the past…. to culturedreviews.com. So she still can’t post anything! Perhaps they’ll get it 100% this time around.

The castle at Chantilly is one of the small collection of spectacular chateaux in the general Paris region. Yet, there’s a whole lot more to it than that as you can see from our Whole Earth entry on it.

Perhaps surprisingly, the castle houses one of the foremost collections of historical paintings in France and yet it receives relatively few visitors for that collection.

It’s easy enough to get there from Paris and very worthwhile too. Not only do you get a chateau, there’s the magnificent gardens and the artwork thrown in too!

Wendy’s very keen on family history but we’ve only just got around to registering a domain for her to put her researches on.

You can look forward to seeing a constant stream of information on the Hamilton’s at Hamilton Family History which is just live as of today though already with its first post.

Over the coming Winter, she’s planning on putting the result of her researches over the years onto the site.

Whatever size your development team is, there’s always an advantage to be had if you can standardise on a common platform and maximise the reuse of any code that’s been written.

It’s obvious really yet you see many people throwing up totally different websites solely for the purpose of being different and nothing else. Yet, look at what the big boys are doing. You’ll have seen untold numbers of very similar hotel reservation sites for the simple reason that there are perhaps a dozen major players out there and they offer what amounts to a franchise to their data via easily customiseable templates which range from the simple click-through banners that you see everywhere to sites that appear pretty much unique, yet aren’t.

On a very small scale, I’ve been busy building on the database of property listings that I’ve built up over the last few years and running up variations on that. Lately, I’ve gone one step further and started using the database structure and front-end template to hold our growing Whole Earth Guide which gives me totally different content yet displayed within the framework of our new-generation sites.

The other plus point of all this is that with a common platform, it’s often the case that a new application running on that platform will require a tiny enhancement which thereby appears across all systems using that platform. For instance, we now have a major improvement in the menu structure on the new-generation sites courtesy of Whole Earth developments (see Inns4U).

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.