Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

From this side of the Atlantic, America is largely seen as a hotel type holiday destination but, of course, the whole range of accommodation options are available. There is one difference though… the quality of accommodation is much higher than you’ll be used to.

Take for example the self-catering accommodation options (vacation rental in American). Las Vegas is one place where you’d definitely be thinking hotels but you can rent a quite spectacular penthouse apartment (condo in American) right in the centre.

More typically villa type places include Lake Tahoe where you can choose from a whole range of luxurious villas in a spectacular location and the more central Palm Springs area.

How much for all this? Well, a typical villa runs from around $1500 to $2000 per week (£750 to £1000) which is more expensive than the average in Europe but then what you’re getting for the money is a whole lot more than is generally available.

Thanks to dreadful flight times, I decided to stay a day in Manchester on the way back here.

Manchester aiport is a brilliant place for flight connections as all three terminals are within the one complex which includes access to the city via bus and train services too. The airport is so close to the city that you’ll often find it takes you longer to walk to the bus/train station than it does to get into the city itself. That closeness makes the price quite low too so it’s under a fiver for the return trip.

We were lucky enough to have timed our trip to coincide with the Manchester Pride events which, as you can see, include a very colourful parade through the streets. As usual with parades, the traffic before and afterwards is something of a nightmare but the small size of the city meant that we could easily walk back to the train station.

Also very pleasant is the free bus services which cover the Manchester city centre area.

We’ve just added Manchester to our Whole Earth Guide where you’ll find more information on the attractions of the city.

One of the long term aims I have is to be able to sell photos from our little collection of sites as we tend to build up quite a collection of photos in the course of developing the likes of our Pyrenees Guide and, on a grander scale, our Whole Earth Guide.

For the guides themselves, the little Nikon Coolpix 3700 was more than enough. Whilst 3mp mightn’t sound much these days, you don’t need anything like that for the internet and in fact even the largest images on the websites is under 1mp. Even those 300,000 pixel cheapo cameras have much more resolution than is required for internet use.

However, it’s quite a different matter when you want to sell the photos as prints or whatever.

So, we had a bit of an upgrade last year to the 6mp Nikon S10 which is an excellent little camera and one of the few which offer x10 zoom on a compact digital camera. It’s certainly improved the photos that we’ve taken since getting it quite substantially, it’s still limiting us in terms of potential future sales of the images we take.

Anyway, ’twas time to really up the ante and so as of next week we’ll be starting to use our brand new Nikon D40x which takes us up to 10mp and will give us a whole lot more flexibility. In fact, the resolution increase is much more than it seems as there are all kinds of settings on the camera should let us produce prints up to poster size.

Now “all” we need to do is to wait for the perfect lighting for the photos…. the weather at the moment is more like the depths of Winter than mid-Summer!

I’m hoping to rope people into writing articles for the Whole Earth Guide in exchange for a link to their own website (or just for the fame that it’ll bring if they don’t have a website).

Anyway, my first volunteer has produced a truly excellent article on Hawaii which puts my humble effort on London to shame.

Still, ’tis early days and I will be gradually upping the ante with the quality of articles that are planned for the coming winter.

If you’d like to contribute to this effort, you can add your contribution here (select “Whole Earth Guide” as the property type and don’t worry about the talk of charging etc.).

One really big advantage of using a database driven approach to the Whole Earth Guide is that I get considerable development leverage from the existing B&B and self-catering listings sites. For instance, using the existing code base let me get the guide operational in a couple of days and there are already improvements visible on the listings sites courtesy of features that were needed for the guide.

Then there’s the global aspect of the guide site which will be leading to the listings sites supporting other countries before anyone applies for a listing. Already, Holland is an available option simply because of the Amsterdam article from the guide and Turkey will be following shortly.

In due course, there’ll even be an SEO advantage as it shouldn’t be that difficult cross-linking the trio of sites and that’ll let me start to use the website recommendations that I’ve been collecting from the properties listed on the accommodation sites over the last couple of years.

Finally, once I get the guide site operational, it’ll be easy to incorporate the information within it in other sites or create a new version targetted at other markets.