Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

As you may know, I’ve been experimenting with the hosting location of several of my websites over the last few months and indeed years.

To begin with I hosted mascamps.com in America basically because that’s where my earlier websites lived and it was handy to just add the new one to the existing account. Anyway, about a year after we got here the various Our Inns had started off on 1and1.co.uk basically because it was handier to have multiple domains in one account but only pay for one webspace account.

Anyway, come 2006 and I needed to upgrade the account to run the database version of the Inns sites. That meant, on 1and1, a move from £25/year to £10/month so I started shopping round and ended up plumping for godaddy in the USA. Snag was that almost immediately after the move, the site traffic started dropping. In fact it ended up dropping 90% before I figured that perhaps £10/month wasn’t too bad after all and, guess what?, well the traffic went up x10 in the two weeks following the move back to the UK!

So, of course, over the year or so after that I gradually moved everything to 1and1 UK. Well, I say “UK” but in fact it’s actually in Germany.

Soooo, come this year I started wondering about hosting in the UK properly. Up ’til quite recently that’s been quite expensive as I need a sort-of “reseller” account in that I need to be able to use the one webspace but have lots of domains pointing to it. However, now it’s dropped to around £20/year (eukhost.com) so time for another experiment.

OK, not so spectacular this time but a jump of around 100% in site traffic does seem worthwhile so over the coming winter I’ll be moving the rest of the sites over and thereby a) getting a lot more traffic and b) saving a fortune compared to 1and1.

What I’ve not done until now is to try out a .co.uk domain for sites largely aimed at the UK market. That’s in the process of changing as I’m putting Whole Earth Guide on a .co.uk domain to see how it goes. Snag is that I’ve not really got a truly comparable domain to check the performance against.

Google’s adsense is a peculiar product in many ways.

On the one hand it seems to pull up adverts that are just what people are looking for on webpages. Yet, if you think about it, they’ve arrived at that webpage looking for something and presumably haven’t found it if they’re clicking on one of the adverts.

That being the case, sites that are full of useful content don’t do too well from the adsense point of view. So, for instance this site is quite information rich yet doesn’t get a whole lot of income from adsense. Similarly, our Pyrenees guide is fairly packed with information (and getting more complete by the day as we’re in the midst of an update) but does quite poorly in terms of adsense.

So, what we’re planning is to have an experimental site which is designed with adsense in mind to see if that does better. Anyway, that’s why Whole Earth Guide will be a little light on content (well, that plus we won’t be properly starting on it ’til after September).

Hopefully we’ll manage to get all the right keywords packed in to get people to the site and adsense will provide them with the content that they’re really looking for.

The travel news site from RatesToGo isn’t the “in your face” promo of their bookings site that it could so easily be and in fact has gone to the other extreme with only a logo to indicate that they even run a hotel booking service.

That makes it quite an interesting site to read as it covers a really wide range of articles such as the most expensive hotel room (in Las Vegas) which at $40,000 is hardly one that you’ll be booking through their site.

They do link to hotels on their site for instance in their top 10 binge drinking getaways but that’s not really limiting the content of this very informative blog as the range of hotels which they have doesn’t act as a limitation to them. Besides their occassional self-promo is more than offset by general travel articles such as the beds on Lufthansa flights.

Overall, it looks like they write the articles then look for a suitable hotel on their list. As in their piece on Japanese fireworks festivals where the mention of the hotel seems very much an afterthought.

At the moment this is a fairly young blog: let’s hope that they maintain the variety of articles that they’ve produced up to now.

As usual on the first weekend of August, the traffic has been heavy here since shortly after breakfast and it’ll likely stay that way until early tomorrow morning.

How come?

Well, it’s the start of the holiday season in France and a number of other European countries so everyone has jumped in their car this morning and started driving. As you’d expect, by the time they get to the south of France they’re both tired and cranky (a bad combination for a driver, of course) and therefore the number of traffic accidents also leaps this weekend.

It’s best not to attempt to drive anywhere on this particular weekend. Just about every road has traffic way above the capacity which it was designed for and the queues are correspondingly long and wearisome. The queue on the left of the photo is created by having three lanes of traffic at 130km/hr going down to two lanes at 10km/hr at the border which has the overall effect that the queue gets longer and longer as the day goes on (at the time of the photo in the late afternoon, the queue was getting on for 50km!).

You might be thinking that you can avoid the traffic by going on the side-roads. Think again: everyone has already thought of that and the side roads are just as busy. Those using in-car navigation aids will find that the queues on the recommended routes are even worse as a lot of people are using those these days and, of course, they always recommend the same route.

Carrickfergus is on the coast just 20 minutes or so north of Belfast so it’s easy to get to.

The castle is, of course, the main attraction of the town. Whilst it’s open all year with exhibitions depicting the history from the 1100s, it’s best to catch it during one of the Summer celebrations that are held. Allow about an hour to fully cover all the permanent exhibitions.

Strangely enough for such a major construction, much of its history isn’t known to great precision so you’ll find that the outer ward was probably added between 1228 and 1242 rather than having an exact date. In fact the only exact date quoted is that of the landing of King William the third on June 14th 1690 which is commemorated by a small plaque at the end of the pier which you can see in this photograph and also by his statue outside the castle.

Sadly the castle fell into disrepair after this time though it was still being used as a fortress when it was captured for the last time in 1760 by the French. After that it was used as a prison and then an armoury up until 1928 and later as an air-raid shelter in the second world war. As a consequence of this long period of non-castle use, numerous repairs were made after it was handed over as a musuem, some of which were a little overdone giving it an overall artificial feel.

This is part of our series of articles for Northern Ireland Themes.