Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

As you can see we’ve started offering the option to buy prints of the photographs from this site and others that we run.

However, as soon as we started doing that we hit the problem that the resolution of our camera ain’t good enough to produce the largest prints and indeed isn’t high enough for the images to be accepted by some services.

Related to that we’re now looking for more images for our Whole Earth Guide and it seems to make sense to do something about the camera for that too (we’re hoping that we can supply the majority of the photographs for that from our own picture library).

Which is where we hit our dilema. We have a massive library of slide photographs and could continue to take those using the Nikon F3 but would need a slide scanner to be able to use them properly. That would run to £500 or more.

Alternatively we could buy something like the Nikon D40x (also £500+) and use that to build the library for the future.

At the moment I don’t know which way to go. Ideally, of course, we’d buy both but there isn’t enough money in the site development kitty to do that.

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.

The funny thing about chickenpox is that once you’re covered in spots, you’re not infectious.

That doesn’t stop people backing away from you though. I well remember the time when I was in the middle of the exams for my MBA and caught it: one big step backwards was taken by everyone once they found out what I’d got!

James wasn’t feeling too well yesterday and he’s still pretty hot at times but he isn’t anything like as lethargic as he was yesterday so I guess that he’s on his way to getting over the disease itself which “just” leaves those darned itchy spots.

We’re looking forward to John getting it, probably sometime next week I expect.

Almost all of the photos on our sites were specially taken for the purpose and a number of them are quite unique. The overall effect of this is that we get quite a lot of hits on our sites arriving because of those images so we thought we’d have a go at selling prints of them a while back but have only gotten around to doing something about it today.

We’ve started with by far the most popular: our photo of the castle in Foix but will be adding the rest as we go along (it’ll probably take a few weeks to get caught up with the backlog). In the meantime, if there’s one that you’d quite like a print of, pop a comment on this post and I’ll put that on by the following day.

In theory, we can produce t-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets etc. using the same images so if you fancy one of those, let me know. Also in the works will be a book form version of our Pyrenees guide but that’s going to take us well into the Winter I expect.