Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

One thing that’s slightly peculiar is that almost always when I write something about languages, I get comments on the post.

Why? Basically because there’s something of an underground support group for Esperanto.

Eh? What’s Esperanto? For those that don’t know, way back in the late 1800s there was a feeling worldwide that what was needed was a world language. One that wasn’t tied politically to any particular country (so no vested interests) and could be used around the world.

At the time, such a language didn’t exist so there arose something of a cottage industry in inventing them. Of those produced at the time, Esperanto being by far the best known these days. However, it didn’t stop then and in the early 1900s people proposed even more languages including a simplified version of English.

Although it’s quite a different world these days, the Esperanto community is still developing the language and you can even get free accommodation around the world if you can speak it (it’s reputedly a very easy language to learn). And, they’re very enthusiastic commenters on posts!

We’ve had two separate groups booking with us recently who seemed to be experiencing senile dementia at a very early age indeed: their 20s!

The first group was Australian so Wendy was quite keen on having them here as she always likes to chat to Australian guests when she gets the chance. We did wonder about them a little early on though as they clearly wanted to be staying at a place on the beach yet had booked our place which is in the countryside although some people do that in the peak season as we’re cheaper. Not only that but although we offer pickups they turned up in a taxi (usually around three or four times the rate we charge). Although they were only here a couple of days they managed to go downhill from there ending up by booking a meal with us for 7.30 and not bothering to sit down to eat it. “More money than sense” is a phrase that definitely applies to them!

The second group was from the UK and couldn’t work out how to get here despite being told in the automatic confirmation that they received when they booked and again on the confirmation e-mail that they received from me the next day. What confused them was that there were no buses to our place at 7pm despite it saying on both e-mails that the last bus is at 6pm. Now, I know that most people don’t read the complete confirmation e-mails but this information was in the second paragraph!

They’re just the first of many similar guests that we expect to receive (or not as in the case of the second group) over the next month or so.

It’s been ages since I looked at the detailed stats for this blog so it was something of a surprise that one place reckoned that 75% of the readership is in America.

I say one place because one place reckoned that as low as 25% were from there and that 16% were from India.

Of course, that’s the problem with web site statistics: none of them are really accurate. Bear in mind too that all of those that I looked at have a little stats marker on the site so they should all be in agreement!

To be fair, they’re not all measuring over exactly the same timescale but a few days out isn’t going to make a difference from 75% American readership to 25%. Some statistical errors are evident though so for example the American readership that Alexa guesses at 25% is higher than the British readership that they guess at 20% simply because their toolbar is more popular in the US (all the sensible stats places reckon that both countries are about equal).

However, it does seem clear that we’re getting more American readers than we used to and therefore I’m thinking that it’s time that Foreign Perspectives emmigrated to America itself so over the next week or two I’ll be moving the hosting for it.

I’ve been plugging away with the SevaTeem theme off and on over the last month or so and it’s now complete enough to let me try it out on various blogs that I run.

Obviously since I designed it mainly for me, it runs quite nicely on a number of those blogs but one or two have highlighted little things that I’d like to do with it. For instance, An Age of Magic uses a dark background therefore I needed to be able to change the colour of the various fonts used so that added a few options. That sorted out a lot of stuff at a stroke as it also lets me change the background image and not need to dive into the stylesheet to change colours as they’re all laid out on the options screen now.

One or two little “funnies” turned up when I tried to add in various bits of HTML in the sidebars by way of widgets so I’m going to be adding one or two options along those lines or perhaps buildin a widget that’ll deal with those issues.

This blog uses a fixed width so I’m currently working on adding that as an option. SevaTeem is a fluid width theme but I want to be able to use a fixed width as well.

Why all the options? Basically because I want SevaTeem to be the only theme that I ever need.

After much tinkering around with other peoples’ WordPress templates, I figured that it was time that I wrote my own one.

That sounds like it would be a major undertaking but in reality it’s not nearly as difficult nor timeconsuming as you’d think basically because a lot of the groundwork has already been done so it’s effectively tinkering around but on a slightly larger scale.

Anyway, I’ve been plugging away with that off and on for the last month or two over at SevaTeem and it looks like it’s getting close to the time when I’ll be able to release it on an unsuspecting public. As a bit of preparation for that day, I’ve started to roll it out on some of my little family of blogs with the one over at Our Inns probably being the closest representation to the final product although as it’s going to offer loads of options it could well look quite different and Personally Chosen is also using it.

What’s needed next is the addition of some options to avoid people needing to dive in and edit the code itself.