Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

For the first time we find ourselves splitting a blog in two.

The reason is simple really: a while back I started An Age of Magic for a bit of fun and some time later Wendy started writing some pieces on it too. Roll the calendar forward a lot of months and her stuff has ended up swamping mine so we thought that we’d be better splitting the blog in two with stuff she’s written staying in Age of Magic whilst my strand of the blog moves to A Time of Magic.

Taking the posts out of the original blog was easy enough as the WordPress export facility lets you select by author and the import was easy enough. However, it’s not quite so easy to get rid of the original version of the posts as they were written under the admin user which can’t be deleted so I ended up having to do that in MySQL which means that the post counts still reflect the number of posts which I wrote even though they’re no longer in the old blog. Still, I imagine that’ll sort itself out at some point.

One of the problems that you find when you’re blogging quite a lot is in keeping the quality of the posts up.

Many bloggers seem not to bother with quality and end up producing a steady stream of short posts that are barely in English and often total drivel. OK, I’ll admit that the “drivel” comment is a subjective one and some of those that write what I’d call drivel seem to have quite substantial readerships so clearly there’s a market for that out there.

What I try to do is to write about a number of separate themes that are intertwined here in the one blog. So you’ll see posts about finance, travel and daily happenings with very little linking them apart from them having been written about by me. That lets me write about three separate topics in a day and keeps things relatively fresh.

On a separate tack, I also have a separate blog over at The View from Arnold which has a similar mix of things but which treats them in a more indepth way and I’m currently limiting myself to five posts a week. What would appear here as two or perhaps three posts appears there as just one. I’ve also adopted the policy that every post will have a photo there which is turning out to be harder to keep up than expected: quite how the daily photo blogs manage it year after year I don’t know.

I’m thinking of doing a creative writing course next year so I’m also toying with adding a “writing” strand to the topics here but haven’t really got further than thinking that I’d like to do that so far.

We had quite a busy weekend pretty much filled with shuffling the websites around which is always a depressing thing to be doing as you spend hours moving things and at the end you’re hoping that it all looks the same as it did to begin with.

First off was the establishment of our foothold in America which currently consists mainly of our French vacation listings site, our French B&B site, our global accommodation site and our global travel guide. That’s our initial collection and we’re hoping that over the next few months the traffic on those will start to catch up with that on their Europe counterparts.

Next was an upgrade to the new version of the listings which gives the property owners a little six page website instead of the previous single page version. That’s phase one of a more significant upgrade which’ll let us offer to build custom websites for vacation properties.

And finally, now that we’ve a proper American hosting service it was the turn of a couple of blogs to head west as their content is more appropriate for an American audience.

Where does all this stuff live now? Well, to give us a bit of contingency we’re using Lunarpages for most of the sites but have kept 3ix for one site as a backup in that one thing that was very clear when we read the various reviews of sites was that it was always prudent to retain a second hosting service. For that purpose, 3ix seems ideal in that their base plan is all of $12 per year which is comparable to the monthly charge of some services and frankly seems the ideal service if you’ve only got one site and don’t mind that it’s hosted in America.

That’s us basically settled down now though I see that WordPress have yet another new version out so we’ll be moving onto that with the various blogs over the next few weeks or so (no big rush though).

After you’ve been blogging for a while you tend to find that some of the articles you write could be collected in a series.

So, for example, this blog has a series on living in France, another about banking, and so on.

However, I’ve been thinking of doing a blog for the listings sites which is quite different. For one thing, it’s a blog with quite a narrow remit ie to write about the listings sites themselves. More significantly perhaps is that I’m planning to do it as a blog consisting of a collections of series right from the start. Today starts off the series on marketing your property which will be an ongoing thread but there’ll be several other threads intertwined through the blog as time goes on.

It’ll be a while before that becomes apparent though as it’s not going to be a daily blog by any means (there just aren’t enough hours in the day for that).

Although there are loads of categories that you can list a blog under, “soapbox” isn’t one of them.

That’s a shame really as many blogs would sit very neatly under that particular category. After all, there are a great many bloggers who would have been standing on their soap box in earlier times. It’s not just the preachers these days of course as everyone and their dog has something to say nowadays. In fact, once you’ve kicked off one blog, you get to the point eventually when you’d like to say a bunch of stuff which doesn’t fit under the heading of the original blog.

Which is a long way of saying that I now have my very own “soapbox blog” over at The View from Arnold.