Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

One of the best things about the paid posts is that there are a fair number of them that I’d be writing anyway in due course. ‘Tis easy enough to pick these ones out as they’re a lot longer, more complete and get a photo or two.

I’ve even had someone offer to pay for one after I’d written it!

Now, the big question is how I can get people to sponsor the other websites directly….

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.

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.

After nearly two weeks of no ADSL, we’re finally back online, at least for the moment.

We’ve been calling France Telecom every day over that time and every day it’s a a different answer. At the start of the two weeks, the noise on the line was so bad that we couldn’t hear the guy on the fault reporting line so ended up having to call them from another phone.

Result? We’ve tested your line and it’s perfect. Emmm, we can’t hear anyone when they call as there’s so much noise on the line. No, it’s perfect.

Next day. Testing… yes, there’s a problem. We’ll send someone out. Two days later nobody and no working line so we call again. No, we’ve tested it: there’s nothing wrong. Several more attempts and we actually had someone come out. Ah, there was oxidation on the contacts, that’s why it wasn’t working.

Well, that sort-of fixed the phone. We can usually hear people now but still the ADSL wasn’t working. Called again. Yes, there’s a problem on the line: we’ll send someone out. Two days later, with nobody out: no, it’s your problem we’re charging you EUR 150 for someone to come out.

That guy actually did come out and announced that it was perfect. Still no ADSL though. Of course, the guy who came wasn’t from France Telecom so wouldn’t test the France Telecom modem for us. Thought I’d try changing the modem and cables and that worked, for a while (at a much higher speed than before) but ’tis still rather hit & miss and we can’t hear people when they call so I’m not sure how long we’ll be online this time.

As you’ll have noticed, I’ve posted next to nothing over the last month. A total of seven posts vs what would have been a more normal 30 in fact.

That’s because I’ve been over in Northern Ireland trying to sort out some administration since June 5th and only got back home on Friday evening.

Now, I wasn’t expecting there to be much change in the traffic on my websites but the blog is different. The most commonly held belief is that you need to post at least once a day to keep up the traffic. That seems reasonable: after all, blogs, for the most part, cover “current events” in some fashion so without the regular updates, the traffic on a blog is bound to drop off quite quickly, isn’t it?

Well, the funny thing is that the blog traffic didn’t drop at all by any meaningful amount. The number of hits showed very little change at all nor did the adsense income. The number of subscribers via Feedburner dropped about 10%. The number of incoming links as counted by Technorati went up.

So little was the change that it has me wondering if the best strategy would be to build up a blog over six months or so then start a new one.