Foreign Perspectives

Although many people concentrate pretty much exclusively on online advertising, there’s still a place for print based advertising.

It’s a very different medium though. Not only is it expensive, but you’re usually pretty limited in the amount of content that you can have and whilst it has a long lead-time, it’s quite time-sensitive too. It’s easy to pay over £500 for just 100 words and a photo. Similarly, whilst your ad may only be on the shelves for a few weeks, you sometimes need to have it with the publishers over 3 months in advance.

However, it does work well for some people and because of that I’ve covered it in quite a comprehensive article over on our listings site blog.

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.

If you’re like most people I’m sure you’ve hardly gotten beyond thinking that you’ll either get a few hundred from the travel agent or perhaps just use a card when you get there.

In the first case, you’ll end up spending a small fortune un-necessarily and in the second you could be stuck without any money. In both cases, it’s worth putting a little thought into it and to help you make the best choices I’m putting together a little series on it over the next week or so.

In days gone by it would be maybe £100 to get a car serviced but those days have long since gone and I just paid out over twice that.

In fact, it would have been much more but we’d had the speedo set on trip rather than distance travelled so managed to miss out a service completely. Whilst we did that accidently this time I think we may well do it delibrately next time as I’m sure a lot of people are increasingly doing these days with the spiralling cost of the process.

Is it safe though? If you’d done that 20 years ago perhaps the answer would have been “no” but cars have become a whole lot more reliable over that time yet the service interval hasn’t changed. From our point of view, it certainly doesn’t appear to have made much difference in the running of the car, certainly not £200 worth of difference.

OK, we’ve some new oil in the car and presumably it’s cleaner oil than the stuff they threw out, which I imagine is better for the car. However, is it enough cleaner to make it worthwhile paying £200 to have it changed? I’m sure we could have managed to do that ourselves for maybe £20 tops. I’ve looked at the list of stuff they did and there’s nothing on it that seems really worth paying that much for so I figure that we’ll likely skip the next service too.

In fact, the only thing that might have been worthwhile for them to have done turns out to be a warranty thing which they couldn’t do today anyway and we’ve to go back in a couple of weeks when they get the part.

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.