Foreign Perspectives

The English course that I’m doing started off nice and gradually with a history of the English language all the way back to its origins as a dialect of Frisian and motoring at a fair pace up to the establishment of the colonies and arrival of Colonial English.

Now we’re moving into a section which you’d think would be easy enough to follow as I’ve obviously been using it all my life: English grammar. Except, of course, that schools haven’t taught English grammar for a very long time indeed and therefore large chunks of it are only any way familiar to me as I’d learnt a number of the terms in French and Spanish earlier. That actually doesn’t make it a whole lot easier though as English is a completely different type of language and therefore many of the terms I’ve had to start going over are quite different from any that I’ve seen before.

Still, at least there’s only one more section of this part of the course and then it’s onto something completely different.

The weather has taken a distinct lurch for the better over the last week or so and we’re having to go back to just the t-shirts as it’s just too hot outside at the moment for anything else.

Somehow I just can’t see that heat wave holding up but we’re trying to make the most of it while it lasts (well, will be once we all get over the flu that’s felled most of us over the last week).

It is pretty peculiar to be needing the airconditioning in February though!

There haven’t been any posts in the last week or so as I was felled by the flu. Isn’t it amazing how such a seemingly trivial thing can still knock all of us out?

Of course, with the relatively cold weather and the school holidays it’s been working it’s way around everyone over the last week.

Still, just about everyone seems to be getting back on their feet again so we’re back to (almost) normal.

Whilst I include most of my sites in an annual site-promotion programme I’m really bad at omitting the blogs from that. Why? Well, because it’s not so easy to promote a blog as most directories aren’t geared up to listing them in a sensible way.

So, now and again, I look around for new places to list the blogs and just came across rssHugger this afternoon.

As in most blog directories, this one considers blogs separately from normal sites and, of course, in this particular instance targets the RSS feeds which is always useful as you can get a whole bunch of new readers if you’re on the “right” RSS aggregators. Now, the question is whether rssHugger is one of those “right” aggregators but, at the moment, it’s just impossible to say as 1) this is a relatively new site and 2) I don’t know the demographics of those that use it and therefore whether or not they’d be generally interested in the stuff that I write.

Initially the sign-up was $20 for 10 years but they dropped that requirement recently for those blogs that write a review of them. Personally, I think that it’s good to have that notional $20 value as it gives a broad indication as to where they themselves feel the value of a listing on rssHugger would be.

What’s the site like though? It has a very clean look which in some senses is good but it’s a little too clean as it’s not immediately clear from the opening screen that there’s a directory living here. I think it would be better to move that directory onto the front page. It’s also quite a long directory and could do with being stuctured eg you get “Investing” and “Save Money” as two categories yet since the directory is purely alphabetical these related categories are nowhere near each other.

Is it worth listing with? In that it’s free at the moment there’s no downside and it has the feel of a site that could have a lot of upside so, yes, it’s worth listing with. How valuable the listing will be only time will tell.

Wendy’s quite keen on Yorkshire though she’s not actually been there and knows it principally through the books of James Herriot.

Normally, the reality of a place is quite different to that which you read about in a book but that’s not the case for Yorkshire. Those rolling dales really are like that and many of the cute country towns that you see on the TV series haven’t changed a whole lot either.

For that matter, you can even go to the Skeldale House which these days houses the Herriot Museum and for that matter you can even stay in the Wheatsheaf Hotel that he stayed on his honeymoon. I’ve been told that we’re going to be staying there when we get around to going!

Yorkshire is one of those areas of England where you have a considerable choice of different activities to choose from too. If you tire of the dales, there’s York itself which just oozes history as do many of the medieval towns around the area. It’s easy to spend a week or even two going round it all.