Foreign Perspectives

Learning a new language and running a business might seem to be very different tasks but they have one thing in common: a need to be stubborn.

To learn a language you need to be stubborn enough to just keep going when you hit difficulties from time to time. In fact, often it seems to be the case that it isn’t so much an aptitude at languages that is required but rather an ability to be so stubborn that you’ll go on regardless of how bad you think you are at a given time.

It’s little different in most businesses of course. There are difficulties that arise from time to time and you need to develop that stubborness to just going because you know that you’ll be able to sort out whatever problems have arisen or are likely to arise in the future.

One thing that I’d not allowed for in changing my hosting service was the sheer size of the photographs that have been uploaded by those on my B&B and self-catering listings sites.

They don’t seem terribly large individually but when you’ve got over 1800 of them that amounts to a hefty chunk of discpace which in turn means that it takes AGES to transfer across the Internet. The sheer length of time means that you get heaps of time-outs on the FTP transfer so I’ve been plugging away at the transfer off and on all afternoon.

Oh well, perhaps another day will get it done.

For the second time in a month 1and1 took it upon themselves to take all my sites hosted with them offline.

Each time it cost me over $100 in lost income so I’m in the process of moving everything to a much cheaper and, so far, more reliable hosting service. One thing I’ve also decided to do is to put a few things in place to make it easier to switch to a backup service at short notice. As it was, I was able to move OurInns over to what will shortly become our main hosting service (EUKHost) but I’ll be starting to build that capability into the hosting setup of the remaining domains too over the next couple of weeks.

One thing that stopped me moving everything over is that I use 1and1 as the registrar for a number of the domains. On the whole, using your registrar as your host is simpler but usually isn’t a good move and I ended up in that situation for various historical reasons and I’ve been thinking of a bit of a tidyup for a while now.

The other thing that held me back from establishing a true contingency hosting site is simply that I’ve an awful lot of information online courtesy of the listings sites. The transfer that’s going on whilst I write this is over 200MB for instance and that’s not including the databases associated with that information. Quite a scary amount of information, isn’t it?

Step one of my move is “simply” moving the data which will probably take me the rest of the week to get through as I need to setup the databases on the new hosting site which always takes a little while to do.

Step two will be going through the domain registrations and rationalising them somewhat. One thing I’m considering is a move to iPowerWeb for the registrations which at $6.50/year is less than the $9.99/year that I’m currently paying but also comes with whois privacy which would be handy.

We thought we’d do some research on the Santa list today so it was off to Media Markt which is a fairly large general electronics cum electricals store in Girona.

Quite nice prices on a couple of items but some others that we were looking for were out of stock and we ended up just picking up a couple of DVDs. Then it was into the cattle pen that they refer to as the tills (the layout needs work!). No matter how many people they have on, it always takes ages to get out once you’ve bought something as they’ve just too much sales floor space in proportion to the number of checkouts.

By the time we’d reached the car, J & J wanted to see the DVDs which was just as well as one of them turned out to be devoid of the contents (quite how, I don’t know as it was a sealed package). That is about the worst possible nightmare you could imagine as it means going to customer service, or rather joining the queue for customer service.

Naturally, the number of customer service people is far below what is required of a store of that size so it was an hour (yes, a whole hour) of queuing just to get a DVD swapped.

Google seems to have its sights on the blogging community and specifically on those that get paid for some of their posts. How come?

Well, basically Google doesn’t like the concept of people being able to pay for links. Unless, it’s Google, of course, as they make quite a bit of money from adwords which is a system of payment for links.

However, the paid links aren’t really the problem for them. What appears to be more of a problem is that the links that the bloggers have been creating are in context. So, if you’re looking for information about, say, credit cards then the theory is that it’s much more likely that a blog talking about them will pop up to the top of the Google search results because the links that they’ve got are in context whereas a normal directory entry for credit cards wouldn’t come up so high because that’s just a link out of context.

However, not all bloggers have been hit by this which has muddied the picture somewhat. Nobody outside Google really knows for sure why some are hit (sometimes from PR7 down to PR0) whereas others are, so far, unscathed.

I’ve looked at some combinations of them and one possible common thread so far is that those who’ve been hit seem to write site reviews when they’re paid whereas those that haven’t been hit tend to write an article around the topic requested and just add the links to that. Whether this is true in all cases I don’t know but it would seem a logical thing for Google to hit: those doing the general article have a “real” in-context link whereas those doing a review have simply written a paid advertisement.

If my reading of it is correct then ironically those who have been doing exactly what the advertiser wanted them to do will have been hit whereas those who did what the advertiser needed (ie a link truly in context) have, so far, come through OK. Think of it like an enhanced version of the advice that some of the paid sites offer: rather than asking would anyone read your blog if the paid posts weren’t there, ask yourself if the article you’ve written would be valid without the link to the advertiser. If both apply to your blog, then you’ll have a much better blog than you would otherwise and chances are that Google will be happy about it too.