Foreign Perspectives

If you value your “spare time” then you should be very careful never to pick up a prospectus from the Open University.

Nobody warned me about it and I started reading one in 2001 and it’s been eating up all my spare time ever since!

The booklet looks innocent enough, but then you start leafing through it and find that it’s just filled with all kinds of courses that sound really interesting. The short courses only take a few months and even a half-credit course only takes a few hours per week. Before you know it, you’ll be filling in the application form for one of them. Just to see what they send, you understand, after all you can pull out of it, can’t you?

You’re only planning on doing the one course, but then about half-way through that one they send you a letter about those that logically follow on from that one along with a little sampler of what the next course is like. All you have to do is to sign at the bottom and return the letter and before you know it, you’re walking along to the Post Office.

It’s the same next year, but by then you’re hooked and looking beyond the current strand of courses. You’re thinking “sure, if I do a couple of courses more I’ll get a degree”. That kind of thinking is fatal: you get another prospectus. Just to have a leaf through it, of course, but it never works out like that.

You think that it’s all over when you’re about to start the final course for your degree, but you’re totally addicted at that point and it’s time to get another fix. What about that other course that you were thinking of originally? Wow, they’ve updated it and it sounds even more interesting now, doesn’t it?

That’s what happened to me. I picked up the Diploma in French three years ago and have just completed the final exam for the Diploma in Spanish. That just leaves one English course and I get a degree in Modern Languages. But I always quite fancied their science courses and will be signing up for the first of those a little after Easter next year.

I think we need to start Open University Annonymous: it’s worse than drinking!

Even aside from the money aspect, I quite like a lot of the paid posts that come along.

For instance, I’ve written a whole stream of them about various holiday destinations and I love writing about stuff like that. I’ve even started up Whole Earth Guide so I can write more of it!

The finance related ones have been fairly thick on the ground here too as I can usually talk the leg off a table when speaking about finance as many people will attest to!

But now and again you get surprises.

For instance, today, PayPerPost just offered a very nice looking African safari post. At least it looked quite nice at first glance. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to go on a safari? Second glance revealed though that they want you to promote a place that guarantees you’ll kill a set number of endangered species.

Now, aside from the moral aspect of that, it’s actually illegal in that PPP is based in America and therefore subject to American laws.

I’m not blaming them on putting it on because I’m sure the whole process is quite automatic and after all it’s Sunday so chances are that they’ve locked the door and left the computers in charge but it just goes to show the range of things that you can get ie you can’t just start typing away with a post before you read what they’re actually wanting you to write about.

Wendy’s very keen on family history but we’ve only just got around to registering a domain for her to put her researches on.

You can look forward to seeing a constant stream of information on the Hamilton’s at Hamilton Family History which is just live as of today though already with its first post.

Over the coming Winter, she’s planning on putting the result of her researches over the years onto the site.

Whatever size your development team is, there’s always an advantage to be had if you can standardise on a common platform and maximise the reuse of any code that’s been written.

It’s obvious really yet you see many people throwing up totally different websites solely for the purpose of being different and nothing else. Yet, look at what the big boys are doing. You’ll have seen untold numbers of very similar hotel reservation sites for the simple reason that there are perhaps a dozen major players out there and they offer what amounts to a franchise to their data via easily customiseable templates which range from the simple click-through banners that you see everywhere to sites that appear pretty much unique, yet aren’t.

On a very small scale, I’ve been busy building on the database of property listings that I’ve built up over the last few years and running up variations on that. Lately, I’ve gone one step further and started using the database structure and front-end template to hold our growing Whole Earth Guide which gives me totally different content yet displayed within the framework of our new-generation sites.

The other plus point of all this is that with a common platform, it’s often the case that a new application running on that platform will require a tiny enhancement which thereby appears across all systems using that platform. For instance, we now have a major improvement in the menu structure on the new-generation sites courtesy of Whole Earth developments (see Inns4U).

It’s surprising just how much mileage you can get out of a database driven website template.

Our B&B and self-catering listings sites have been held on the database for around two years now and we’ve been able to run up several new variants of them since, each taking just a few weeks to get operational from the time of the original concept.

Of these, our new-generation template is proving to be the most flexible. We’re still adding enhancements to it but already we’ve been able to launch our Whole Earth Guide based on in and we’ve been working on yet another variation, Inns4U, which for the first time includes all our properties rather than separating them out into B&B and vacation rentals and thereby creates a website with a much larger footprint than the others.

Tidying up Inns4U will probably keep us out of trouble for the rest of October and perhaps into November though we’re also plugging away with the new-ish blogs at An Age of Magic and On a Postcard of course.