Recent Posts
Foreign Perspectives
Return To Blog Listing
News and editorial on life from the south of France, a regular series on how to move here and some random musings too.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'web development'
Working on SEO
One thing that constantly surprises me is just how little care people put into their SEO efforts. Granted, most people don’t really bother about SEO at all but of those that do quite a surprising number don’t seem to have spent more than ...
Sometimes a small change can make a big difference in a site
One of the things that I’ve been looking at over the last couple of days is how I present the affiliate properties on the holiday listings sites and particularly on the new generation versions of them. What I’d been doing was listing 5 pr...
Updating the blog themes
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 num...
A new Wordpress template in the making
After much tinkering around with other peoples’ Wordpress templates, I figured that it was time that I wrote my own one. That sounds like it would be a major undertaking but in reality it’s not nearly as difficult nor timeconsuming as you...
Selecting a new web hosting service
Selecting webhosting is always something of a gamble as it’s difficult to get a truly objective view of what a new host will be like. There’s also the not inconsiderable problem that there are hundreds if not thousands of hosts out there,...
The tunnel out of Microsoft is nearly dug…
It took five and a half hours to download yesterday but finally I’ve got a DVD with Ubuntu (Linux) on it. Setting up the computer to run both Vista and Ubuntu turned out to be surprisingly simple. All that I needed to do was to shrink the parti...
Will our little American adventure be worth all the hassle?
Ah, now, that’s the question, isn’t it? The original idea for the plan was hatched when google started offering to let you label sites as being targeted at specific countries. As a trial, we popped the twins of some sites on either side o...
A busy weekend of shuffling websites
We had quite a busy weekend pretty much filled with shuffling the websites around which is always a depressing thing to be doing as you spend hours moving things and at the end you’re hoping that it all looks the same as it did to begin with. F...
Powweb finally gets back to me
It’s taken three days and in the end I had to send an e-mail to their sales department saying that I wanted to cancel the hosting account to get any action. Now they’re saying that they are expediting the work on it. It’s still not ...
American hassles on the powweb hosting
I thought that I’d run with powweb as our main hosting platform in America on the basis that Brooke uses it and she always seems to know what she’s doing computer-wise. Not a good move as it turned out. Uploading the databases and HTML wa...
Thinking of setting up a US company
I find myself in the unusual (for me) position of thinking about setting up a company in America. How did that come about? Well, some back of the envelope calculations indicate that there could be a lot of money to be made were some of my websites ho...
American Adventure
Some years ago I moved all my websites from a US hosting service over to a UK one to take advantage of the search engine boost that you get when your sites are hosted in the country where your target audience are searching from. Ironically, now I fin...
Trying out American hosting
Several years ago I made the move from US based hosting to UK based hosting because of the extra traffic that you tend to get when your site is hosted in the same location as your main customer base. That particular move worked really well in that I ...
Where should I host my sites?
Although the main customer base for my listings sites is essentially the English speaking population of Europe, there’s an even larger English speaking population just across the Atlantic that don’t see the sites as often as they should s...
A google experiment
It seems like google hand you pagerank when you’re not looking for it so I’m going to run a little trial on another blog domain to see if I can pick it up delibrately. What I’ve been doing in the past has been to use a test domain w...
How valid is google’s algorithm?
Reading the original research presentation of google highlights a number of points where the weakness of the algorithm can still be exploited and those cracks are starting to become very obvious. One thing that they never allowed for was that once mo...
Trying out adwords again
Now and again I try out adwords, mainly to advertise the listings sites or rather to advertise for owners to list on them. It’s been ages since I spruced up the campaigns so I thought I’d have a shot at it again today. One thing to remem...
Souping up the listings sites
I came across an interesting site a few days ago which has set me thinking about my own listings sites. What this site does is build mini websites for accommodation properties and then enters those properties in a property listing. It’s interes...
