Finding mis-spelt listings on ebay

Nothing to do with France this posting (so turn the page if you're not interested!)

I came across a pretty neat site today, TypoBuddy that searches on ebay for common misspellings in item listings.

The idea is you put in what you are searching for and then TypoBuddy searches on ebay but with variant spellings of the words you've put in. So searching for "xbox star wars" you'll find entries such as "xbox star wrs", "xbox star warzs", "xbox staa wars", etc which hopefully other people won't have found and thus will close for a lower selling price.

Well that's the theory anyway, how did it work in practice?

Personally I found the user interface a bit confusing because firstly I was told there my eBay results were "48 typos of 'wars' with xbox star" but when I clicked the link, I got nothing back. What was happing was that TypoBuddy found 48 different word variations of 'wars' (waars, waz, etc) but hadn't actually undertaken the search on ebay until I clicked the link, when nothing was actually returned - meaning either ebay users can type properly (unlikely) or the suggested misspellings were out.

TypoBuddy is just one of a growing set of such auction finder sites; a couple of others I tried out were Gunshoo and FatFingers.

Each of these search sites has similar features although they all differ slightly.

TypoBuddy allows you to try each misspelt word in turn and also does searches of Craigslist.org.
Fatfingers is I think one of the older search tools it tries less aggressive misspellings than TypoBuddy
Gumshoo has a very nice user interface allowing you to filter out junk listings, find those with free shipping, search for new/used items and a neat trend analysis to see if the seller's rating is on average going up or down over the last 30 days.

So do they work?

Well sort of. Trying searches for "xbox star wars", "Christian Dior" and "home theatre system" I generally didn't find many "hidden auction listings" but Gumshoo and TypoBuddy both turned up a "Home Cinema System Theartre" and Fatfingers turned some "xbox starwars" games.

Christian Dior was the most successful search as FatFingers and TypoBuddy managed to turn up listings for Chritian Dior, Christain Dior, Christian Dor and Christain Dior, Chrisian Dior and Chirsian Dior.

If you're really keen to find such listings then you probably need to use more than one search engine; Gumshoo definitely looks nicest but has the poorest results and FatFingers and TypoBuddy both seem to be much better with FatFingers perhaps slightly ahead.

BBC and ITV launches freesat - a new source of expat TV?

After many years of talking about it (and also owning the Freesat trademark), BBC and ITV have just announced that they're launching the FreeSat free to view satellite digital TV service and as a holiday Gite owner I'm quite interested in this news.

It's not at all that well publicised by Sky but they've been offering their own Free satellite TV service since 2004 which operates by the rather unruly name of FreeSat from Sky - a tongue twister of a name mainly caused by BBC already owning the FreeSat trademark name!

Sky would of course you rather purchased one of their contract offerings but it's little advertised that if you buy a Satellite dish and a Sky decoder then you can receive some 200-odd channels without requiring any kind of decoder card or subscription service at all. Admittedly an awful lot of the channels you can receive are not the sort of things you want to watch regularly (unless you like shopping TV or adult phone sex channels) but there is still more than enough that you can watch without a decoder card - BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, ITV1-4, Men & Motors, Zone Reality, Film 4, CNN, France 24, CBeebies, dozens of radio channels, etc, etc.

For some strange licensing reason you don't receive Channel 4, Channel 5, Five Life, Five US and Sky Three without a decryption card but you can pay a one-off £20 fee to Sky and receive a basic decryption card which enables you to watch these additional channels without any further monthly subscription. If you want to watch Sky One, UK Gold, More Four, E4 and most of the movie and other entertainment channels then you do have to take out a monthly subscription, but for me with our French Gite, the basic channel set is sufficient.

It's also not all that well advertised but the Astra Digital satellite broadcasts not just to the UK and Ireland but also to much of Northern continental Europe. For our Brittany Gite a standard-sized receiver dish is all you need but the signal reaches as far down as Spain and Italy (although a larger dish is usually required).

Back in March 2005 we bought a second hand Sky decoder box off ebay (they're readily available for £30 or so, usually from customers who are upgrading to Sky+ or SkyHD) and a satellite dish from a nearby BricoMarche in France and then I climbed up the ladder and erected the dish. A bit of wobbling it from side to side before we got the best signal we could and the job was done, a perfect UK TV picture. I did decide to start doing this at about 7:30pm in the evening so that's why it's rather dark in the picture (and it was even darker by the time I had finished), but all in all it was a comparatively easy thing to do.
Since then we've bought a second decoder box and also put Sky TV into the master bedroom in the Gite so you can watch TV in bed - luxury!

It's not immediately apparent from the Freesat website whether they're also broadcasting their 80-200 channels on the Astra satellite (so in other words my existing dish is already aligned to receive the signal and I wouldn't need to move it), or whether the list of channels is going to be substantially different from the Sky FreeSat offering, although the BBC digital package comparison Q&A seems to imply that there will be more major movies and sports programs on the Freesat offering so it's definitely one to keep an eye on.

Update:
I've just found in the Freesat Q&A that Freesat is "broadcast from Astra 2 at 28.2° East and Eurobird at 28.5° East" so my existing Sky dish which is aligned to the Astra 2 satellites should be able to pickup the signal without any problems.

Loosing it - French house keys, sunhat, room key, passport and more

Of late I seem to be loosing it big time.

I'm not talking about loosing the plot (although I sometimes wonder about that as well), but I'm actually talking about how I seem to be getting incredibly forgetful and keep on loosing things.

Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to go on a short business trip to South Africa as one of the qualifiers for the 'Hundred Percent Club' at work. I had a fantastic time over there, went around a national park game reserve and saw Elephants, Giraffes, Hippos, Rhinos, Zebras and more; rode a series of Zip wires over a canyon; mountain biking round another park; ate a lot; drank a bit; oh yes, and did do some work as well. A wonderful time was definitely had although the 12 hour flight each way wasn't the best fun I've ever had.

Whilst I was there I managed to loose my hotel room key and then a day later loose my sun hat.

I nearly didn't get to South Africa as the night before when I was packing I discovered I couldn't find my passport.

I'd had it only the week before when we'd all returned from our Easter holiday at the Gite, and I was convinced I'd "left it out handy" somewhere, but I couldn't find it anywhere in the kitchen, my study, the car, the lounge, the bedrooms, in short anywhere.

For the next 4 hours we turned the house upside down searching everywhere for the wretched passport. In the kids toys, the kitchen cupboards, under the beds, in all the waste bins; but no joy.

I phoned the 24 hour Passport helpline but as I'd lost an existing passport (rather than needing a renewal) and it wasn't a "matter of life or death" I was told the best they could do was a 7 day turnaround for a replacement - argh!

By 3am in the morning I was getting pretty close to admitting defeat and that I wouldn't be going to South Africa; and then I found the passport standing up on the floor of my study, end-on where it had landed after falling on the floor from the table I'd put it on "where it would be handy to get to". A lucky escape.

The frustration of loosing my passport has just about topped the frustration I felt in January when packing to go to the Gite and finding (once again the night before) that I couldn't find the keys for the French house.

As we're over in France at most half a dozen times a year the keys don't get used between visits and so twice now I've managed to completely loose them.

Loosing them for the second time was more galling than the first time as I'd resolved to "put them in a safe place" so they didn't get lost again. The first time I lost the keys and after spending hours looking for them they eventually turned up in my car under the drivers seat where I'd put them as we'd driven away from the Gite the previous holiday.
For some reason I'd decided to put the keys in the storage tray under my car seat and there they'd remained for several months.
Luckily I remembered where I had put them otherwise I might still have been looking for them.

After this experience of loosing the keys I decided to put them somewhere safer and so put them in a plastic box in the kitchen.

Liz got fed up with the key box lying around the kitchen and so I took the box into the garage and put it inside the crate of things I was accumulating to take to France on the next trip.

With having two homes we find we've often got things we want to take to the other house so tend to accumulate them all in a crate so it's easiest to remember everything when we go over.

At the time it no doubt seemed logical to put the keys in the 'France' crate, but all that happened is that when I loaded up the car I put the whole crate in the car without looking at what was in it and so we then spent several hours looking in vain again for the keys which were already in the car!

After I finish writing this blog post I'm going to have to go and check where the French house keys are as I'm not absolutely sure where they are again.

Wonder what I'll loose next?

Buy your own corner of Brittany - 6 acre forest and lake, £45,000

Whilst looking on ebay for a particular tourist guide to Central Brittany that I saw whilst I was over there last I came across an auction for 6 acres of land and a 1 acre trout lake in central Brittany that looks very tempting for just £45,000.

There's no electricity onsite and no planning permission for a dwelling either (it's classified as "leisure land") but a 5 berth caravan is included in the price so if you want a real getaway from it all place and like fishing then it sounds ideal.

Unfortunately it appears to be about an hour's drive from our own Brittany Gite otherwise I'd be extremely tempted myself ....

Here's the link to the advert on ebay that runs until the end of May 2008: Land with lake & woods

Unfortunately no sign of the book I wanted on ebay so I'll have to buy a copy of Central Brittany (coast to coast) guidebook from Amazon.

Proposed 16 mile bridge from Normandy to Jersey

Sounding to me rather like a late April fool's joke (but stranger things have happened), there's a report in The Times today about building a bridge from Jersey in the Channel Islands to Normandy in North West France.

Peter Walsh a former president of the island's chamber of commerce has costed the 16 mile long bridge at *just* £1 billion after looking at the similar, but shorter 10 mile, Oresund bridge that links Sweden and Denmark.

Property prices for the 91,000 inhabitants of Jersey are already at similar levels to Central London and are tipped to go higher if the bridge does go ahead as it'll open up the possibility of commuting from France to Jersey and vice versa although with £25 tolls it'll take a while to recoup the massive investment.

Who knows whether it'll happen or not? Eurotunnel and the Oresund bridge no doubt started with similar low-key suggestions but I don't think the ferry companies will be quaking just yet awhile ...

Free tickets to A Place In The Sun Live - this weekend (25-27th April)

A Place In The Sun Live

This coming weekend Amanda Lamb and the Channel 4 crew come to London's ExCeL arena from Friday 25th April to Sunday 27th April for "the world's largest exhibition of overseas property".

There's lots of exhibitors there to help you find your dream home abroad whether you're looking to retire there, move there or simply buy as an investment or occasional holiday home. One of the advantages of exhibitions like this is you can meet many of the different companies involved, find out what they offer, learn more about the foreign property markets and how you go about buying, etc, etc.

Normal website advance ticket price is £15 for two tickets but I've a hot link that will get you up to four tickets for just the price of the printer ink (and paper!) !

Just use this link for free tickets to A Place In The Sun Live.

Enjoy!

PS: If you're into Golf you can also get tickets via this link to the London Golf Show which is running next door, also at ExCeL.

French Magazine relaunches Holidays2France and we get a free advert

A couple of months ago I wrote about our print advertisement in French Magazine, which unfortunately to date hasn't produced any enquiries or bookings results 8-(

On Wednesday this week I received an email from the publishers of French Magazine, Merrick Media, to tell me that they've relaunched their Holidays2France website and as an existing advertiser I would automatically appear on the website - just as long as I provided them the Gite details in the format they required by Saturday lunchtime!

Getting the details together was a bit of a challenge as I was in South Africa for most of the week and so had to subscribe to wireless Internet access from my hotel. I did manage to get the entry written just before the deadline and before the day was out my new Gite advert was live.

I continue to hope that the advertising purchase cost was justified and we get some enquires as a result.

Gite 'features' and fixing another HTML bug (disappearing list bullets in IE)

A while ago I embarked on updating our holiday home rental website easier to read by reworking each page from being blocks of text into more digestible topics and paragraphs with topic headings (and sub-headings) delineated by <h1> tags.

Not only does this make it a lot easier for the reader to quickly scan through a page and hone in on the areas that they want to read, but by using headings the web page also becomes more "search engine friendly" to Google et al as they can better gain an understanding of what each page is about.

Of course like many of my grand "it would be good to ..." ideas (and especially those that involve significant re-writes of the website) I'm somewhat of a long way off actually completing the idea and to date I've only actually reworked in this way a limited subset of pages - the homepage, travel options, useful links and the fairly new RSS explanation pages.

According to the Google Analytics logs for my website, after the homepage the next most visited page is The Gite, the second entry on the navigation structure, that introduces and describes the Gite itself, and so it made sense for me to tackle that next.

Being away on holiday gave me enough free time to actually get around to rewriting the page, and adding what I felt it was missing out most, a short concise summary of the Gite itself. It's easy to go into reams and reams of prose but to make it easier for the visitor I wanted to bring together a summary bulletted list of "key features" you'd get when you rented our holiday Gite.

Summary lists are fairly easy in HTML using <ul> to start the list (i.e. an unordered list), then &li;li> (list item) for each feature of the Gite I was listing, and then wrapping it all up with some more subheadings gave a structure like this:

<h3>Kitchen</h3>
<ul>
<li>Fridge</li>
<li>Freezer</li>
<li>Double Oven</li>

Which looks OK but somewhat uninspiring with a vertical column of bulletted items:

Kitchen

• Fridge
• Freezer
• Double Oven

So I applied a new class "feat" to the list so that I could style the list using CSS. I wanted to change the default black bullet to being a nice stylish green tick-mark and for the individual features to read one after another across the page instead of going down the page.

The HTML now became:

<h3>Kitchen</h3>
<ul class=feat>
<li>Fridge</li>
<li>Freezer</li>
<li>Double Oven</li>

And in the CSS file after quite a bit of mucking about with padding settings (because IE and standards-compliant browsers treat padding in different ways) I ended up with:

ul.feat {
    list-style : none;
    margin : 0;
    padding : 0 0 1em;
}
ul.feat li {
    display : inline;
    padding : 0 1.3em;
    background : url (/theme/tick.gif) no-repeat;
}

Which comes up with a lovely styled list in Firefox that also displays properly in Internet Explorer most, but unfortunately not all, of the time.

Here's what Firefox displays:


and here's Internet Explorer's rendition:


I've deliberately narrowed the window size to exacerbate and highlight the problem, but the same problem occurs on normal width screens that when list items wrap from one line onto the next (as the 'Double Oven' and 'Sandwich Toaster' entries both do), then Internet Explorer 6 quite happily doesn't bother rendering the bullet image (in my case a tick mark).

Formatting the list to display vertically (i.e. 'display:block' in the CSS) and there's no problem no matter how long the line or where it splits, format it to display horizontally ('display:inline') and the problem occurs on all items that wrap from one line to the next.

Whilst in France I experimented with all sorts of things such as applying <span>'s and <div>'s with 'style="display:block;" ' but that didn't work and the best I ended up with was a kludge of manually inserting <br>'s into the list so that particularly long lines split in the right place and thus didn't wrap around the screen, but this was horrible and didn't always work for different screen widths so I was determined to find a more robust solution.

Of course when back online in the UK after a bit of Googling I found the solution to this and other CSS problems in Internet Explorer was to apply an additional CSS rule that logically shouldn't have any effect, but for some reason forces IE to display things properly.

Three different suggestions were made:

line-height: 1.25;
zoom: 1;
position: relative;

And after a bit of experimenting I found of the three 'zoom:1' did the trick when applied to the CSS styling of the list item which now becomes:

ul.feat li {
    display : inline;
    padding : 0 1.3em;
    background : url (/theme/tick.gif) no-repeat;
    zoom : 1;
}

Job done, the page now looks just as good in IE as Firefox now:


In fact I feel it actually looks slightly better and is more readable now in IE as there is less splitting of the text within list items, they wrap onto the next line most of the time and only split onto a new line when the whole item text is too long to appear on a single line.

So what starts off as a simple improvement of a bit of the website ends up in a successful grapple against browser compatibility problems.

LD Lines splashes the cash on a new boat, more sailings and a new route

New LD Lines RORO Ferry

LD Lines announced today that they're purchasing a new boat, currently under construction in Italy, and due to come into service in November 2008.

The as yet unnamed boat is similar to LD's M/V Sorrento which operates between Italy (Rome) and France (Cote d’Azur) and will be able to 800 passengers with 110 cabins plus reclining seats, sleeper seats and the usual bars, restaurants and lounges.

Once the boat comes into service it will be used to add a second crossing on the existing Portsmouth/Le Havre route, leaving at lunchtime from Portsmouth and in the evening from Le Havre; complementing the existing crossing which currently runs overnight from Portsmouth and in the evening returns from Le Havre, but will probably be re-timetabled to balance the new service.

On the weekends LD Lines will operate their new boat on a completely new route from Rosslare in Southern Ireland to Le Havre, leaving France Friday evening, arriving in Ireland just 20 hours later on Saturday, and then returning back to Le Havre for Sunday.

This'll provide some competition for Irish Ferries who currently operate unchallenged two routes from Rosslare to Roscoff (Brittany) and Cherbourg (Normandy peninsular).

LD Lines is spending $110M on the new boat so they're clearly serious about growing their share of the French ferry market.



Further details of the new LD Lines ferry are on their website as are details of current summer sailing offers.