Caught out by Spam comment (for once)

Over an average week I get two or three Spam comments on this blog, and pretty universally they are obvious for what they are - sometimes random words with embedded links in them, text often with poor English, or more recently they've been along the lines of "this is a really interesting article, your Blog has really inspired me".

Fortunately I am impressed by the Google spam comment filter which almost never mis-categorises a genuine Blog comment as spam, but conversely seems to always correctly identify the rubbish and remove it from the Blog so that all dear readers don't have to wade through it and we're just left with genuine Blog comments.

Of course I always have the administrator option to change Google's idea of what comments are spam or not, so I try to keep in the habit of marking Spam comments myself which I hope continues to "train" Google as to what is good and what is not.

But today I have to admit that I was fooled by the comment I received on the Blog and thought it was genuine.

Here it is:

Hi, I think your site might be having browser compatibility issues.
When I look at your website in Ie, it looks fine
but when opening in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping.
I just wanted to give you a quick heads up!

Other then that, great blog!
Feel free to visit my homepage ... mens wellington boots

(I've removed the link that was on the wellington boot text)

Well sad to say I did actually go and check the Blog looked OK in Internet Explorer (and it does) before I realised that this was yet another bit of Spam ... and Google had correctly categorised it before I'd had chance to do so.

Nice try Mr Spammer but even if I'm more easily fooled, Google is just one step ahead of you!

Goodbye MyBlogLog, RIP

Since 2006 I've been using a service called MyBlogLog to give me some insights into the popular articles on this Blog, and where visitors to the Blog came from.

Well I don't have to any more as today I received an email notification from Yahoo that Yahoo are sunsetting (aka terminating) the MyBlogLog service on 24th May 2011.

If your interested there's more details on MyBlogLog on the eponymous Wikipedia but in a nutshell MBL enables you to track who is visiting your blog, how they reached your blog, what they looked at, and form a community with them. The tracking is similar to the information that Google Analytics gives you except I personally thought it was better because the reports gave details of not just what site the visitor came from but also what keywords they used. So for instance yesterday's information was that I had visitors from:

Google Search: channel 4 documentary french gite
Google Search: what is nippi

http://us2.startpage-proxy.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&cat=pics&c=pf&q=kids%20playing&h=393&w=600&th=196&tw=300&fn=pool_L.jpg
http://www.google.es/imgres?imgurl=http://www.giteinbrittany.com/images/pool_l.jpg
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3339/4594389461_5bd1010156.jpg

So the last three are people who viewed various photos from search engines or a proxy site, but the first two show that visitors came with relevant searches to look at my review to look at the review of A Place In France - Indian Summer by Nigel Farrell and Nippi Singh.

The community side of MBL probably never reached critical mass, you can subscribe to your "favourite blogs", send messages to the Blog author and others that like your blog, and although there are now 45,000 blogs on BML but much of this is similar and of course far less popular than "like it" widgets from Twitter, Facebook and the other social media sites, the new darlings of the internet world.

Anyway, after spending $10m dollars in 2007 Yahoo has decided that it is not part of its "core strategy" and is killing it off in May.

BML had either a paid model or a free model, I used the free model so was able to view reports of my Blog visitors for just the last 7 days, so since 2006 I have been laboriously copy and pasting the reports into a massive Excel spreadsheet every week or so so I can see how the Blog is doing. At least I will be saved the task of doing that from May, but once MBL goes I'll try to produce some stats on what's been the most interesting articles - any bets as to what that might be?

Turbo blogging - or making your website/blog load faster

Even in these days of always on broadband and hyper-fast connectivity (well if the government get their way with Digital Britain that is), it's still worth taking a bit of time to make sure you've done the obvious things to make your website or Blog as quick as possible.

Over on Blogger's help pages I came across some how to make your Blog load faster tips from Google - and they should know!

I still find it amazing how many websites you see that have massive photos that haven't been properly resized from the multi-megabyte camera image.

I've also been using the Yahoo Yslow plugin for Firebug to analyse my websites for performance problems and whilst it gives some good pointers as to what to do the suggestions are a bit "cryptic" to say the least.

Surfin the web today I came across a Google announcing they've launched Page Speed, another Firebug plugin which does much the same thing, except (in my humble opinion), it's better.
So for example the three tips that Page Speed identifies I should apply to our holiday Gite homepage are to:

• Set expiry dates on items (such as pictures) that don't change frequently so they get cached in the user's browser and thus don't need to be downloaded each time ... and PageSpeed gives me specific details of what should have the cache expiry date set


• Enable gzip compression on the html and linked css files ... and I'm given details of precisely how many kb download this will save


• And to use Minify to reduce Javascript files ... and again the savings I can gain are detailed

Great stuff!

It would be 'even better if' Page Speed gave me details (or a link) to precisely how to implement these suggestions, but the help given is much more specific than Yahoo's Yslow so Page Speed will be going in my Web kitbag and (when I get some time!) I'll be working through the suggestions made.

See the Google Page Speed download page for more details and to join in the community forum to share your own experiences and suggestions.

Follow these tips and do your bit to keep the 'web lean!!

Google Reader (and Geoffrey's) useful tips for Blog/Website developers

I came across a useful page in Google reader help the other day, a set of Google Reader Tips for Publishers.

Among the useful tips Google Reader provides are:

1. Write useful and engaging content with good headlines to ensure your readers keep coming back for more (hopefully I do this on my blog so 'nuff said!)

2. Implement your feed in either RSS or Atom format (but not both) and to ensure you use a feed validator to check that you've formatted it correctly.

I use the excellent Feedburner service for our Gite Blog (now owned by Google) which automatically detects and provides the feed in the right format according to what program the end reader is using to read the Blog.

3. Make it easier for your reader to find your Blog with feed "auto-discovery".
Simply include a <LINK rel=alternate type="application/rss+xml" ...> line in the header section of your Blog and website pages and modern browsers such as Firefox and IE will auto-magically enable you to quickly subscribe to your conent.

All our website pages contain <LINK rel=alternate type="application/rss+xml" title="Our Weblog of Running a French Holiday Gite in Rural Brittany" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/GiteInBrittany">

4. Include feed subscription buttons so with one-click the reader can subscribe to your blog in their favourite reader.
Unsurprisingly there's webmaster help provided by Google on how to provide a button to join Google Reader, but if you look round most of the other main feed readers the instructions are fairly easy to find.

I do suggest you don't go overboard with subscription icons though, one blog I know of has some 30+ icons on the bottom of each posting which to my mind looks just overkill, untidy and overboard. We have 'Add to Yahoo', 'Add to Newsgator' and (just added yesterday) 'Add to Google' buttons on this Blog, and over on the Gite website page explaining what RSS is we've also got 'Add to Bloglines', 'Add to MyMSN' and 'Add to AOL' buttons.


All good suggestions and fortunately are all ideas that I am already adhering to.

To add to Google's suggestions, here are four of my own:

5. Provide the option for readers to subscribe to your Blog by email.
Many people haven't got the hang of RSS or feed readers so make it easier for them to join in by providing an email subscription mechanism. We use the FeedBlitz service which will automatically email each reader each day with all the new articles posted on your Blog. Our subscription box appears to the right of each Blog page - simply enter your email address and click 'Go', and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Personally I am still split between deciding which method I prefer to read Blogs. I subscribe to 9 different Blogs in my Thunderbird email program but then I receive daily emails from FeedBlitz for about another 18 Blogs. For me I prefer reading all the new postings in one go in one email, but you pays your (no) money, you takes your choice.

6. Keep an eye on where you got your readers from.
As well as established website log tools like Google Analytics which work OK on your Blog there are other niche players dedicated to tracking Blog visitors. One we use is My Blog Log and is now owned by Yahoo. I'll try to write something more about MBL another time.

7. Presentation is everything.
Don't adopt a font or colour scheme that alienates your reader and makes them puke when they visit your site, and equally do take time to customise the default Blog template to make it unique and "you".

It's been an awful long time since I setup this original Blog template and since then Blogger has moved on and is now all "widgetised" so to make more significant changes to the Blog template is going to be a big undertaking for me. Doing this is on my to-do list (somewhere after 'building a railway board for my eldest' but before 'solving world peace') so don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen in the next week or two.

But meanwhile if you want to see how I'm doing the new 'experimental format' Blog is over on Test In Brittany (original name, huh?)

8. Publicise, publicise, publicise!
It's no good having all the best prose and all the best widgets and all the best layout to your Blog if no-one actually finds it. Firstly ensure you notify the main feed directories that you're out there (there's an option in Blogger for instance to notify (ping) Weblogs.com when you make a new posting for instance) and then there are literally hundreds of Blog directories out there on the web. Spend time doing a Google search for appropriate keywords and then subscribe yourself to them. I get visitors from BlogCatalog.com, BlogLines.com, BlogPulse.com, BlogRankings.com, BritBlog.com, etc (and they're just the ones starting with 'b').

Also make sure you include your Blog details in your email footer and on other places you comment or write on. I get click-throughs from Flickr, LinkedIn, Blogger itself (where I have written about various new Blogger and Google features) and many many more websites as a result.

So there you go, 8 top-tips. Do comment if you've used any of these yourself or if you've any corker's that I've missed out.

Relaunched Computing in France

Computing in France

One of the blogs I follow is Bob Toovey's Computing in France which is a bit of a mixture of internet articles, tales of computer use from France, and special projects such as step-by-step instructions of transforming a website into a modern standards-compliant CSS masterpiece (similar to my own prose on revamping and redesigning my Gite website).

Bob's recently updated and relaunched his blog and now offers the opportunity to "ask Bob" if you're stuck with an internet-related problem and some bonus free e-books to all new subscribers to his RSS feed. Surf on by to Bob!

Blogging in the future

When I finished editing my last posting about a scam "honeymoon" booking I accidentally discovered a new feature that Blogger had just introduced - automatic future posting.

When I finished writing the article on Tuesday evening I decided I'd post it on Wednesday morning when I got into work so I changed the post date & time to 9am on Wednesday morning. I then intended to click "save now" to save a draft copy of the posting, and then on Wednesday morning I'd click on "publish post" to launch my inner thoughts onto the internet (well a few of my inner thoughts anyway).

Instead what I did was press the enter key, which defaults to "publish post" and Blogger then surprised me with the following screen telling me that my posting was queued up and would be automatically posted at the appropriate date in the future:

Blogger only launched the automatic posting of future-dated posts last month, and like lots of things from Google it's delivered so neatly that you don't even need to search it out - it just works!

Guess what, I'm going to future-date this posting as well, not for any good reason, just because I can !!

Looking back on 2007 - Blogging from July to December

Carrying on from last week's blog entry (Jan-June 2007), a quick recap of some of the notable blog posts from 2007.

July 2007
The month kicked off well with news of my successful promotion application at work, making me now an Associate Partner (equals more stress, more hassle, longer working hours and a tiny touch more money!).
July continued with how to apply for an EHIC (E111 replacement) online, the Tour de France, news of English homes being attacked in Brittany, cheap car hire throughout France and Europe courtesy of Auto Car Europe and finally a sighting of Harry Potter at King's Cross.

August 2007
Postings on MoneyBookers for cut-price foreign currency transfers, our first holiday booking for 2008, Moncontour medieval festival and Mr Bean's holiday.

New septic tank
Many of entries written through the latter half of the year covered covering the Gite's major building works, the installation of a new septic tank system. The story started off with how a septic tank system works and plans for the new septic tank and earthworks and then I recounted day-by-day the story and photos of how our garden disappeared, lots of large holes and mud appeared, the new fosse slowly took shape, and then the builders tidied everything up and grassed it all over again.

The construction itself took 7 days, starting with arranging with a farmer to get the old fosse emptied, starting work and emptying the old fosse, digging out and installing the new septic tank, digging out and installing the sand filter bed, completing the filterbed and pipework, inspecting the system and filling everything in, and finally finishing off with a new gravel driveway.

September, October and November 2007
As well as the fosse story I wrote about free tickets to the London Property Investor Show, £19 speedferry tickets, EasyJet buying GB Airways and some fun online Jigsaw puzzles.

December 2007
Having finally finished off the epic tale of the new septic tank, in December I was able to post on a few other subjects including going over to France for a working week and not being able to sail back because of the gales, Book Review of A Year in The Merde, Frenchmen setting fire to speed cameras and one of my Christmas presents - a top tool!

Hopefully I will shake off this flu/cold I've had all week soon and be able to get back to work and normal life again soon.

Looking back on 2007 - blogging from January to June

At the turn of the year I thought I'd recap just a few of the stories and articles I have blogged about throughout 2007. Last year was my second full year of writing the Blog (I started the Blog on 1/1/06 and have written a few retrospective articles for earlier years) and in total I've written and published 116 postings.

Frequency of posting has been a bit erratic I know and as much as anything else has been driven by how busy I've been at work - sometimes I've been writing 4 postings a week, sometimes it's down to one every couple of weeks.

I'm not going to make a new-year's resolution to improve the blogging frequency as I know for sure that I will fail to keep it! Meanwhile I hope you do find what I write is interesting and fun.

January 2007
January was the month of car and weather problems it seemed with difficulties hiring a car to go to France after mine was rear-end shunted. Then the ferry was cancelled due to gales and I finally managed to hire a nice Ford Mondeo with cruise control and a week later couldn't get home from London due to more gales!

February 2007
The month started with me spending hours rebuilding and repainting the garden gates in France (in hindsight buying new ones would have been much easier!). An explanation of what RSS is all about, France was voted the best place to live in the world, Speedferries move into the old Dover Hoverport, I bought a new 15 foot frame swimming pool for the Gite and more construction of new Fence panels.

March 2007
LD Lines LD Lines announce they are taking over Transmarche Ferries and soon publish details of the Le Havre to Newhaven and Dieppe crossings. Articles about Advertising on the Blog (Blogvertising?), Photos of the nearby Nantes/Brest canal and using Pictobrowser as a slideshow for Flickr photos.

April 2007
Nearly missed the ferry going to the Gite due to an accident on the M20, but had a great April holiday with warm and sunny weather for all bar the last 2 days. Family photo of us all (and Dexter the dog) on holiday in Brittany, went to a Brocante (car boot sale) in France and spent more days repairing the Brittany garden gates!

May 2007
Trials and tribulations of applying for promotion at work, Photos of the Napoleonic town of Pontivy near our Gite, Google launches an improved Google Analytics service, Dilbert tried Blogging, Google Checkout opened for business in the UK but then wouldn't let me use it as I'm a travel-related business and finally a new Blogger Autosave feature which I have to admit I really love.

June 2007
We went over to our Brittany Gite again at the May half term and I managed to lose my passport and French cheque book causing lots of administrative nightmares. Back in the UK (reunited with my passport and cheque book), Sir Alan Sugar wanted to knock down my office, Brittany Ferries spends €81m on a new cruise ship, the differences between electricity sources in the UK and France, OnOneMap's a great Google mashup for finding properties for sale and Ryan Air launches a new route from Bournemouth to Nantes.

I'll carry on with recapping my ramblings from July to December 2007 in the next Blog entry.

Blogger adds a really useful auto-save feature - no more lost postings!!

Blogger's new auto-save feature

Very quietly Blogger's added a really useful new feature that definitely makes my life easier, Blogger now automatically saves my blog postings, so loosing all my creative thoughts because of an accidental close-window or PC crash is now a thing of the past.

Originally there were two little buttons, 'publish post' and 'save as draft'. The latter finished editing the current post, saved it as a draft, and dumped you back in a list of all your postings so you could either re-edit the draft posting or edit a completed posting. Hardly user friendly and not inspired to make you use it frequently.

A few days ago I noticed that the 'save as draft' button had disappeared, replaced by a 'Save Now' button and a little note that told me that Blogger would automatically save the post. It's quite intelligent in the way it works, postings are automatically saved every minute or so or saved when you stop typing; so if you are in mid creative flow you don't get distracted by the autosave kicking in whilst you're typing.

The spelling checker appears to have changed as well (for the better) with the spell check button now changing the screen background green and all misspelt words being replaced by drop-down lists of alternatives so you can more quickly fix and replace the typos.
Previously spell checking put up a modal dialog (a bit like the Microsoft Word spell checker) so you could correct one spelling error, then search for the next mistake and laboriously work your way through all the errors. For some reason this didn't always seem to work properly in FireFox and I found it tended to replace the wrong letters when I used it so I've not bothered for some time with the spell check (perhaps you've noticed my frequent typos ...)

Finally, there's also a handy control-S shortcut to save the posting at any time and also new control-P shortcut to publish a post.

I'd quite like Blogger to extend the list of html tags buttons that are available in the post editor (currently there's just bold, italic, link and blockquote) and add a toggle between edit and preview mode, but these new feature's are definitely worthwhile and continue to expand the usability of Blogger.

Dilbert's pointy-hair boss decides to start a blog

From the mighty pen of Scott Adams, three recent cartoons where Dilbert's pointy-hair boss decides to start a blog ...

Dilbert's boss starts a blog

Problems with the RSS feed ?

I've noticed that a couple of recent Blog posts I've made have not always appeared appeared consistently on the RSS feed, especially the new Blog postings that FeedBlitz sends out by email.

I have no idea why this is happening nor how to sort it out, but I'll keep an eye on things going forward to see if it keeps on happening.

Meanwhile, here are the most recent posts in case you missed any:

• French Bank Charges
• Notre Famille en France (our family in France)
• What glasses wearers have been waiting for ?
• Back from Brittany after a fantastic 2 week break
• Accident on the M20 meant a mad dash for the ferry
• Free tickets to 'A Place in the Sun Live'
• New 2007 edition of the Michelin guide to France
• Brittany Photo Gallery - courtesy of Flickr and PictoBrowser
• Translating French (or lots of other languages) using Google
• Misty morning in Brittany over the Nantes/Brest Canal

Blogvertising - Advertising on my Blog

Last year I received an unexpected email that I have to admit I firstly viewed with some suspicion. Basically the email was asking me if I would be prepared to add a small commercial text link advert to this Gite weblog in exchange for an annual payment.

Immediately unsure I checked out the website from the company that had sent me the email and found out that they are a search engine marketing company with a number of well known clients. I then google'd for the company's website address and found numerous references to their site from their client's sites - so it looked genuine.

A few emails back and forth to find out more about what sort of advert they wanted, I was quickly sent payment via paypal, and all of a sudden I've entered the world of corporate advertising ! All in all it wasn't too painful, the payment was nice but I doubt I'll be able to retire just yet.

I thought I was being really clever by inventing the term 'Blogvertising'. Unfortunately it appears I'm not unique enough in my thinking, Google knows of 187,000 other websites that have used the term Blogvertising.

It's interesting to read on Stay Free Daily that some bloggers are proud to announce with the little owl logo that they're ad free. Unfortunately now I don't qualify 8-(

This Blog's not long for this world

Yesterday when I logged into Blogger I got a message telling me that I had to upgrade to the new Blogger and that I would only be allowed one more time to login to "old blogger".

So far I've been quite happy with the previous blogger software, yes I know there are loads of new Blogger features like templates and comments but I've been quite happy with various GreaseMonkey scripts to improve the old blogger and provide many of the missing features.

The other main reason I've held off is that I'm afraid of the change! Conversion from old Blogger to new is a one-way process and if it goes wrong I'll end up with a screwed up Blog and a screwed up Blog template. Spending time fixing the template is not something I really want to do right now and so I've resisted the change.

If Blogger had offered some form of "test upgrade" with being able to copy my blog into a new one and test the new features before I committed to the conversion then I'd be happy to go, but they don't so I've stuck with working as I am.

Looks like I won't be able to stay standing still though, this may be one of my few remaining posts in old Blogger and my intransigence may be over-ruled by a forced upgrade.

Bloggings for Bookings

Craig McGinty over on This French Life wrote about this Blog last week, drawing out the benefits of Blogging and the follow-on benefits in terms of more material for search engines to 'get their teeth into', the boosted search rankings, and then the holiday bookings that we've had as a result.

Craig is a prolific writer with his 'This French Life' Blog, usually there's several postings a day of news and information about France - well worth a visit.

RSS and our holiday home Weblog diary - Explanation of what RSS means and how to subscribe to new articles

What is RSS and the orange icon all about?

RSS is a simple mechanism of enabling internet users to see what's new on a website without having to visit the site. At its heart is a web page with all the 'what's new' items and articles, which are then wrapped up in a special file layout (known as XML) that computers can read.

To let visitors know that an RSS page (also known as an RSS news feed), is available a little orange picture icon is often used. Many big names on the internet such as BBC News and Google News are now using this icon to keep their visitors informed about what's new on their sites.

What's RSS got to do with this Brittany Holiday Home, and what's a Weblog?

As well as our main giteinbrittany.com holiday home website, Geoffrey and Liz also write an online diary (which you're looking at now) about their adventures with buying, running, rennovating and letting out the holiday home, and also French news and book reviews, travel special offers and occasional chit-chat such as cool websites we come across.

This online diary is known as a Weblog, ours is at giteinbrittany.blogspot.com, and to make it easier to find and read the new articles each day, we also make them available in an RSS file.

How do I read articles written in an RSS file?

To read RSS files you need a computer program (often known as a news reader) that understands the RSS file format and will regularly check all the RSS files that you have 'subscribed to' and let you know if any new articles have been added. Some of the more popular PC programs that do this include FeedDemon, FeedReader and NewsGator, or for the Mac NetNewsWire.

Increasingly the ability to understand RSS files is now being built into email programs such as Thunderbird and web browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.

Finally there are also a number of different internet services that understand RSS files such as BlogLines, MyYahoo, My MSN and NewsGator Online - these have the advantage that you can read your subscriptions from any computer, or you choose to have new articles automatically emailed to you each day with services such as FeedBlitz.

What do I need to do to start reading new articles you've written?

Once you have decided which program you are going to use, you click the right mouse button on the little orange icon below (which you will also see on the right hand side of every page of the Blog website), then click on Copy Shortcut to copy the internet address of the RSS file, then go into your Newsreader, select 'new subscription' or 'new feed' (the process varies slightly for each different program), and paste in (using control-V) the RSS internet address you copied above.

Whenever we write a new article you will then get a message to say there is something new and you can read it from within your newsreader without having to visit our Blog website.

Subscribe to our RSS news feed by copying and pasting this internet address into your newsreader.

It's even easier to start receiving new articles by email. Simply enter your email address in the box below, click Go, and then whenever there's a new article (roughly every two days) it will automatically be emailed to you.
Your email address will only be used to send you new articles, will not be shared with anyone else, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

 
 (Powered by FeedBlitz)

Finally for a few of the more popular internet-based RSS readers there are buttons provided below that will automatically subscribe you to our RSS feed. Simply click the appropriate button depending on which RSS reader you use:
 
 
 
 
 
 

---

Categories: Blogging

With ReviewMe you get paid for blogging (or not as the case may be)

Review Me - Bloggers paid to write reviews

I came across an interesting new Blogging community site tonight, Review Me where Bloggers are paid by advertisers to write about their article or site.

Here's there explanation of how it works:

1. Submit your site for inclusion into the ReviewMe publisher network. Begin by creating a free account


2. If approved, your site will enter the ReviewMe marketplace and clients will purchase reviews from you.


3. You decide to accept the review or not.


4. You will be paid $20.00 to $200.00 for each completed review that you post on your site.

It's an interesting idea and I can see how it's trying to capture another different aspect of web social networking so I decided to create an account and give it a go and register the Blog with keywords such as Brittany, Gite, France, etc and a nice snappy description that might entice advertisers to send me the odd dollar or two.

Unfortunately the blog was not accepted and the rather terse FAQ answer as to why simply said

To be accepted into ReviewMe, a blog must meet a minimum number of citations, subscribers, and traffic. If your blog is rejected, you may want to return in a few months' time and submit again.

So instant fortune has escaped me again ...

Be interesting to see if it actually catches or is just another here today, gone tomorrow concept.

Happy blogsday!

Yesterday (1st January) was this Blog's first birthday and so in among the festivities I thought I'd look back at how well things have gone.

In the last 12 months since the very first posting about setting up a CSS print stylesheet so I could print out the website pages for a neighbour who was interested in renting the Gite (which in the end didn't turn into a booking), I've written about a wide variety of subjects related to running a small Brittany Gite business and also to our life in the UK.

I've written about diverse things like advertising on Google, using Vistaprint to produce cheap business card advertising magnets, the many trials and tribulations of managing French builders from afar to get a new patio built, special offers and route details from different Ferry and budget airlines, the long-running saga of redesigning the Gite website using CSS instead of HTML tables, Blogging and Blogger Hacks in general, etc, etc.

When I setout the Blog I wanted it to be an opportunity to write a bit more about our French adventures, both from a self-interest angle, but also to help promote and publicise our Gite and to maybe get some more bookings as a result.

So how have we done with that aspiration? Well in 2006 the Blog's had 1700 new and unique visitors (excluding returning visitors), about a quarter of which came as a result of various Google searches (we're number one for searching for "estage agents bretagne" and number six for "rural holiday gites without pools") and about a quarter come from our Gite website.

I doubt that reading the Blog has been the sole cause for the upturn we've seen in Gite rentals, but I do know for sure that it's one of the contributing factors. I've had a number of renters who have commented that they have read the blog and that they've found it helpful to understand a bit more about the property and to put a bit more of a face to the owners beforehand. It's also nice to start to receive comments about the blog (although more would be nice!) and to build an expat and renters community.

So here's to 2007!

Setting up a Google sitemap for my blog

Reading a useful article on Improbulus tonight about using the Blog RSS feed to trick Google into using it as a sitemap. That way you can automatically ping Google whenever you add new Blog entries so that they'll be more rapidly indexed by Google (without this trick, Google's currently reporting that it last crawled my Blog on 8th October for instance - 6 days ago).

Unfortunately I can't type tonight and mistakenly submitted my site to Google's webmaster tools as giteinbrittany.bloTspot.com rather than giteinbrittany.bloGspot.com and not suprisingly it didn't work!

blotspot.com is incidently for sale and doubtless there's money to be made from all the other people on the web with fat fingers like me.

Spam blog commenting

From what I read blog spamming seems to becoming more of a problem as more and more people put up spam blogs or clutter up genuine Blogs (like this one!) with comments that attempt to entice you to their website or to gain from your website page ranking. The idea is that they lodge a comment on your blog (which of course is one of the great social networking benefits of Blogging) but in it include a link to their own website which is usually completely unrelated to the original site.

The problem has been partly solved by Blogger and other blog tools automatically implementing the nofollow tag in all comments so that the links from your Blog comments do not contribute to their search engine ranking, and they've also introduced word verification steps where you have to retype a displayed word before you can leave a comment.

I guess my little Blog is getting more popular as I've been increasingly getting more blog spam posted as comments. So far I thought it would be easier for the reader if I didn't turn Blogger's comment verification on, but may have to change my mind about this decision if I'm inundated with spam.

Today I found eight comments on the Blog which when I first saw them I thought they were genuine and nice feedback comments. It's only after I read them a bit closer that I realised they were clearly spam as some of them were very similar, they were completely irrelevant and they were posted to a set of Blog entries from January to February.

For your amusement, here's what they said:

Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!
I have a internet banner advertising site/blog. It pretty much covers internet banner advertising related stuff.
Come and check it out if you get time :-)

Hi thanks for your blog, I liked it! I also have a blog/site about advertising firm that covers advertising firm related stuff. Please feel free to visit.

Hi Thanks for your interesting blog. I also have a blog/site, covering advertising solution related stuff. Feel free to visit my advertising solution site.

Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!
I have a orlando advertising site/blog. It pretty much covers orlando advertising related stuff.

I just came across your blog and wanted to drop you a note telling you how impressed I was with the information you have posted here.
I also have a web site & blog about yellow page advertising so I know what I'm talking about when I say your site is top-notch!
Keep up the great work!

Hi Thanks for your interesting blog. I also have a blog/site, covering advertising standard related stuff.
Feel free to visit my advertising standard site.

And my personal favourite is:

Hi Thanks for your interesting blog. I also have a blog/site, covering advertising inflatable related stuff. Feel free to visit my advertising inflatable site.

They were all linked to the same (extremely dull) website. I've now deleted all these comments but please let me know if you really want the address of where you can get details of Orlando/inflatable/yellow page advertising ...

Learn a French word-a-day

One blog that I've been regularly receiving for some time now and can thoroughly recommend is French word-a-day which sends out regular (thrice-weekly) emails which they lovingly describe as a "slice of French life".

The authors moved to France a number of years ago and started their site in 1999. Each email is based around a French word (yesterday's was ciseaux - scissors), contains the dictionary definition, a proverb using the word and then a little illustrative story interspersed with French words and phrases, all based around the word of the day.

I have to admit that although I've been receiving the emails for some 6 or more months, I'm a bit behind on actually reading them and improving my French !