Running a French Holiday Gite in Rural Brittany

Creating our new Website FavIcon (Favourite Icon)

2008-07-03T09:30:00.001+01:00

Back in May I wrote an article explaining about Blogger's new favicon and what favicon's are.

For a recap of the purpose and benefits of a 'Favourite Icon' (or 'Favicon'), read the original article!

At the time I said that I'd had the task of producing a favicon for our Gite website on my 'to do' list for some time but still hadn't had the time to create one.

Well for once I actually left the office last night at a half-reasonable time (8pm as opposed to 10pm or 11pm which it sometimes is) so I had some time to myself in the hotel I was staying in.
Trying to draw a firm line between work and home I resolved to not spend the evening wading through the hundreds of unread emails I still hadn't dealt with and would spent my time doing something for me, i.e. working on a favicon.

I'd had the idea for what I wanted the favicon to be for some long time - to blend together the black and white stripped Brittany Flag (the Gwenn-ha-du - literally Black and White in Breton) and a love-heart symbol.

I thought this would be nice and simple, and hopefully iconic and memorable enough.

Flag of Brittany

Back Searching on Google for Brittany Flag I came across Wikipedia's Flag of Brittany entry and this rather nice commons licence copy of the Gwenn-ha-du.

Favicon's need to be sized as either 16 by 16 pixels or 32 by 32 pixels and the Microsoft Icon format allows both types to be embedded into a single file so the first thing I needed to do once I'd saved a copy of the flag found on Wikipedia was to reduce it down to 32 pixels wide.

This resulted in an absolutely awful image with indistinct stripes in varying shades of grey and black so I had to spend quite a bit of time with Photoshop's pencil brush manually editing the individual pixels of the picture to make the image more clear, both when viewed at 32x32, but also when reduced to 16x16.

Next job was the love heart. This was somewhat easier as I found a suitable picture in the Microsoft Word clip-art gallery which I copied into Photoshop, cropped it down to just the central heart, selected and then removed the surrounding pink background using the magic-wand tool, and then resized it to 22 pixels wide.

Finally I copied the love heart into a new layer above the Brittany Flag and then carefully copied, nudged and pasted the heart into the right alignment against the flag. I'm sure there is an easier way to move layers around in Photoshop but I don't know what it is so this last bit was somewhat laborious.

And this is the completed 32 x 32 pixel result which overall I was quite pleased with.

I did try some other variations of orientation of the flag and heart, and I briefly experimented with writing 'GITE' at the top of the icon, but none of these really looked good - you can see some of the trial attempts on the picture at the top of this article.

Having got a picture in Photoshop I was happy with I used my favourite Image viewer/converter, Irfanview to convert the .PSD to a .BMP and I then used Chami's FavIcon Generator to create the Icon File. You upload a normal picture format to the Chami website and it converts the picture to 32x32 and 16x16 pictures and then embeds them together into a single .ICO icon file.

All that was then required to associate the icon with my website was to upload the favicon.ico to my website and then change the website template to include a reference to the icon file in the HTML <HEAD> section like this:

  <LINK rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.giteinbrittany.com/theme/favicon.ico" >

And that's it, all finished. If you now view our Gite website or this Blog in either Firefox or IE7 the icon should be shown on the tab bar, and if you bookmark any of these pages the icon should again be shown against the saved bookmark.

I did find reference on Wikipedia's FavIcon entry to the above not being valid W3C HTML and that I should be using

  <link rel="icon" href="http://URLtoyourfavicon/favicon.ico" type="image/png" >

or
  <link rel="icon" href="http://URLtoyourfavicon/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" >

But what I'd written seemed to work in the browsers I use, it passed the W3C website validator test, and sampling the many websites I currently have open in Firefox showed that they all either used the rel="shortcut icon" coding or were using the old IE approach of relying upon the icon being named favicon.ico and it being stored in the website root directory, so I decided there wasn't sufficient justification to do anything different from the rest of the website 'flock' and it was job done!

Hope you like it - please do drop a comment on your thoughts - good, bad or ugly?

A free ticket from SpeedFerries after they cancelled my crossing last week

2008-07-02T15:19:00.004+01:00

SpeedFerries.com

Last week I wrote about my frustrating trip home after striking Boulogne fishermen caused SpeedFerries to cancel my crossing. Well today a bit of nice news in the email, a complementary return crossing ticket:

Dear Customer

Last week your crossing with SpeedFerries was affected by industrial action on the part of the fishermen in Boulogne.

As a gesture of good will for the inconvenience you experienced, SpeedFerries would like to offer you a free return ticket, which is valid for travel within the next 12 months. Should you be unable to use this ticket yourself, it can be passed on to a person of your choice.

The free ticket has been issued with a “dummy” date and name and can be activated for actual travel dates by logging on to http://ecommerce.speedferries.ats.fi/direct_amd/en/directmenu.asp using the reference number and security code below.

Reference number : XXXX it's a secret that I'm not telling my blog readers!
Security code : XXXX also not telling you this!

SpeedFerries is also pleased to inform you that the relevant parties have all committed to a long term solution and that we are assured that SpeedFerries’ customers will not be inconvenienced in the future by actions of this type.

Kind regards

SpeedFerries Ltd.

Definitely the right thing for SpeedFerries to have done, a good customer service result, and I'm happy to continue recommending them.

Speeding Ferry News

2008-06-26T14:51:00.004+01:00

SpeedFerries.com

Over on This French Life, Craig McGinty was a bit quicker off the mark than I was with writing about SpeedFerries new foot passenger service so I won't repeat the details of his posting. Further details are on SpeedFerries website.

Whilst trying to find a ferry home from France on Monday (from McDonalds car park in Boulogne - see my Blog posting) I was looking at SpeedFerries website to see if they'd any news of the strike and when service might be resumed. Despite searching on all corners of their site I couldn't find any details of current sailing crossings (e.g. are they running on time or are there any localised delays) - black mark to Mr Stavis over this omission I feel.

Anyway I did come across a press release I hadn't seen before from May 2008 announcing that SpeedFerries have purchased SpeedOne the fast-cat they've had on hire from Incat since they started running in May 2004. The purchase comes as no real surprise as they've definitely established themselves as a viable ongoing ferry operation from Dover (with 12% of the ferry passenger vehicle market) and the monthly rental must have been an ongoing financial drain they were keen to remove.

Also mentioned in the press release was written confirmation that SpeedFerries are planning to source a second fast-cat to partner SpeedOne (and guess what it'll be called - no prizes for this one!) and that it might operate on alternative ferry routes.

There's been talk about SpeedFerries acquiring a second boat for some time now and I've even talked to crew myself onboard SpeedOne to see what they knew, but despite rumours for the last couple of years I've not seen it written on their website before. There's no additional news of a second boat on Incat's press releases so we'll have to wait and see what transpires.

It'll be really good if SpeedFerries do open up a second UK/France route, perhaps competing with LDLines on the 'mid-channel' (Le Havre and Dieppe), or even better with Brittany Ferries on the 'western channel' (St Malo, Cherbourg and Caen) - they could definitely do with some cut-price competition in my opinion as their fares right now can be quite outrageous.

Boulogne fisherman's strike meant a detour via Dunkerque

2008-06-24T11:51:00.000+01:00

I'm writing this Blog posting whilst sitting on the quayside at Dunkerque waiting to be called to board the 8pm Norfolk Line sailing back to Dover. Unfortunately I can't find a WIFI signal so I won't be able to actually post the entry until I'm back in blighty.

On Thursday I left work slightly early and headed down to Dover en-route for a long weekend in our Brittany Gite. The main reason for going is that we're in the process of moving house in the UK and a friend of mine had recently given me his complete kitchen (cabinets, appliances, et al) as he was having a new one fitted. Thus we were given his old one which after a bit of remodelling would do perfect for the second half of our Gite I'm currently in the process of renovating. And with the imminent house move we didn't really want to have to move all the kitchen pieces from our current UK house to the new UK house, only to then a little while later to then have to move it again to France.

Hence why on Thursday I was driving to catch the SpeedFerries boat to Boulogne with the car extremely heavy on it's suspension. As well as all the kitchen cabinets which in themselves weigh enough I'd managed to fit in two large oak beams that were left over from when our front garden in the UK was terraced, so they too had to go to France before we moved.

Right now the Gite is booked up solid from June through to the end of August and I really wanted to take the things over, so for the first time I decided I'd go over when there were guests staying. I've never really wanted to do this before as I prefer to let people have the run of the place and not be disturbed by me coming and going, but I did need to clear the space so it was a compromise I had to take.

Of course I wasn't actually going to be staying in the Gite that the guests are staying in, now that Bob the builder has connected up the water in the second Gite I can at least "rough it" with a spare bed, the almost completed bathroom and an electric kettle - living on Pot Noodles and Sausage rolls for a few days won't kill me but the sooner I get the new kitchen fitted so I can have a few home comforts the better!

After a late arrival and long drive down from Boulogne I reached the Gite at 3am, left the car in the lane, and crept into the house so as not to disturb our guests. Next morning they were quite surprised to meet me but were very nice about it. Whilst we were chatting they told me how they'd come over via Norfolk Line through Dunkerque and had only paid £39 return for their crossing - an even cheaper deal than Speedferries!

Anyway, had a nice break over in France, did a bit of work on the house, met up with some nearby friends in Brittany, and all too soon Monday came around and it was time to set off back to England and work again Tuesday morning.

When I was over half way to Boulogne I received a text from SpeedFerries telling me that because of a French fisherman's strike none of their ferries were running at all today and I was advised to *urgently* call their UK call centre.

After 15 minutes on hold (which no doubt cost me a bit from my mobile) I finally got through and was told that a "lightening strike" had blockaded the port and so all they could do was to credit me the journey so I could rebook at a later date. Ironically this Boulogne/Dover ticket had already been credited to me once before in December 2007 when strong winds prevented SpeedFerries from operating - perhaps this is a cursed ticket, two cancellations for the same ticket is surely more than just bad luck??

Anyhow remembering my guests advice about the price of Norfolk Line tickets I decided I'd try them for a change instead of P&O or SeaFrance from Calais to Dover. I continued up to Boulogne and after filling up the car a the E Leclerc Hypermarket I parked in McDonald's car park to pickup the Free WiFi signal in all McDonalds restaurants. Worked a treat and by getting online I was able to book at the online *special* price of €46 instead of the standard €120 crossing price !

I did drive around the harbour in Boulogne for a bit to see what the fishing blockade looked like. I was hoping for scenes of angry fishermen waving haddock's or whatever they do when disgruntled, but there was just a few bored looking SpeedFerries staff hanging around the rather closed looking ferry port ...

Dunkerque ferry port reminds me rather of Calais of a few years ago; you drive through miles of desolate wasteland to find the ferry terminal, past rows of container lorries and warehouses, and when you get there there's not much in the way of facilities, just a cafe bar, toilet and a few video games.

Boat's arrived now so better blog off for now !

Free XML Sitemap tool to describe your website content

2008-06-19T12:00:00.001+01:00

XML Sitemap tool

Earlier in the week I wrote about how I've added a new website page about Mont St Michel to our holiday home website, but once you've added a new page, how do you ensure that people will find it quickly?

Well one solution is of course to Blog about it, but if you've not got a Blog or don't think a Blog article is appropriate, then you're generally down to waiting for search engine users to stumble upon your page, which in turn means you need to ensure that your new page is rapidly advertised to the major search engines.

And that's where XML sitemaps come in.

A few years ago lead by Google the major search engines including Yahoo and Microsoft agreed a standard method of describing what pages made up your website, a sitemap. In essence a sitemap is simply a text file that you hold on your website that contains a list of all the pages in your website, and like most new Web2 initiatives the file is structured as an XML document which makes it a lot easier for the search engine computers to read and process.

By convention your sitemap is usually called sitemap.xml and is placed in the root directory of your website so ours is http://www.giteinbrittany.com/sitemap.xml and if you take a peek you'll see it looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
  <loc>http://www.giteinbrittany.com/</loc>
  <priority>0.5</priority>
  <lastmod>2008-06-05T22:19:14+00:00</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>http://www.giteinbrittany.com/index.html</loc>
  <priority>0.5</priority>
  <lastmod>2008-06-05T22:19:14+00:00</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
...
</urlset>

Ignoring the opening couple of lines you'll see that the structure is pretty simple and consists of each website page URL, it's relative priority compared to other site pages (between 0 and 1.0), when it was last modified and how often the page changes (to give a hint to the search engine as to how often to index your website).

So you can hand-craft your own sitemap if you really want to using any text editor, but I find it's easier and more reliable to use a tool to generate the sitemap for you, such as the XML Sitemap Generator over on xml-sitemaps.com.

XML sitemaps offer a free online tool that will crawl through your website, find the linked pages, and generate a sitemap for you (for which you then need to save the XML file and upload into your website); or they offer a standalone tool for just $19.99 that will generate the sitemap as part of your website, ping Google and other search engines to tell them you've changed the sitemap and automatically generate a human readable sitemap (my equivalent which I manually have created is at http://www.giteinbrittany.com/sitemap.html).

Once you've got your sitemap created you then need to register it with your Goggle webmaster account, then you can notify Google when you've changed it or periodically Google will trawl your sitemap and download it, looking for changes:

Mont St Michel - a 'new corner of the internet'

2008-06-16T21:33:00.003+01:00

Mont St Michel

If you've been reading this Blog for a while and following some of the stories of our French holiday home website, you may have spotted that there are several "loose end" bits and pieces whereby I've started a project and then never quite managed to get around to finishing it.

Looking in my "draft Blog postings" I can see I've some 56 entries for the Blog that at one stage or another I've started writing about something and then never finished it, and in my "unwritten website pages" directory there's some 29 new pages for the website that again have never been completed. If truth be told some of these are probably more in the "never really started" category rather than the "never quite finished" category.

All this is I feel a bit at odds to my personality as according to all the times I've ever completed the questionnaire to determine my Belbin team role I've always come out as a 'Completer-Finisher' rather than a 'Plant' so I should be good at working through the detail of problems and finishing things off, but I suppose lack of time is a major contributor to this state of affairs ...

... but I digress slightly (OK I digress lots)

Over the last few weeks of working away from home and staying overnight in hotel rooms I've actually managed to find enough time to finish off one of a new page of the Gite website and finally pushed the button to publish it onto the Internet last week - the UNESCO world heritage site, Mont St Michel which is just over an hour's drive from our holiday Gite.

I've been to Mont St Michel four times now, and we've taken the family on two separate occasions, and on every visit you can't help but be amazed as you drive over the kilometre-long causeway that links the island to the mainland by the towering monastery that sits on top of the pinnacle of rock.

King's Gate, Mont St Michel

Built over the last 10 centuries it's hard to imagine the amount of physical labour that must have been required to haul the massive blocks from the mainland, across the sea (the causeway is a relatively new construction) and up the top of the natural rocky outcrop to build the church, monastery and town that's now a popular tourist attraction.

Inside the defensive walls and among the winding narrow streets there's plenty of tourist outlets, four museums, a couple of hotels, and of course the obligatory fine restaurants overlooking the impressive view over the Bay of St Michael. Once you climb to the top there's a fascinating tour of the 12th Century abbey and monastery with both written and audio tours available throughout the year.

So there we are, details of a new french holiday attraction on our website and one less "to-do" on my ever-increasing list!

P&O Ferries - 5 day sale - ends June 10th

2008-06-07T21:31:00.004+01:00

P&O Ferries 5 day sale

Over on P&O Ferries I noticed they're having a 5 day sale running up to midnight on 10th June:

Dover/Calais for £25 each way>
Hull/Rotterdam or Hull/Zebrugge for £99 each way (including cabin)
Portsmouth/Bilbao for £299 each way (including cabin)

Worth a visit if you're looking for cheap ferry tickets - but be quick!

Nice to get a cheque from Google

2008-06-06T20:35:00.002+01:00

Google Adwords

Last month I wrote about Google Adwords offering me a VAT refund and today in the post I received a nice cheque for £67.90 for VAT overcharged between 1st January 2004 and 22nd May 2008.

I didn't think I really used Adwords all that much (perhaps a tenner or so a month in advertising fees) but it clearly adds up as shown by the size of the refund cheque.

Unfortunately there was no multi-coloured Google logo on the cheque or a curvy 'g' like Google's new favicon just a plain "Google Ireland Ltd" typed out on the top.

Oh well off to the bank tomorrow to pay it in along with a couple of Gite rental cheques that have come in. We ask for a 25% deposit up front to secure the booking, then the balance payment 8 weeks before the booking. So now there's a nice little deluge of cheques arriving with all our guests paying for their July and August holidays.

All helps the "Gite renovation" fund!

New 'favicon' Icon for Google - and what is Favicon anyway?

2008-05-31T23:02:00.008+01:00

I think I need to get out more !

Yesterday I noticed that Google has gone and got itself a new 'favicon' icon, a rather stylish blue 'g' rather than a Capital 'G' in a white box.

By now I'm sure half of my readers will have switched off and the other half will have decided I've gone bonkers. For those of you left, a quick side explanation about favicon's ....

Favicon (short for Favourite Icon) was pioneered by Internet Explorer 5 and for once this proprietary Microsoft extension has now become common across most other web browsers.

If you define a simple 16 by 16 Windows icon (or logo) for your own website, name it favicon.ico, and then install it on the root directory of your website, when someone bookmarks your website your icon then appears alongside the browser bookmark to remind a visitor about your site, as your link in their favourites will then stand out.

Firefox then extended the use of favicon by displaying the website icon in the browser address bar and on the tab window so it's instantly visible what website you are looking at, and now IE7 has copied this design feature as well.

I've had it on my "to-do" list for some time to get around to defining my own website favicon, but somehow I've still not quite managed to do so. You need a graphics program that will output Icon format files such as Paint Shop Pro or Icon Forge, or there's a simple online favicon editor over at degraeve.com and a favicon generator on favicon.co.uk that takes a .GIF or .BMP picture and converts it to .ICO format.

The picture above shows some of the open tabs from my current Firefox session; the orange B is Blogger, the blue G in a green box is the original Google icon, next to it is ebay and on the row below is AngloInfo, a website which doesn't have a favicon setup (so shows the default white box) and then three of the new curly 'g' google icons.

It appears that Google's not yet rolled the new icon around all of its websites, google.com and google.co.uk have both been changed as has Google Analytics and Google Maps, but Google Adwords is still the old fashioned square-box G icon.

And I've beaten the Googling Google blog to this news. Like I said, I need to get out more ...

Bookings holding steady for 2008

2008-05-30T09:11:00.003+01:00

I've not written for some considerable time about how we are doing with bookings for our holiday Gite this year, so to rectify the situation, a quick blog posting.

There's plenty of articles around in both the newspapers and on the Internet about over-supply of holiday homes/Gites in France is meaning many owners are finding that they've been struggling for bookings over the last few years, even having trouble filling the peak school summer holidays.

In our experience of renting our Gite over the last four years, we haven't seen any sign of a slowdown.

This year, as at the end of May 2008, we're now booked solid for all of June, July and August and don't have a single free vacant day until 31st August, then we're (as at right now) vacant for September, then we've a couple of weeks booked already for October. Compared to this time last year we're ever so slightly down on days booked (7 days less in total) but on pretty much the same as the year before, so all in all I'd say we are still keeping even with previous years.

One thing that does surprise me each year though is comparatively how few bookings we get through April and May. We've been over at Easter for the last 3 years running and at May half-term for the last couple of years, and have always found the weather to be really warm and pleasant - not baking hot but nice enough that you can sit outside on the patio and eat lunch and dinner, even in March! If I tried doing the same in the UK in March then I'd probably catch pneumonia!

Be interested to hear how other people's experiences of 2008 bookings are going?

Free online copy of 'The Traveller in France' magazine

2008-05-29T08:18:00.001+01:00

Traveller in France

FranceGuide, the Official website of the French Government Tourist Office, has recently launched the Summer 2008 edition of 'The Traveller in France' which covers many aspects of France as a holiday destination - the glorious seaside, rolling wine areas, fantastic cuisine and cultural heritage.

There's special articles on France’s varied coastline, the great outdoors, city breaks to places like Montpellier, Tours, Bordeaux or Orange as well as an article on some of the talented artisans who maintain and rejuvenate some of France’s finest monuments and buildings.

You can order a printed copy of this guide plus others about holidaying in France such as Golfing Holidays and Wine Regions from the French Tourist Office brochure request site or you can view an electronic online copy (and print it yourself or save it to PDF) by going direct to the Traveller in France magazine.

Of course if this has wetted your appetite for your own French vacance then I can recommend a rather nice little country holiday gite in Brittany ....

Conditional CSS required to workaround an IE bug

2008-05-22T08:00:00.002+01:00

W3C CSS Validator

I sometimes wonder if working on our holiday home website is going to be a job for life?

In March I wrote about fixing several HTML incompatibility problems that meant that the website wasn't properly HTML 4.01 compliant (as measured by the W3C HTML validator); then in April I separately wrote about what seemed to be a simple request to create a bulletted list of features ended up with discovering an obscure Internet Explorer display bug, well a month later, I've found yet another problem.

The problem is this:

To get the bulletted list to appear properly in Internet Explorer I ended up having to add a zoom: 1; declaration to the CSS style for the bulletted list, vis:

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

But unfortunately then when I used the W3C CSS validator to confirm that the CSS style sheet is CSS 2.1 compliant, the same 'zoom: 1' line gets rejected as it's not valid CSS.

So how to fix? What I ideally wanted to do was to keep the style sheet as standard (compliant) CSS (so big tick from W3C), but then for anybody accessing the site with Internet Explorer include the necessary additional CSS command to ensure that everything displays properly.

Fortunately there is a reasonably easy way to accomplish this with IE CSS Conditional comments. These are additional HTML commands that all browsers other than IE just ignore (as they think they are HTML comments), but that IE will process - i.e. you get specific HTML commands that you can target at Internet Explorer users only.

So what you do is to define an additional CSS file that contains your "non-standard" CSS commands for IE users and then with a conditional comment direct just your IE users towards using this additional CSS file:

This example means that any Internet Explorer 6 users will process just the additional CSS file and there are similar conditional comment options if you want to target specific CSS at IE5, IE7, all IE users or specific ranges of IE versions. Examples of the different options and how they all work are over on Dave Woods' blog.

For me I determined after testing with different versions of IE that I actually needed to target the 'iefixes.css' file at all IE users so I used a <!--[if IE]> conditional format in the head of the single affected page and now everything validates OK.

Due a VAT refund from Google Adwords

2008-05-20T08:06:00.001+01:00

Google Adwords

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from Google Adwords telling me that they'd reviewed by Google Adwords account and decided that my VAT setting was incorrect as my account was being used for business purposes (i.e. I was using Adwords to "gain an economic advantage by promoting goods or services on Google AdWords") rather than non-business purposes.

According to Google I had either declared that my adwords account was being used for non-business purposes (unlikely) or that I had not entered a VAT number (definitely the case as I'm not VAT registered). As a result of this VAT was being charged on my Google Adwords Adverts at the Irish rate (21%) as all EU customers are managed from Google Ireland Ltd (EU).

The email then went on to explain that under article 194 of European Council Directive 2006/112/EC as a non-Irish resident business I should be responsible for accounting for VAT in my home country, and thus Adwords have ceased charging me Irish VAT on my Adwords adverts.

Finally the email concluded with telling me that I may be eligible for a refund of Irish VAT charged by Google Ireland Ltd that I had errantly paid.

Digging into the Adwords help files I found a definition of whether Adwords is being used for business purposes or not, whether VAT applies to Adwords or not which also said that "Advertisers with a business address in the EU, but outside Ireland, may self-assess VAT at their Member State's local rate if they are using Google AdWords for business purposes", and finally instructions on how to declare for self assessment of VAT within Google Adwords.

I did find this all somewhat confusing as there's no easy way of making a VAT self-declaration in the UK as my rental income turnover is considerably below the annual VAT threshold.

Potential eligibility for a VAT refund was triggered by me checking my VAT details on my Adwords account and basically confirming that the account's 'company name' matched the name held on my bank account as this is who any refund cheque would be made payable to.

Well not really expecting much from it I duly verified my company name details and today was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Google Adwords telling me that I am eligible for a refund of past VAT charged by Google Ireland to the tune of £67.90.

Very nice!

Finding mis-spelt listings on ebay

2008-05-17T22:40:00.005+01:00

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 Gumshoo 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, Cristian 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?

2008-05-07T09:42:00.005+01:00

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

2008-05-05T20:18:00.000+01:00

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

2008-05-02T23:25:00.003+01:00

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

2008-04-28T18:43:00.000+01:00

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)

2008-04-24T08:21:00.003+01:00

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

2008-04-20T20:06:00.004+01:00

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)

2008-04-14T19:00:00.000+01:00

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

2008-04-11T23:22:00.007+01:00

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.

Primroses, tree lopping, ladders and sore fingers

2008-04-08T09:22:00.003+01:00

Something I've never noticed before when over in Brittany, but which we saw in abundance this March, was wild Primroses flowering in the grass verges alongside the road and embankments of the autoroutes.

I'm used to buying Primroses in the UK from the garden centre and admiring their colour each springtime ... and then remembering to overlook the bedraggled clump of Primrose leaves in the flower bed for the rest of the year - more than one of our Primroses in the past have been pulled up and thrown away because they were mistaken for weeds in the garden after they'd flowered!

But in Brittany it appears that wild Primroses are flourishing and loads of places we saw clumps of them flowering away and brightening up an otherwise ordinary roadside. They were pretty much all a pale yellow variety (presumably the original wild flower variant before we started propagating and cross-breeding them into the garish colours you find in a garden centre), but there was a one or two white ones I saw as well.

Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of them.

A job I had to tackle this holiday was the height of some of the pine trees bordering our garden. I'd taken the tops of them out before, but obviously not enough, as several of the trees were now a few feet above the height of the telephone cable that runs along one edge of the garden, and they were now starting to approach the height of the electricity cable that was suspended a metre higher up the pole.

I've heard of other French residents receiving letters from the marie instructing them to cut the offending trees down to size, and as we're not over there that often I thought I'd better get onto the job myself.

Turned out to be somewhat harder than I thought it would be as the branches were some 12 feet up and just about at the maximum reach of our 5-step ladder with me standing on the top with the long-handled loppers. Cutting the 1-2 inch branches wasn't easy either and I ended up with sore arms after spending a few hours trimming the first tree.

After an overnight rest I decided to tackle the remaining branches of the last two trees and set the steps up again on the roadside verge, and climbed up with the loppers.

Hooking the loppers over a tall branch I took a firm hold and braced myself to pull down on the loppers and cut through the thick branch.

And of course as should have been predicted, the ladder slipped forwards on the wet grass verge and down I tumbled off the top, bouncing backwards past all the steps, and landing on my back on the grass. Ouch ouch Ouch.

The step ladder came off worst with a broken leg so has now been retired from active service, and I came out with a bit of additional stiffness and a few bruises.

After I'd recovered I used a proper ladder propped up against the tree with one of the kids on the bottom to brace it, and a two-handed saw to cut through the remaining branches, some of which turned out to be 3 inches thick and for which the larger saw proved to be much more up to the job.

I've now got minor nicks cuts and skin abrasions all over my fingers from the saw and the tree, and the wood store (for the open fire in the Gite) is now somewhat fuller of pine tree branches.

Job done - but somewhat painfully it has to be said!

Running a French Holiday Gite in Rural Brittany

Creating our new Website FavIcon (Favourite Icon)

A free ticket from SpeedFerries after they cancelled my crossing last week

Speeding Ferry News

Boulogne fisherman's strike meant a detour via Dunkerque

Free XML Sitemap tool to describe your website content

Mont St Michel - a 'new corner of the internet'

P&O Ferries - 5 day sale - ends June 10th

Nice to get a cheque *from* Google

New 'favicon' Icon for Google - and what is Favicon anyway?

Bookings holding steady for 2008

Free online copy of 'The Traveller in France' magazine

Conditional CSS required to workaround an IE bug

Due a VAT refund from Google Adwords

Finding mis-spelt listings on ebay

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

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

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

Proposed 16 mile bridge from Normandy to Jersey

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

French Magazine relaunches Holidays2France and we get a free advert

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

Kitchen

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

Primroses, tree lopping, ladders and sore fingers

Nice to get a cheque from Google