In anticipation of setting up my ‘official’ Beauregard web-site and blog, I have been mulling over the implications of safety….for myself and my family.

I posted a question about personal safety on one of the forums that I read, but unfortunately and somewhat surprisingly, the response I got was a bit disappointing. I think people got the impression that I was about to launch a blog detailing my childrens achievements in minute detail. I think they missed the point somewhat! I would think that personal safety for our loved ones is as important now, if not more so than before, especially with a lot of people considering setting up a more personal blog as an addition to their web-site.

So for that reason, I decided to do a little on-line research and deeper thinking about the issue.

There are many reasons why I chose to write a blog for my new, pending life in France. I will no doubt write about that at a future date but one of the reasons was to be able to share our experiences. Not everyones cup of tea I admit….but I like the idea of the ‘community’.

Of course, this implies that I will be writing about my children too, after all they are a huge part of my life and integral to the story.

However, I am now beginning to doubt whether I should even mention my children at all. The world can be a cruel place, filled with weird people and the thought of attracting the wrong people sends shivers down my spine.

But  I can’t help thinking, by not including my children in the picture, the story will be only half a story. So based on the results so far, I have come up with the following:

• never to use my childrens’ real names, nick names will suffice
• never to publish any photos of my children, unless they are unable to be identified in them
• not to publish the full address of the property online
• not to give out detailed directions until I have a firm booking or final payment cleared
• not to publish anything that establishs a routine, e.g. on Wednesdays we always go shopping as a family ( in other words…the property is empty on  Wednesdays, come along and help yourself!)

If there are any considerations I have missed, please let me know….

Unfortunately, there are some ‘rules’ that we cannot adhere to due to the nature of gite letting…we are after all, inviting people to stay at our properties. So I will have to publish my name and phone number, I will need to check that links etc do not contain anything that I am trying to keep private, I want to provide an availability calender.

But I am hoping that with a bit of foresight and common sense, I can maintain the safety of my family, without compromising the integrity of the blog. It is sad that these things need to be considered at all but I would rather be safe than sorry.

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Ok…so I was raring to go and thought I would check out WP.org to see the lay of the land.

I am now beginning to think that sticking to WP.com might be just as good…to say that I am about to embark on another voyage of discovery is a huge understatement!

In my blissful naivety, I assumed that WP.com and WP.org were the same, except that with .org you need to arrange your own domain name and host…that’s ok, thought I…no problem.

However, I am now painfully aware in my lack of awareness in Apache and Linux, mod_rewrite…an absolute must apparantly, remote connections and text editor software. I need to know about FTP client software and hosting. Do I want to download onto my root or sub-directory? Do I have a list of my categories and pages? Well, I do, but I might want to add or change things….

…..I am now officially worried! I need to know if I can start writing or do I need to do an evening course for the next three years just to learn the basics? I’m not even sure if the dashboard business and easy-peasy get on with it stuff is there, or will I need to HTML my way to everything?

So, I doubt if I will be on my way to setting up my first official web-site this weekend…that was the plan! But, I will not be daunted, it was only a few weeks ago that I had no idea what a widget was, or how to download a picture or do a link, so I won’t let a small thing like this put me off!

It sure beats watching the tv!

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Right, now that I have been practising and getting my head round this blog lark, I now have a plan of action. It is thus:

1. Create a web-site/blog for the letting/gite business, using WP as the operating system

• static pages only
• comments disallowed
• this will be first link from advertising sites such as BV 
• It will have a link to the blog

 2.   Create a blog that is linked to the gite web-site  

•  
  • more personal in  nature
  • comments allowed
  • easy to add to
  • pages and articles
  • Host on seperate host with blog as sub-domain or on it’s own domain

 Reasons for having two seperate entities are as follows:

•  seems to look complicated with too much going on
• difficult to follow if not experienced with blogs
• could be difficult to navigate
• looks more professional to keep the two seperate
• can choose whether to read blog or not

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Good news, we have our first booking for next season. It is with a couple and their daughter, who have been coming to stay with us for about 10 years….they are part of the family now!

I updated the online availability calender and it worked fine…don’t know why I should be so relieved..that’s what it’s meant to do.I must doubt my own ability too much!

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I checked on the progress of the stat counter today and all seems well!

It shows that I have had various people reading the blog….one is my sister…hello!, one is my sister’s friend…hello, and another form USA….Hi!

It’s very exciting and shows location of people, whether they are new or revisiting, how long they lingered etc. It will even show info on search words used, which search engine they used and what page they entered and exited on! It’s a bit spooky really…but it shows it in great charts and pretty pictures!It doesn’t give any info such as personal address’s so it is quite safe!

Highly recommended if you are doing this sort of thing. 

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Todays exercise was to download the free statcounter from Statcounter.

As usual, the easiest bit seems to be registering…I’m quite good at that now.

However, when I came to placing the code provided into the widget box, I checked on the site and noticed that the button had downloaded along with half of the code itself. I must admit, that I wasn’t too surprised, although annoyed, as this seems to happen all the time. It couldn’t be left, it looks a bit naff, so I deleted the visible code which left just the button.

So, the result looks good, but I doubt very much if the stat stuff works! Unfortunately, there is precious little traffic to the site at the moment, so it will be nigh on impossible to verify if it’s working.

But, hey,it’s in, I’m registered and at least I’m getting a good feel for all this, and I’ll be ready for the real McCoy!

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I was reading This French Life yesterday and mention was made of a free lettings calender that could be downloaded onto your gite website.

Interesting, thought I and proceeded to check it out!

I managed to register and get a calender for Beauregard…easy! But then the fun started.It must have taken about two hours of fun and larks to get the link downloaded and linkable. Which is good…I was pleased with my efforts.

However, I was under the impression that with a little copy and pasting of the coding, kindly provided by the calender designers, I would have the whole calender displayed on the web page, with no need to open up a separate page. How wrong can you be?!

I even resorted to emailing, poor long suffering Craig McGinty at TFL, who recommended a few ways around it. But nothing worked. I tried every permutation of copying, pasting,linking, unlinking, highlighted, not highlighted etc, etc. And at this late hour, I have withdrawn from the battle to maybe fight another day…after all the link does work…maybe I should just leave it at that. (Don’t you just hate having to admit defeat?)

And on a separate issue, I registered with del.ic.ious…again very easy to do. But, whether it’s AOL or me, I can’t manage to get the buttons required to become visible on my front page/whatever the thing’s called.The buttons have downloaded and are sitting on my c-drive waiting to be called upon…but I can’t find the relevant ‘view’ button on the AOL page to get them going….all very frustrating! And mention is only made of a different provider…(can’t think who now!)…in the help section. 

So all in all, a fairly frustrating day. My only consolation is that I have learnt all about linking links…even if they don’t always work! ( I just hope the link above does!….)

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Been messing around on the net today looking at various blogs and sites…so am too tired now to do a proper entry.

Managed to link up with Technorati last night on all three of me blogs…took a lot of jiggery-pockery, but got there in the end.

My Tecnorati rankings are as follows:

Phoenix(aol)   369,412

Phoenix(WP)  1,085,151

Rattled   1,554,960

Phew…popular then! Might be worth checking it out in a few years to see how I’m doing!

Been looking at You Tube too…I keep seeing it everywhere so thought I’d check it out. Didn’t glean much info, but there is a really good video of Noah Kalina, who’s taken a photo of himself for 6 years and turned it into a video. It’s really cool…he just stares at the camera with the same expression and compelling eyes, that keep you pinned, while the rest of life moves around behind him. And his hair is waxing and waning and changing all the time and looks as if he’s under the sea…liked it! I’ll try to put in the link…now that’s really ambitious!

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This mornings experiment was to change my header image. I must admit, having looked at the instructions on the excellent WordPress help thing last night, I thought I would never, in a million years be able to do it…it looked very complicated! But, look! I’ve done it!

The image is a photo I took last year while in France. It’s an abbey called Blasimon Abbey, a gothic abbey near Bordeaux, SW France. It’s mostly ruins but the chapel part is still standing. This image is a detail from around the huge arch around the front portico. I love this sort of thing!

Maybe my next experiment will be to change the header on the different pages, whilst keeping this one intact….we’ll see!

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Lets have a go at putting in  a picture shall we?

Nope, not working!

Yee..haa!!

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