Europe a la Carte Blog

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Kango have launched a travel blog search widget to make it easier to find and search  travel blogs. If there are any travel blogs that you’d like to see added to the search engine you can make suggestions.

Travel Search

The Kango site aims to become the ultimate travel information search engine, which works in a simple and intuitive manner. You can search for trip recommendations based on you specific theme criteria, e.g. romantic, family, pet friendly. The results will then come up with recommendations, based on your priorities, gleaned for a multitude of sources, avoiding the need for you to search through several different sites. However you won’t be able to compare price or book directly through Kango.

At present the site is in beta and only covers Hawaii and California.

If you’re looking for some ideas on where to spend your short break or holiday. “Alfie” is here to offer you some suggestions. You just need to answer a few quick questions about possible destinations such as desired temperature, length of flight, month of travel and your interests and Alfie comes up with a list of destinations that fit the bill.

I thought it was quick and simple to use and the destination list did fulfil all my criteria. So if you’re looking for some ideas try Alfie. Alpharooms have a wide selection of accommodation at good prices and their price promise means you can be sure of getting a good deal.

According to a new survey 90% of online travel shoppers have experienced problems during the booking process in the last year. I can certainly testify to that as I had a problem in the last couple of months trying to book accommodation with On the Beach when arranging a DIY holiday to the Canaries. I thought I’d booked the accommodation twice in error, as when nothing happened during my first attempt to enter my credit card details, I tried again. I’d to wait 24 hours for On the Beach to get back to me to say they’d no record of my booking. It was all rather unnerving. I don’t think I’d visit the On the Beach site again.

Have you had any similar problems or have you been one of the lucky few for whom travel transactions have gone smoothly?

There’ s a new widget in the right hand margin of the blog with links to posts on other travel blogs. I hope that the Blogrush widget will introduce you to some other interesting travel blogs. It will also allow me to publicise my blog to more readers. If you have a blog it’s free and quick to register with Blogrush. There’s a short video which explains how the system works and as soon as you register, the code is produced and you just have to copy it into a widget.

Please let me know what you think of the widget and the quality of the travel blogs which are featured.

Technology is being used as part of the solution to preserving a lovers ritual and the structure of the Ponte Milvio in Rome. The fictional scene of two lovers etching their names on a padlock chained around a lamp post on the Ponte Milvio, then throwing away the key to express undying devotion in a book by Federico Moccia, has started a craze.  The bridge has been unable to cope with the strain and any intervention by city officials was decried as being “anti-love”

 
Love Padlocks by Luciano_46

Officials have now erected a set of six steel posts connected by chains for padlock attachment. However a more novel solution is offered by a website where lovers can write their names on a virtual padlock. I visited the site but unfortunately it’s only in Italian. I’ve emailed to ask if the site could have an English version.

I’ve installed the Postreach click to comment plugin to make it easier for you to make a quick comment on my blog posts. It’s reckoned that 95% of blog readers never leave a comment. Only a tiny percentage of blog readers comment regularly. Probably the majority of them being other bloggers like me who have become blogaholics!

If you look at the icons at the bottom of the post you can click to comment. Do you think they are a useful addition or just unnecessary clutter?

Update 26 August 2007

I’ve now deactivated Click to Comment for this blog, they changed the logo to a rather large, garish cartoon type character with a large finger with a very limited  number of colour options, as well as reducing the number of click options to four.  I just didn’t like the way it looked on the blog.   You can see the new logo and icons on my other blog Business Blog Boost.

[tags]Postreach click to comment, blog comments, plugins[/tags]

I’ve just discovered widgets and have been experimenting with them on the sidebar on my other blog Business Blog Boost. I thought that having a Flickr “badge” displaying a random selection of my photos at the bottom of the homepage of Europe a la Carte would be a good idea. It would make the homepage a bit more colourful and eyecatching plus showcase some of the less well known destinations in Europe about which I write.  I’ve also added a vertical Flickr photo badge to the sidebar of this blog.

If you’d like to create your own photo badge, it’s really easy. You just login to your Flickr account and to to the bottom of the page and click on tools in help. There are various layouts, horizontal or vertical, a flash or static badge and you can choose from recent photos. specific tags or just a random selection of photos. You can choose whether to include your buddy icon. Then you select border, background and text colours and your code is produced. I really like the fact that there is text saying “start of badge” and “end of badge” in the code. It makes it much easier that having to scan through screeds of html code if you want to make any changes.

Below is a horizontal badge with 3 medium sized photos.

[tags]Flickr photo badge, Flickr photo widget[/tags]

I read about the social network aggregator Wink last week and decided to join. It sounded like a good idea to have my websites, blogs and input to other sites like Flickr and Stumbleupon in one place. I set up a profile adding the urls of all my “places”. Then I made a widget which you can see below.

where i’m at…

people search by

make your own Wink Widget!

I will wait and see if winking is an effective way of promoting my business. Have you used Wink or any other social network aggretators, how useful have they been to you?

[tags]social network aggregators, Wink.com[/tags]

Apologies for the disappearance of the Europe a la Carte Blog for a couple of days. My site was hacked and it took a bit longer to get the blog up and running again than the main site.

I was amazed that my site was hacked, it’s not as though there is anything of value such as credit card details. The hacked site had a photo of a Goth and large letters saying “Hacked Pit10 OwnZ Yo”.

Hacked by Christos_m2001

It was really annoying and frustrating. It damages your reputation because if a visitor to the site/blog sees a message like this they will immediately leave and never return. Has you site/blog been hacked? Do you believe that it had any serious effect in the long term?

[tags]hackers[/tags]

I am pleased to report that the Europe a la Carte Swicki is now online. Well until early this week I’d never heard of a swicki either, it’s an intelligent search engine, a cross between a wiki and a search engine. I thought it sounded such a good idea that I’d set one up for my website. My aim is to host a useful resource to help you see more of the real Europe during your visit. The whole idea is that users will edit and add to the content of the swicki. The swicki will learn from users search behaviour and become even more relevant.

So if you’re researching a trip to Europe try the Europe a la Carte Swicki. Let’s build a great resource for travellers who are want to have an authentic experience during their trip in Europe.

check out the Real Europe swicki at eurekster.com

[tags]swicki[/tags]