Over the past few days we’ve been setting up and testing a brand new web server for villaseek.com. We have upgraded the site to the new servers this morning at 12am. We have done extensive testing and are expecting that the site will be faster and better able to cope with increasing demand. Any problems at all, please let us know in the comments! But hopefully you should notice little change – except for it will be slightly snappier!

The new server is based in Dublin and is powered by Amazon EC2. The set up enables us to scale our infrastructure more easily and better cope with changes in demand as the site grows.

Many thanks

Tom K

Manchester city centre will be host to a festival of the Balearic Islands this bank holiday weekend. The festival celebrates Ibiza, Menorca, Majorca and Formentera — and it’s completely free.

You can find out more about the festival via the official festival website

There will be parades happening on Saturday and Sunday at 1pm (and Monday 11am) – finishing up at Albert Square.

I’ve finished adding a new keyword and description system to VillaSeek. We’ve been playing about with this for a while, but it’s now fully implemented.

On your customer control panel (http://www.villaseek.com/customers), there’s a “Keywords / Photos” page for each villa. As well as uploading up to eight photos, you can also enter keywords and a description for your villa.

These are embedded into your listing page as meta data, where Google can read them — potentially enabling your individual listing page to appear higher on Google when people search using those keywords.

The main advantage is on VIllaseek itself, though. If potential holidaymakers enter a keyword (eg. “sleeps 4″, or “near sea”, etc.) into the search box on the front page of Villaseek, then your villa will come up if you’ve also entered those keywords.

So it’s a way of adding more information to your villa page, and increasing its visibility when people do keyword searches.

The best way to use the keyword search area is to enter a comma-separated list of potential keywords into the box on your control panel, and then press the update button. This adds the keywords to your page, and also to our search system – ready for people to find your villa when they search using the appropriate keywords,

As always, drop us a comment below if you need any more info about the system – or feel free to contact us via email or phone if you’ve got any specific questions!

Tom

Issue 75 of Holiday Villas Magazine will be hitting the shelves within the next few days. We’ve created a virtual copy for you which you can flick through (using the Z-mags magazine publishing sysem). Just click on the magazine below to access it…

Hi everyone,

We’ll be making an official announcement about this in a couple of weeks, but we’ve just finished an upgrade to the Villaseek site that will allow all villa listings to show eight photos of their villa. I’ll be testing out this functionality over the next week with a few villas. If you currently list your villa on Villaseek, and would like to have more photos, drop us a comment below with your reference number, and I’ll get in touch to add your extra photos… Once we’ve tested it, we’ll add the functionality to the photo-upload page on everyone’s control panel.

If there are other areas of the site that you think could be improved, or features you’d like us to think about adding, drop me a comment and we’ll get to work on i!

Tom K

The Villaseek photo upload panel

Dear villa owners,

Just to let you know, we’ve had an issue with the photo upload system on your customer management page over the last few days. I’ve now fixed this – so you should be able to upload new and replacement photos on your listings pages at any time you like.

We’ve also got a new keywords and description section on the same page. Here you can enter a few words that describe your villa (separated by commas). That will cause your villa to come up when people search for those keywords.

The keywords and description will also appear on your villa page as metadata that is used by some Internet search engines for the descriptions on search listings, and may help to increase the visibility of your listing on those search engines.

As always, drop us a comment, or get in touch via the contact page on Villaseek.com and we’ll do our best to help with any queries,

Tom

The 100ml limit on containers of liquid taken on international flights may soon be lifted, thanks to a new scanner that can spot dangerous / explosive liquid.

Trials have been conducted on the new scanner, and it’s thought that this could lead to the existing limit being lifted as early as 2010.

RyanAir will abolish its physical check-in desks by the
end of 2009, BBC News reports… It’s a logical progression. Checking in to the airport online already makes sense, and saves travellers money (the online check-in is free, whereas there’s a charge if you just turn up on the day and check in at a physical desk…)

Hi everyone,

I’ve added a new section on Villaseek featuring villas in South Africa. We’re hoping to add more villas to this section in the coming week, so if you’re planning a self-booked holiday in South Africa, this should be a great resource for you!

I’ll also be adding a few more of the travel articles we’ve written on South Africa (from Holiday Villas magazine) – I’ll let you know via the blog when we’ve got them up on line!

Tom K

Hi! We’ve just published the latest issue of Holiday Villas Magazine – Issue 74. To read the magazine in full online, just click the magazine below – or click here.