A blog meet-up on the beach?

Friends of ours own some amazing gites in La Rochelle and have finally set up a blog and website to promote them a bit. They have some free slots available this summer so take a look by clicking here!

La Rochelle has hundreds and possibly thousands of holiday homes available to rent and this year with 11 direct flights from the UK and Ireland, La Rochelle is set to be busier then ever. If you wanted to have a relaxing week or two surrounded by sunflower fields, our pals gites are perfect (this year in any case, the crops can be rotated!).

What is a gite? It is basically a self-contained house or apartment (generally house with large grounds) with every utensil required to spend a few weeks living like a local or relaxing in peace. In the USA I guess these are called Villas or Condo’s to rent?

Why am I promoting their website and blog? They are friends, I want their website and business to succeed and more importantly, would love to meet more fuelmyblog people in La Rochelle this summer. Thomas Hamburger Jnr is popping in for a cafe, who else?!

So this got me thinking of hosting a blog meet up on the beach in La Rochelle, with free wine and wifi organised and we could even live blog it! Here is a link to the local airport, ryanair are a great source of cheap flights, I fly with them almost weekly and often pay £30 return including tax.. So now there is no excuse, free wine, oysters and wifi, with my friend’s gite and hopefully good company, this could be a Pimms moment!

Take a look at the gite if interested, drop them a line. If you fancy meeting up in La Rochelle, drop me one

1 million hits is a new challenge

Fuelmyblog is now getting over a million hits per month, the majority of which are coming through the Friends widgets.  This is seriously slowing the site from time to time and we are working on a fix.  The best solution is to change servers and upgrade to something more robust.

Why haven’t we already made these changes?

Whilst we have enough funds to cover these changes, we are launching something in the next week or two that will be bringing in huge levels of traffic, estimated at over 5m per day.  We are talking to some major players in the hosting space and will hopefully be in a position to work on scaling up ASAP.  Sorry for the continued slowness, we will fix it soon and be bringing some very cool features asap (along with a new employee or two).

I’d love to see what features you guys would like to see installed in fuelmyblog, more writers, better blog help, better features etc.  I plan on hosting some user groups both in the UK and US during the next few months and am keen to see your feedback.

If you are reading this and are on fuelmyblog, please leave a note

10 top tips for using Google

I have been busy recently and have failed to keep up with this blog, I intend to get back up to speed over the next few days.

Moving on from my post yesterday about what Google would do if they bought Fuelmyblog on the Fuel blog, it made me think about Google and the fact that many people simply use it to search, so, here are ten tips on using Google and making it a better experience.

1. Calculator - Type in a maths problem, Google will show the answer, and this works both in numbers eg (1+33)*2 and words one plus thirty three times two, it will even do a combination eg  1 plus thirty three, *2.  Go on, try it!
2. Precision Search - Using quotes will return an exact search,  removing them will return an assortment of unrelated pages.
3. Dictionary -  Type define then any English word, the result will give you a quick dictionary definition.
4. Maps - Type a town or city, sometimes with a County or State and Google will produce a map, click on it you can view driving directions, satellite views etc.
5. Books - Go to books.google.com type in a writer or book title, and view the scanned book online.
6. News - Go to news.google.com type in a subject and see up to date news results.
7. Alerts - If you want to see who is writing about you, your blog or anything of interest, go to the following link here, then simply type in the search terms ie fuelmyblog, determine the type, I prefer comprehensive (search everywhere) and get an update via email as it happens, you can then track everyone that mentions your subject.
8. Weather - Want to search weather easily?  Simply type weather followed by the name of the place ie weather la rochelle, hit return!
9. Lucky? - If you have never tried it, typing a site name eg fuelmyblog in the search box followed by clicking I’m Feeling Lucky will take you there direct, no search results.
10. Link - Who is linking to you?  Type link: followed by your URL and see who links to you eg link:fuelmyblog.com.

There, ten simple Google tips, if you have any other gems, leave them in the comments, Enjoy!