Virtually all French petrol stations now are ‘automatic’ in the sense that there is no cashier, just a machine to plug your card into prior to filling up. This makes sense, it’s quick and easy – but they all use the same system and none of them accept my Spanish Mastercard. I’m assuming it’s because it’s a Mastercard and not because it’s Spanish. The motorway tolls are the same. If you’re in France and relying on your Mastercard you will find yourself in trouble – when we recently had the same problem, but found someone present, they even wouldn’t accept cash!

I stuck adsense ads on here and also on Gabriel’s site partly to use it as a testbed for work purposes, partly because I thought what better way to earn a little pocket money for me and the kids? Gabe’s site quite bizarrely ranks very well for a couple of Doctor Who phrases so he gets a bit of traffic as a result, so I thought he might get a few clicks from that.

As it is our conversion rate is significantly below that which we get on selfcateringhols, something I’d like to resolve.

Looking at the ads that get displayed they don’t seem particularly relevant – the ads on my blog homepage are all about dentistry thanks to my daft post on loosing my tooth whereas the ads on Gabe’s homepage are all about holidays, I guess because of the recent post about going to Mallorca.

I would have thought though that the ads would become more specific when you click through to a particular posting. For instance if I look at a posting by Gabe about a Doctor Who doll he wanted I would have expected the ads to display something on subject rather than links to wordpress.

I suppose the lesson here is that to earn any proper money from advertising you need to target your audience and tailor your content accordingly. A blog that rambles on about whatever happens to be of interest at the time isn’t really going to do the job. Ah well!

I was looking at Phil’s site (Phil ‘the lodger’ from about 15 years ago) – it’s a good blog and I like the way he brings all the various feeds from facebook, twitter etc all into one place, I need to do the same.