Wow, things have got pretty hectic since December (hence the terrible lack of blog postings). Search traffic in the vacation rental industry doubles around this time of year and owners are keen to get their properties booked up. We're adding new properties faster than ever which we're pretty thrilled about! Recently I've been working on the public XML API for updating listings and availability. This isn't going to directly effect most of our advertisers (unless you are particularly technically inclined!) but should allow us to more easily integrate with other services (shared calendar services, for instance).

A short posting to say that we're finally open - you no longer need an invitation to sign up to Rentability. Which is not to say that we've actually finished or anything to wildly radical like that - but we've gone from being a "private beta" to a "public beta". We're still working on new features while polishing and simplifying the existing ones - we think we'll finally be prepared to consider the site "done" sometime around march next year (that still doesn't mean we'll stop working on it - just that we'll be removing that little "beta" label on the logo really).

So - if you didn't sign up for the beta testing you're too late to get the extra credits now! You have only yourself to blame!

Either today or tomorrow we'll be making an update that adds SMS enquiry notification to our ever-expanding feature set. When an enquiry comes through, property owners can receive an instant text message notification that includes the basic enquiry details. For the time being, this feature will be available free of charge!

Notification messages will look something like this:

Enquiry received: "Tom Riley" <tom@example.com> for Le Pigeonnier Tel: 447890123456. Dates: Wed 12 Dec 07 to Thu 20 Dec 07

We've been testing video upload support on Rentability and we're now making it available to all advertisers. This means that while building your advert, wherever you can attach a photo you can now upload and attach a video too! Right now we support uploads in MPEG, AVI and QuickTime format. We'll add support for more formats later. Oh, and uploaded video file size is currently limited to 100 megabytes.

If you've noticed Rentability running any faster recently then you should probably be getting out more, but nonetheless we appreciate the dedication. The reason we might be a tiny bit faster is that we've just installed a new server which should be at least five times more powerful than our old one. It doesn't actually make much difference to the speed you see web pages, but it'll allow us to handle many more simultaneous visitors without slowing down under the load. And the reason that that's important is that we're finally going to be moving out of the private Beta stage soon.

We still feel we have a an enormous number of improvements to make to the system before we can think of it as "finished", but everything seems pretty stable now. With the next major software update we do we're going to allow people to sign up directly, rather than requiring an invitation from us. So Rentability will still officially be in "beta" (what website isn't these days), but it'll be a public beta test. At the same time we're going to drop the number of free credits we give away to new members - instead of the 24 credits we give away now we'll probably drop down to 10 or 5, so if you know anyone who you think might want to join you better send them an invitation soon.

We were visited this morning by a lovely man called Dr. Henry, from British Columbia. He was obviously very keen to go on holiday, but pathologically indecisive about where he wanted to actually go - the poor chap was so confused he ended up sending out hundreds of enquiries for different properties.

Except, depressingly predictably, Dr. Henry turned out to be from Nigeria and his enquiries (though very polite) were quite obviously scams.

We've been working on solutions to the scamming problem recently, and there's been some discussion on the Rentability property-owner forums about what to do. This has spurred us on a bit, so expect some action soon.

If you were one of those who received a message from Dr. Henry we apologise for the inconvenience - you can claim your credits back in the usual way by just clicking the refund request button on the enquiry in your dashboard.

Looking through the log files is a dangerously addictive habit as anyone who has run a website will know and one of my lesser vices is rooting about in our website logs trying to work out how and why people come to our site.

By far the biggest proportion of our traffic is handed down to us like manna from the capricious gods of mount Google, but occasionally we get the odd visitor who finds us through the MSN Live search engine. But "Live" never seems to send us people who are looking for a place to stay on their holidays - instead, bafflingly, we get visitors who have ended up being sent to our site after searching for things like "naked" and "dick". Although I'd like to think that they stay to explore the romance of a week in the Dordogne, I supect that Rentability entirely fails to satisfy those particular customers.

The nice people at Flipkey (whose blog is an excellent source of Vacation rental market information) have made a posting about Rentability . I hadn't really thought of us as being particularly Eurocentric before, but I guess we do currently have more properties here than anywhere else - it's interesting to see how one is perceived.

Flipkey seem to be developing some top secret stuff which sounds very exciting, but we can't get them to tell us about it. Well - to be honest - they did try to explain it, but none of us had the vocabulary to understand all the clever words.

Those of you who live in Europe may not have realised it, but our maps for other parts of the planet were in a bit of a mess and in desperate need of some loving care and attention. The vast majority of the world was just lumped together into the huge block of "Asia" which was pretty much impossible to navigate, and some places (such as the Caribbean) were just totally broken. So for the last few weeks we've been giving our maps a bit of love.

Last night we finally managed to deploy the new maps we've been working on. We've re-arranged the top level of the world so that we now have regions like the "middle east" and "southeast asia" - which should make navigation to those places a lot more rational. We've also chopped up some areas, so the Caribbean is now separated into its individual countries and islands (I'm particularly proud of the Caribbean - it took AGES). We currently only have one single solitary Caribbean vacation rental but I'm sure all that work will pay off one day....

A lot of the decisions about how to rearrange things were fairly arbitrary - basically we've tried to balance the need to navigate to where you want to go as quick as possible, while still retaining areas that are large enough to show the number of properties in the area and are easy to click on and trying to group things in ways that make some real-world sense. That means that some areas have been defined politically (most of Europe, for instance) while some have just been chopped out into a map on their own because they were making drawing the maps difficult. For instance, Alaska,Hawaii and Nunavut are now "top level" areas, rather than being sub-regions of the USA and Canada, because they were causing the maps of the mainland areas of those countries to be drawn too small. And anyone looking for vacation rentals in Iceland can now go right there without having to somewhat counter-intuitively click on Europe first.

I'm crap at Geography, and I'm sure we must have made a few mistakes. It's also occasionally been politically tricky to know where to put particular regions, so in the end our decisions have been driven purely by pragmatism - generally making regions big enough to comfortably click on. There have been occasions where it's been frustrating - much as we'd like to recognise Palestine, for instance, we don't have the map data available (and don't get me started about the Redondan situation). So if anyone has any suggestions or complaints then I'd be happy to hear them.

Also, the transition hasn't been entirely painless - we lost a couple of properties for a few hours in the upheaval but they should be back now. If you notice your home has disappeared overnight please let us know.

In the future we will be adding major towns and cities to our maps so that it's a bit easier to orient yourself on the most zoomed in levels, and we'll also be making it possible to click on the nearby "inactive" areas on the maps so you won't have to go back up to Europe in order to move from the France to Spain. There's certainly more to do before we can be happy with the maps - we're probably going to move New Zealand to the top level of the world map rather than having the rather redundant "Australasia" region, for instance - but hopefully this is a big improvement.

Watching the highlights of this year's Tour de France has become a daily ritual for us and yesterday we got the chance to see them for real on Stage 18, Cahors to Angoulême. So we got up early, threw some pork in the boot and headed to St-Cyprien to see the riders go by. We were quite pleased with our excellent time keeping and we thought we had arrived with 20 minutes to spare only to find that the peleton was two hours away. Sunburn turned out to be a valid concern. Being smacked in the head by various promotional samples was also a bit of a worry. Sim got hit in the face by a packet of nuts. I did manage to catch some coffee which we thought we might be able to swap for some water or a baguette (for the pork) or something. Unfortunately we were no match for the honed skills of local freebie grabbers (you need to know which catching strategy to employ for the different brands). After an hour or so, some helicopters approached (nice dramatic effect), a 4 man breakaway went past (one of whom was all scratched up, having earlier crashed into a dog at full speed). At least 3 seconds of cheering and happiness ensued! 10 minutes later the peleton zoomed past just as quickly. I managed to spot David Millar (mostly because of his sun-blocked white legs) and Sim spotted Mauricio Soler (polka dot jersey). I don't think any of us spotted the yellow jersey.

As of yesterday, entering pricing tariffs for Rentability properties just got much more flexible. Owners wanted to enter weekly rates but to have a flexible changeover day - you can now do this (just choose 'Flexible' from the changeover day selector).

The option to enter a price range (dependent on occupancy level, amount of deposit etc) rather than a fixed price was also requested so we have the option for price ranges for weekly or daily price rules:

Also, some owners didn't want to use date ranges (rental seasons) and just wanted to quickly enter a minimum and maximum price that their property rents for regardless of date. Well now you can. You can create a daily or weekly tariff and just enter minimum and maximum prices:

Price chart rendering has also been improved - we decided it made more sense to show a yearly view (actually, we have extra space so it's 14 months). So while building a tariff, you can see everything that's going on and potential clients can see at a glance how an owners prices change over an entire year.

A weekly price chart:

I'm trying to reorganise the Caribbean maps on the site (if you've looked at them you'll notice that the hierarchy is completely messed up at the moment) and it's just ridiculous how complicated it is ; Islands with only a couple of thousand people on them are divided into two halves of different nationalities, Federations of islands are spread over vast empty expanses of sea (which makes the maps a bit useless), Islands seem to secede from their colonial overlords every couple of weeks etc. etc. Best of all is Redonda, which as far as I can tell doesn't have anyone living on it, but which nonetheless appears to have several kings. I can't tell what political entity to include it in, so I'm just going to email all the possible kings of Redonda and ask them how they think it should be represented on our maps.

Tom arrived at Le Sage yesterday and the whole of France celebrated his arrival with great enthusiasm and fireworks. We've all gathered together to make a big push on cleaning up the last issues with Rentability and adding some new features that we think we need before we finally go out of beta testing and launch properly. Expect big things in the next weeks. I was going to call it "the Surge", but then I thought that was just silly.

We're starting to get a bit of a problem with what we're calling "drive-by advertisers".

The root of the problem is that people have a low perceived value placing an ad on Rentability, because it's free to advertise your property with us. There are lots of other free ad sites out there that, because they are free, can't afford to do any promotion and get very little traffic. Holiday home owners will place ads on these sites, but using an R-selection strategy - basically making lots of adverts on a lot of sites, but putting very little effort into their ad because they don't expect much return. This is actually a false perception of Rentability - although it's free to advertise with us we aren't a "free" site (although we give away so many credits to people who sign up now that we don't expect the early adopters to pay anything for a couple of years). We charge for enquiries, so we can afford to actively promote the site and we've worked very hard to make a site which makes your advert look as good as it can.

The upshot for us is that we're getting quite a few ads which just have a single photo and some copied-and-pasted text (sometimes, bizarrely, ALL IN CAPS or with messy line breaks and lots of spelling mistakes). These scruffy ads will bring down the quality of the site if we don't do something about them, and potential holiday home renters will get a bad first impression of our site and leave before seeing the better adverts.

It's a difficult problem for us because we don' want to be turning advertisers away, but we have to find a way to get them to invest a bit more in their advertisement. The solution we've come up with, which we'll probably be implementing in the next few weeks, is to have a "adScore". Each advert on the site will be scored according to a whole bundle of criteria - for instance are there spelling mistakes ? Have they made a Property Tour ? Is the text all in caps ? Is there more than one photo ? etc. etc. The total score for the advert will then be used to bias that advertisements' position in the search result listings.

So - we won't stop people putting crappy adverts on the site, but if they don't put any effort into making their ad then it's unlikely to appear high in the search results - it'll always be last on the list. This gives people an incentive to improve their ad, and it means that visitors coming to Rentability will see the most attractive adverts first - which hopefully means they will be more likely to stick around and actually book one of our advertisers properties.

We've decided to try out another new service. We're going to offer to "clone" an advertisers existing advert from another website for free as an easy way to get their Rentability ad started. Hopefully this will mean that it's absolutely painless to run an ad with us - it costs nothing and on top of that we'll do almost all the work for you !

Of course it's not possible to completely set up an ad in this way - a lot of our features like property tours aren't available on other websites, so you'll have to do those yourself, but we can set up the basics like photos, property descriptions and possibly even availability and pricing. To do the job we've developed a set of clever tools which allow us to automatically read data off most other websites and inject it into Rentability. At the moment the process isn't completely foolproof, and sometimes needs some manual assistance (for instance it can erroneously add a "swimming pool" feature to your property if you have something like "with a municipal swimming pool nearby" in your property description). It's likely to mean a lot of grunt work for us, but I think it's a very cunning idea.

It's starting to feel as if we're really picking up speed and pulling ahead of the other sites in terms of the kinds of features we offer to our advertisers - none of the other sites even seem to bother to think about how they could improve things.