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.