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.