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.

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.

A couple of days ago I added some code to Rentability to count advert visits, per day, per month and an all-time total count. Today I added the first UI so property owners can view this data and actually see how their listings are performing. Here's a screenshot of what account holders now see on their dashboards:

For the moment it's just visits per day for the previous week and a grand total. We'll be improving Rentability's statistics features over the next few months.

We think this is really really great because for the first time (we can't think of a site that already does this) property owners will be able to monitor how well their advert is performing and how updates to their adverts affect its performance (in terms of number of visits and the rate of conversion from viewing to actual enquiry).

I went around to see my sister today, to see if she wanted to go and buy some teabags with me, and when I arrived she was a bit upset. As we worked on the site over the last months we've all had a creeping feeling that encouraging people to take more aeroplanes doesn't feel very comfortable. Now we've launched, the fact that we're becoming part of the global tourism industry and all of the problems it can create - well, it's starting to feel more urgent. We've always holped that once we've got the basics of Rentability sorted out we could try to work on how to do some good with it - but it's really hard to know what to do. Carbon offset calculators ? Articles about cultural responsibility ? Maybe features that allow people to search for a holiday within a given carbon budget ? Maybe we could try to highlight properties that are making a particular effort in that direction. It would take an awful lot of effort, but I'd love to finally make a decent train booking system so it's as easy to book a train from here to france as it is to book a flight. I'm not sure what we should do, and I'm wary of writing a bunch of stuff and sticking a carbon calculator on the site because it just seems tokenistic.

Well... Rentability.com has finally (after months and months and months) come out of the shadows of port 3746 where it's been secretly hiding. It feels very odd to suddenly be exposed like this to the entire big scary internet, especially since (obviously) no-one knows anything about us yet. It feels as if we've suddenly stepped out of the door into Trafalgar Square completely naked (TADA!) while everyone just carried on without taking the slightest bit of notice. We've had a grand total of 3 visitors in the last 24 hours. One of them bears all the signs of being Tom, and I strongly suspect that at least one of them is me. I'm pretty damn excited about mystery guest number three though.

We finally made it! As of 14th of May, Rentability.com goes live and we start our (hopefully short) public 'beta' period. It's been a heck of a lot of hard work, even to get this far, but we think it's been worth it. We feel Rentability is indeed something special.

So what's this blog for? Well, it should be a good place to keep interested parties up-to-date with the latest Rentability goings-on. Information on site updates - new features etc - will be posted here along with anything else we feel a burning desire to share with the world.

We started this project because we thought that existing holiday rental websites weren't really offering what they should to either property owners or would-be holiday makers. We thought that these sites should have more powerful search facilities - why shouldn't you be able to find all properties with plasma TVs if you know that information is in the owner's adverts? We thought that property owners should be able to create more detailed and attractive listings. That's why, amongst other things, we don't put limits on the number of photos used to describe a property. Upload as many photos as you like! (Okay, maybe I should set some kind of limit now. Hmm, alright, you can't upload more than 1000 photos of your property!)