Slow Europe

Plough Cottage near Painswick, May 2000

If you are curious to see the types of vacation rentals available in Italy, Switzerland and England, have a look at the places we have stayed in over the past ten years.

• Vacation Rentals in Italy
• Vacation Rentals in Switzerland
• Vacation Rentals in England

These are the places we have stayed since I got my first digital camera - from 1999 to the present. They give you a good idea of the types and quality of vacation rentals available in these countries.

Send me your links

If you have some great Europe travel photos or know of websites or Flickr accounts with great photos, send me the link and I will add it to the resources on my main photo page. Contact Pauline.

Third time lucky!

First I set up PhotoPost to display my photos on Slow Europe because I was used to it from SlowTrav. But I don’t like how it works and it was overkill for what I needed, so I looked for a better solution.

I found Gallery2 which is great software with easy to change templates. I uploaded my photos again. But it never clicked for me and was once again overkill for what I needed.

» Read the rest of this entry

Eight hours later - finished the upgrade. Upgrade was easy-peasey but interrupted by the snow stopping so went out to pickup our mail (they seem to be plowing more streets in Santa Fe this winter), endless loads of laundry (just got back from a 10-day trip to Tucson AZ), listening to Talk of the Nation (the news is a little too interesting these days), phone calls, making dinner (cauliflower and carrot soup, brown rice). Now we are settling into watch the season finale of Dexter and Californication which we missed when we were away.

I still have to figure out what changed with the new release (other than the wonderful redesign of the Dashboard). And upgrade the Cotswolder blog.

I used to think in Blog posts, but now I think in Tweets. One or two short sentences to summarize any event. Our friend Colleen (SlowTalk moderator) joined us for a few days on the trip and I showed her Twitter - now she is Tweeting. Colleen and Steve were feeding me possible Tweets the whole time.

Since we are chatting, I will add that I realized that the home page for Slow Europe did NOT say that the site was not launched yet (DUH!!), so for anyone who thinks my lame home page and blog are it - you are in for a treat in a few weeks. The programing is done, the database is mostly loaded. I have to write some of those bothersome “words” - and then it will be ready.

Sign up if you want me to email you when we launch. We have great lists of recommended vacation rental agencies and resources for Europe and I can hardly wait to share them.

Starting the upgrade.

Several people posted comments over the last few days that did not get “approved” by me until today. Sorry! I was fiddling with my settings and set the comments email notification off, when I thought it was on. I love getting comments, but don’t get that many - so was happy to see a backlog of comments from the last week.

I read a lot of blogs - mostly from my SlowTrav friends - and don’t comment often. I should because I know how much I like reading comments. So, keep those comments coming. I have my settings correct now and will see them. If you have commented before, your comment is posted immediately.

Avatars

I changed the blog to display avatars from Gravatar. Wordpress blogs can be set to display avatars created on Gravatar (they are linked to your email address).

I tried to sign up for Gravatar, but it said I had already signed up. So I got it to send me my password, logged in and set up my avatar. Then I noticed that it said “Hello Poptarticus”. My friend Shannon runs a blog called Poptarticus. Recently I switched her blog from Movable Type to WordPress. I must have signed her up on Gravatar using my email. Gravatar calls me Poptarticus and I don’t think there is any way to change it :)

Long story to say - check out Gravatar if you post comments on WordPress blogs.

Subscribe to My Blogs

I run two blogs - this one on Slow Europe and one on Cotswolder. I have both set up on FeedBurner for email subscription. Plunk your email address into the form on my blog sidebar and click SUBSCRIBE. FeedBurner sends you an email confirmation and then you receive an email every time I do a new post to the blog.

I really like this feature and have subscribed to several blogs. Usually I sit down and go thru all the blogs I read to see who has new posts but with this I get an email showing the new post, so I don’t miss posts if I forget to check blogs.

But not all blogs are set up with FeedBurner. If you run a blog, put a FeedBurner subscribe link on it! You can add a form to your sidebar or a link to a form page. There are other things you can do with FeedBurner, but I have not figured them out yet. FeedBurner is now part of Google.

I just checked and 4 people are subscribed to Slow Europe - cool! I thought only I had subscribed. But I would love to have more subscribers. Cotswolder has 2 subscribers, me and my husband Steve (I wonder why Steve has not subscribed to my Slow Europe blog?).

» Read the rest of this entry

The end of Daylight Savings time brings back last years bug in Dreamweaver. Read my earlier blog post for details - Dreamweaver crashes when editing a file.

My friend Chris emailed me that Dreamweaver had crashed and she did not know why, which made me remember when it happened to me last year. I sent her the link to my old blog post without reading it again (that shows you how detail oriented I can be) and she wrote back saying it was probably the cause since we had just switched off Daylight Savings.

I am posting this again so any other Dreamweaver users that have mysterious crashes will find this post when Googling. Happy coding!!

www.google.com/chrome/

I downloaded it yesterday and I like it! The download and install is quick and easy (and free). Happy to say that all my websites work with it.

I lost all of yesterday to a mysterious problem with Dreamweaver CS3, the software I use to manage the www.slowtrav.com site. I am posting this because this will happen to everyone using Dreamweaver 9 (CS3) with PHP or ASP code.

I was going crazy trying to figure out what might be wrong. It took me hours to even figure out which pages crashed and why. When I determined what was happening, I posted on the Dreamweaver Support Forums and got my answer.

There is a known bug that happened with Dreamweaver CS3 after we switched off Daylight Savings Time. Read the TechNote Dreamweaver CS3 crashes after Daylight Savings Time ends.

I was working on the website and everything was fine. Then I opened up a page that I have worked on many times before and that had not changed recently. This page contained regular HTML and some ASP includes. Whenever I selected text or clicked and dragged the mouse to select text, Dreamweaver crashed with the error: Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Other pages, with only ASP SSI includes did not crash. Other pages where I call ASP scripts with variables did not crash. I took the page apart and rebuilt it piece by piece until I found the part that made Dreamweaver crash. It was a call to one specific script in the format:

:) Removing the code example, it made my blog crash!!

This script had not changed. The page had not changed. How on earth could this piece of code that had been there for years be the problem? The page on the website worked fine - it was only when I looked at this page in Dreamweaver, that made Dreamweaver crash.

I found the answer on the Dreamweaver Support Forums. I would have gone there sooner, but I did not even know what question to ask! I am posting this here in case someone else is running into this.