Weekly Roundup Friday 23 July 2010

 Wow.  What a roller-coaster ride of a
week it was.  The conversion to the new newsletter format ended up
with us losing 2,000 readers.  Surprisingly, most of these losses
came from people who presumably didn't recognize the new format and
simply reported it to their email service as being spam.  Some
people have a very fast trigger finger, don't they – even people who
have been formerly happily receiving the newsletter for many years.

I'm now shaking the dust out of the new
system, and have ended up with lots of stuff for you today in our first
live run of the new format.  In addition, as you'll see shortly (or
as you may have already seen if you are getting faster updates) I've
created a webpage with a
step
by step explanation of how to log in to the new newsletter system and
adjust it to your exact preferences.

The next big thing this week was – and still
definitely is – the

50% off sale at Pro Travel Gear.  Be sure to read down to the
item about this great deal sale, and hurry on over to take advantage of
it before it expires at Sunday on midnight.

While there have been plenty of blog
articles added during the week, I made a point of creating a new feature
article too.  This article addresses and answers an annoying
challenge that at one time or another has afflicted many of us. 
Scroll on down for more on this or click directly to the website link
here :

This Week's Feature Article : 
How
and Why Air Fares Change When You Go to Book Them :  On average,
airlines sell one seat per flight every other day.  So how is it that in
the two minutes between being shown an airfare via an online booking
site and going to buy it, the fare apparently disappears and is replaced
with a higher one?  Read an interesting
explanation of the behind the scenes factors at work, then answer the
question for yourself – is this bona fide or is it bait and switch?

We had two short term opportunities come up
this week.  One of them was a request from a New York Times writer
for people to contribute quotable comments for an article he is writing. 
That opportunity has come and gone already.  The other is
Wednesday's news of the special sale at Pro Travel Gear.

If you get one of our 'Express' or Daily
email newsletters, as well as or instead of the weekly newsletter, you'd
get these notifications very much faster.  One possible solution is
to select the Express summary option (as well as a weekly option) so you
can quickly/lightly look at new articles as they are written, and choose
whether you go over to the website to read them in full on the spot or
wait until the full newsletter compilation on Friday.

Was this newsletter too long?  If so,
you could consider switching from the Full Text version of the weekly
newsletter to the Summary version.

Please refer to the help page for
instructions on
how
to make any such changes to your newsletter settings.

Lastly, it is National S'mores day in early
August.  Read on down to the bottom for some

trivia about S'mores.

In case you wondered, the picture was
taken with my new iPhone 4 – very good quality for a camera/phone image,
and was done by my not quite six year old daughter.  Maybe she will
become, like her great-grandfather before her, a prominent photographer. 
🙂