The season is almost upon us and, for those of you holidaying in Elounda this year, we hope you've managed to find some great deals. We are almost ready to launch our brand new Greece Holiday message board, with an Elounda forum and we hope that you will join up when it goes live. It will be the place to go for the latest tourism chat, video and photo links, news and arranging informal social get togethers in Elounda.

Don't forget to keep an eye on Sam's site too for his start of season news, roundup of the Elounda winter, updates etc. He gets some wicked shots, many more of which you should see this season. In a blatant plug I hope you checked out Anamnisis in 2006 (where the computer shop was - opposite the church) which should be getting a website soon. The owners are family of Sam, friends to me and great people with a shop full of delights!

If you've got any ideas for the first Informal Social Get Together of the year (around May 5th - 15th) your suggestions are welcome on the eZboard . Please feel free to use the new board to make impromptu arrangements too, whenever you are looking to go out in Elounda and catch up with friends you can ask who else is heading where.

As always, we welcome news about upcoming charity events, special events, demos latest and sports scores, which we are always happy to include in our news roundup at Elounda77.net. If you wish to become a trusted local news source, please let us know. We do have to make sure we actually know you are who you say you are first, in order to prevent pranksters and spammers from abusing our site, so please do not be offended if we ask you to introduce yourself in person at one of our G2Gs. News should be in English and Greek if you wish; commercial announcements will not be accepted for the News pages. Our News pages will be available to users of mobile devices

Business and Publisher News

You only have just over a month to get your webcard submissions in. 2007 Webcard submissions should be completed as soon as possible as we will be deleting all older files shortly. 2007 free Webcards may include up to 5 accepted photos. Each business's first submission for this season,  made before May 14th, will be included in the appropriate section as quickly as possible. 2007 webcards will be published until approx March 2008 when we will begin to accept free submissions again, for the 2008 season. Find out more here .

We're pleased to be able to offer upgraded Free Hosting accounts, from our network, to local businesses and residents for use with their own domain name. You will be able to pick up an invitation code at one of our Informal Social Get Togethers or Web Development and Advertising Meetings - the long titles for 'Parties' and 'Tech Stuff' . Freehost users can now have up to 50MB space and 5000MB/mo transer to use with a domain name registration they have. If your homepage receives more than 1000 unique views per month, you may apply to receive payment or advertising exposure from gr.EUclix.com for the ads you show on your site.

Businesses will be able to upgrade their Elounda77.net listing with paid advertising and submit an RSS feed URL for use in their webcard too, an excellent way to keep it updated with the latest news and special offers, and as freqently as they wish from their own website. Featured feeds will be aggregated together for Elounda77 visitors to see the latest from them all. With a company approved freelance photographer it is now also possible for businesses to access many more of our company services, including complete websites and customised advertising graphics, without having to directly use all our online systems. More information here

Our visitors, from across the holiday companies, and our local friends will be enjoying more informal get togethers this season. Why not join them and enjoy the daytime social or nighttime fun. It's a great opportunity for people to get to know the faces behind the sites?

Local merchants and publishers, using our free webspace or webcards or anyone just interested in general, will be welcome to join me for an informal Web Development and Advertising Meeting, to be organised at various times during the summer. Details will be available closer to each. It should offer you the opportunity to ask all those questions that you have about linking strategies, bandwidth use, social networking, PR, hosting terms and legal content, popular scripts, scams to avoid, Google, Adwords, Affiliate Programs, SEO, Pay per Click, Search Engine Marketing, AdCenter and more. Technical support for free services will be available in the form of peer discussion at the new Greece holiday forum.

All the best for the run up to the season,

Mike

As you may have noticed there are currently some big changes afoot and gaps at the Elounda77.net site. What's happening then?

Well, some sections will be moving, some sections will be going and some sections will be newly arriving as the Summer 2007 season approaches.

The existing message board has been a great platform for people to exchange their holiday messages over the past couple of years, but we seem to have reached the time when we find we've outgrown the present system. Consequently we will be launching a whole new Holiday board, for all islands and mainland areas of Greece, over at MakeItGreece.net and running on vBulletin. The old message board will remain open for a period of time, while users migrate over to the new board, after which it will be locked for new posts.

The comment form over time has become the subject of a huge amount of spam abuse, which has rendered it almost useless. As we have the alternative options of normal email and private message on the board we have removed the comment form from the site. The best of the comments that we managed to extract from the spam over time are posted on the message board welcome page.

We encountered problems with the Image Gallery script before Christmas, during the server's Plesk panel update. We hope that those users who emailed in to alert us saw the post on the message board about it. Apologies that I haven't managed to get a personal reply out to everyone. As we were already experiencing both editorial and scalability difficulties (managing requests for picture removals etc and multiple user permissions) we have decided to seek an alternative image management platform for the future, which again will be for pictures of all Greek areas and with links through to some of the most popular third party image sites. We will be sorting through the old Gallery files and publishing a 2003-2006 archive selection soon.

The two informal Get Togethers of 2006 were super evenings and we hope everyone else had a great time at both venues into the early hours. Big respect to your host, Sam, and a big congratulations on fatherhood too. 2007 should, hopefully, see quite a few more informal G2Gs so please feel free to bounce around any ideas for dates and places on the message board. We've also got a few ideas up our sleeves that should give visitors a reason to desert their sunlounger for a day, so keep checking back for updates as we run up to the 2007 season.

The site will be publishing more shots of the area as we update our pages in the coming months and we will be producing versions of a limited number of sections for Mobile Access and Greek Language. Pages will make greater use of network feeds and shared info, news and ads. The network will continue to produce information pages such as GreekAlphabet101.com, which will be of interest to the general visitor and featuring holiday and accommodation providers for the UK and other European markets. You'll also see the development of a number of additional pan Greece sites, where we can offer professional business platforms enabling, amongst others, property agents, marine dealers and private sellers the ability to market services, property, businesses and boats.

For Elounda businesses, groups and residents we're also planning on extending our Free Hosting, Free Templates, Webcards and Ad services to more local users. With the explosion of social networking sites, PR wires, video hosting sites, RSS and blogs there's never been as many ways of connecting up and making the internet work for you.

Hoping that spring finds everyone well and looking forward to a season of fun, sun and Elounda hospitality

Mike