Scrambling for things to chat about

We do keep an eye on our competitors sites to see what they are up to, whilst doing this I noticed an interesting post by Dale on the pubutopia forums. He mentions a Sunday Mirror article claiming that pubs are losing out on sales of 50 million pints of beer every month now.

The article suggests there are 58,000 pubs nationwide so that is somewhere short of a 1,000 pints a month that an average pub is losing. It blames the cheap supermarket beers and smoking ban. Which sounds reasonable, after all you can smoke at home and get cheaper drink, it is less sociable, but arguably so is the smoking ban. It really is no surprise that pubs have to find a gimmick to try and make sure they make up for these lost sales and pretty inevitable that we get so many gastro pubs.

Because I feel obliged to mention Pubs Galore at this point, if you know of any good gimmicks that a pub is using, make sure and put it as a recommendation for the pub on pubs galore. Really though it is just sad news to see the pressures pubs are put under.

I have gotten back to developing the town links, it is nearly there, but it is going slowly as I am learning how to use new (on me anyway) AJAX methodologies to do it. It is clearly better in a lot of ways, but I need to put more thought into the presentation as it could get very messy if we were to set up the whole site in the way I am playing with. I also have a couple of bugs to iron out from the last release (nothing to worry about, but one or 2 audits are making no sense, editing recommendations rather than creating them and the like.)

Hope you all have a good weekend.