Web Sites

France, anyone? Airfares are becoming more affordable after summer highs, and new websites, including YourTour ( www.yourtour.com), are busy crafting ideal itineraries for you. What's hot: Getting a suggested day-by-day itinerary that you can edit helps take the guesswork out of a from-scratch tour. Use the map and click on the region(s) you're interested in, select travel dates and specify whether you'll be traveling one way or round trip. Don't worry about including your favorite activities; that fine-tuning comes next.

The spotlight is on Rio de Janeiro now that it's been chosen as the host city for the 2016 Summer Games. If you are researching a trip to Brazil, don't miss Hiddenpousadasbrazil.com, an accommodations eye-opener that will inspire you to trade your hotel for an eco-trip, farm stay or hideaway in a colonial mansion overlooking the ocean. What's hot: If you know nothing about Brazil, HiddenPousadasBrazil will at the very least tell you what a pousada is (a place to stay)

Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at UCLA, knew that libraries all over the world had been digitizing their holdings. But he was frustrated by the difficulty in finding what he was looking for -- in particular, medieval manuscripts. A Google search for "Edward the Confessor" might turn up 20 pages of results before the book, the oldest surviving Anglo-Norman history of the king, appears; it's at Cambridge University, and they've put it online. Rather than telling Cambridge it was time they hired an expert in search-engine optimization, Fisher decided to collect links to these works himself.

As job losses mount, more people -- including those who are still employed -- are turning to career-development websites, a new study found. Nielsen Online reported a 20% increase in unique visitors to job-search and career-development sites in January -- 49.7 million, compared with 41.5 million a year earlier. The unemployment rate was 7.6% in January, the highest in more than 16 years. People 65 and over represent the fastest-growing group among visitors to job sites. CareerBuilder.

Los Angeles County officials this week launched a new "solar mapping" website, lacounty.solarmap.org, that lets residents and business owners determine whether their properties would benefit from solar power. The site evaluates a building's potential to generate solar power based on roof size, pitch and shade from nearby trees, buildings and mountains. By typing in an address, users can check a property's roof size, space for solar panels, potential electricity production, electricity savings, carbon reduction, nearby solar installations, utility company rebates and solar panel installer information.

Thanks to your frequent visits, latimes.com has seen the fastest growth of any top newspaper site over the last year. We're breaking more news than ever on latimes.com, we've expanded our blog network, we're publishing more stunning visual, interactive journalism, and we have savvy readers like you contributing to conversations. Now we're bringing you a site that's easier to read and use -- crisper, cleaner and better able to showcase the world-class journalism our newsroom produces around the clock.

Imagine a billboard of community events free of thumbtacks and tattered index cards, a sleek, stylish resource available 24 hours a day all over the world. In fact, it already exists. Known as the Event Center, it's the creation of a Chatsworth computer consultant, a cyberspace place where community groups can advertise their activities on the World Wide Web. The site is located at http://www.pacificnet.

Trying to figure out how to get to Asuza by bus? Or find out how to get around Paris by subway? You can hop on the information superhighway for help in navigating the asphalt highway. A wide array of transportation information is available online, from tips on bicycle commuting, to bus and train schedules, to descriptions of the cars that police drive throughout the country so that you can slow down in time.