Category: 101 Happy Hotelier

All you may want to know about Happy Hotelier and his blog

Happy Hotelier becomes a Trend Hunter

TrendHunterLogoAd468x60c

I have Trend Hunter Magazine in my Google Reader for some time, and was browsing and searching the site. Accidentally I signed up, because it induces you to look at “unpublished trends” and then you get curious, wouldn’t you? It is free anyway.

After signing up I noticed that at Trend Hunter Magazine you can maintain your own Blog alike page, which they call “Portfolio”. You can use it to comment, they call it “to crave”, posts of other Trend Hunters. You can also submit trends.

So my Portfolio at Trend Hunter is now: Happy Hotelier, Trend Hunter. On that page you see the most recent trends I have submitted. Actually I was quite surprised that the first three trends that I submitted, both from this Blog as from my other blog Chair Blog, were published almost immediately.

If you want to see my “favorites”, then hit Happy Hotelier Favorites. To be precise: the header of the page is the same, but the url is different.

The amazing thing is that the whole site is just a One Man Show: Jeremy Gutsche’s.

If you want to know more about Jeremy, click the Interview with Jeremy Gutsche, Founder of Trend Hunter by Nigel Goodwin.

Each Trend Hunter has his own page. I’m not sure whether you see only trends that were published when you are not logged in on those pages. Each published trend has the respective hunter next to the full post. So when you get used to it, it has nice navigation possibilities.

There are of course plenty of lists of top Trend Hunters: Those with the most published trends, those with the most cravings, those with the most traffic and so on. There is also a community with a “Wall” to write on.

In addition to its main magazine it has several subject related “magazines”.
For me the Hip Hotel Reviews magazine is off course of interest. It has a separate URL as well at Hot Hotel Reviews.

I also noticed that famous international trendy design, interior, fashion and travel magazine cum website Wallpaper* signed up as Walpaper*, Trend Hunter recently. So I believe to be in good company of them and the more than 13.000 Trend Hunters.

Trend Hunter Magazine offers a 50/50 split of revenue from Google Adsence, but I am not very interested in getting paid per click.

All in all Trend Hunter Magazine has a lot of Web 2.0 features: User generated content, syndication, community building…and a Technorati authority of 1,169 and a Technorati rank of 1,898…not bad for a one man Blog, although assisted by 13.000 and something Trend Hunters. The fact that you are able to build a community with 13.000 and something people on your own is amazing in itself.

And thanks Jeremy for the help with my first steps on your platform with a bit idiosyncratic interface!

Happy Hotelier on Facebook

Some people believe Facebook is the hit for 2007 in community building. To say the least: It grows considerably.
Induced by A Luxury Travel Blog I have decided to give it a try, created an account on Facebook and started Facebook | Happy Hotelier.
Feel free to join!

Oops: I changed my 404 error template because of Blogflux

Oops, I have changed my 404 template today [Ed: It has changed again since this post].

I  was a member of Blogflux.

Blogflux is a combination of several things: A Blog directory that has organized and cataloged about 82,000 blogs by country and by topic (or tag if you whish). They have some Blog tools, among which mapstats that they have knitted together with Google Maps, a nice feature that I like. It enables you to see from where people land on your Blog. As a free member you can have a little bit of statistical analysis. In the pro version you can have some more statistical analysis.

You see from where the people look at your Blog by the position of the red blobs on the map and you see where they land on your Blog by clicking those little red blobs.

In my case you see for instance many clicks on the posts archived as number 211. When you wanted to know what post number 211 was about, you could click on the blob and were redirected to the actual post.

That was when I had my permalinks organized by date of the post and archive number of the post.

Unfortunately I could not relate each time archive numbers to individual posts unless I clicked them again.

Therefore I have changed my archiving method into date of the post and name of the post. Post 211 ) is now
http://happyhotelier.nl/2006/11/13/qbic-dutch-answer-to-easy-hotel-yotel-and-hotel-everland/. As Qbic is hot nowadays because of their recent opening and Yotel also because of their first pod hotel at Heathrow.

I found an alternative way of getting at the same post by post number which is very easy: http://happyhotelier.nl/?p=211

My older posts will remain organized in the old way, at least for a certain period, in certain search engines. People clicking trough from those search engine results are now landing on my 404 page. How stupid am I!

However I have decided to stick to this choice and apologize to all those landing on my 404 page.

I hope that the search engines gradually will find their way around this Blog when they re index this Blog and the error will fade out in the future.

We will see.

Update

As of november 2009 I have a plugin in place that enables you to redirect outside referrals to urls of your blog that are wrong because you have changed the way you archive posts. With the Google Webmaster help you can from time to time reapair errors. I have now redirected 211 to the actual post.

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on February 17, 2010 at 10:30 am

Cleaning up Happy Hotelier

Behind the screens I have been cleaning up Happy Hotelier….Well a bit: There remain more things to do.

CSS is great.

It took some time, but I found out where in the CSS Stylesheet I could change a bit ot two so that I don’t have to add manually “[strong] [/strong]” anymore when I simply want a link shown Bold. The consequence is that now I have to delete a lot of those….So be it. Why I bother? Well, when you have to use bifocals for reading like I do, you will be glad to find this to be a Blog in a font and a font size that is easily readable. I hate many of those “Stylish” Blogs that simply do not read. Take those horrible dark backgrounds….

Translations.

The WP plug in that I use is great. It makes it possible that search engines also capture keywords in foreign languages. However, in a strange way the links to the Google translation service work, but those that point to Alta Vista don’t work. So I have , temporarily, disabled the widget until I have figured it out. Also because the translate widget is in the way of XHMTL validation (not that there are not more errors left).

Del.Icio.us.

I am learning how to create simple javascripts to import on the flight bookmarks that I organize in Del.Icio.us. I will be fine tuning this. At least it gives me the means to keep track of the T-List and The L-List and My Del.Icio.us on separate pages. With their tagging button in my Firefox browser it is a lot easier than manually manage the links in the side bar. So I will be trying to change the manual links for scripted ones in the side bar in the near future.

Big Google Brother is watching you.

Despite the fears I have here – recently there is a lot of commotion in Europe over the CIA having full insight in all bank transactions carried out by Swift…Americans are not aware what occupation by a foreign country means… so they dictate the law after 9/11 – I have, for the moment, uploaded my feeds to my Google reader and show some of the interesting posts in a widget (apart little screen or frame) in my side bar. I am definitely interested in another possibility.

My first English interview.

March 1, 2007 Paul Johnson published an interview with me on his A Luxury Travel Blog.
On my wish list:

  • Solve the translation issues
  • Repair the validation errors
  • Find a better solution for the “Happy Hotelier’s RSS Picks” widget
  • Last comments widget
  • Add a couple of Digg and Del.Icio.us alike buttons
  • Related posts widget
  • Style switcher so that readers can choose how to read what I write
  • Most visited posts widget

Away with Google Adsense and Hurray for Google Reader

After my previous post I found out that indeed Google Reader gives you a possibility to add a widget to your own Blog which I have now installed. At the same time I have removed the Google AdSense widget, because collecting cents from clicks is not my primary aim with this Blog. I just Blog for the fun of it, to share with my readers and to learn an awful lot. Besides the adwords Google believes it has to insert are weird.
So let’s see how it works and what is your opinion?