Category: Blogging

Travel In Blogs : A new travel community?

Recently the blog Travel in Blogs seems to have started a sort of Travel Blog community. From the outset it seams a great idea, but there is hardly anything available on the site about the site, about who does it and why they do it.

What do you think?

Added 15 March:

The basic idea is that Bloggers submit stories that can be voted upon like the Diggs and Del.icio.us es of this world. In one view you can get the hottest posts. But there are many other alike initiatives. For the moment I am reasonably content with the Google reader which loads very fast and gives you a fast means of browsing the blogs you like to read. Another issue is that the admin (whoever he may be) seems to get his ideas from a blog that looks as if it is a pure scraper or maybe even a Splog. I wont mention it here because I don’t want to grant it a link.

It is registered in the name of a thus far undisclosed person at the same address as the “aggregators” or “scrapers” i am referring to:

DreamHost Web Hosting
417 Associated Rd #324
Brea, CA 92821
US
+1.2139471032

Record created on 2007-03-09 18:34:56.
Record expires on 2008-03-09 18:34:56.

Added after the comment of David of Travelhorizons:

There are some ramifications here why I am still not sure.

I suppose if it would be non – human, they would have programmed the spider bot so that it would publish posts (I submitted 3 or 4 myself) as soon as possible and would not leave them unattended for 48 hours or more. No attention is much more human than bot alike I would think.

Furthermore, I believe that I have seen Albert Barra making a comment somewhere that he had to do with this Blog. But I can’t reproduce the comment anymore. That would also explain why there is a Spanish section. Ah, wait, it was not a comment I can reproduce what I thought I had seen: it is this post More about the T-List, on his Blog, but my Spanish is insufficient to understand what he tells in his post, even if I use Alta Vista Babel Fish.

Also it is notable that as a comment on a post by self proclaimed spin doctor Martin Schobert, of the Austrian Blog in the German language, Kulinarisch Reisen (i.e. Travel Culinary) about The T-List a certain Danay asks attention for the Blog in question:

Can the T-List go Web2.0?

We have recently launched TravelinBlogs.com.

TIB is a social network for the Travel and Hospitality Community. This site allows you to submit an article that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page.

We encourage all Blogs of the T-List to sumbit their content and get additional traffic to their blogs.

Best regards,
Danay

Danay seems human and like me not a native English speaker (“sumbit”).

So again: is it a hoax of for real, what do you think?

Update:

I’ve taken out the link as, sadly, when Albert tried to move the site to another server, he lost all of it. Later I met Albert at WTM in London. He is a very likable person.

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on February 25, 2010 at 9:14 am

The New T-List

The New T-List

The T-List (and L-List) initiative is spreading and spreading.

I try to keep track of both on my T-List and L-List page and before I add the suggestions of Cesar, I counted today 122 T-Listed Blogs and 44 L-listed Blogs.

And now Cesar Gonsales of the multi authored Argentina’s Travel Guide has given it a further kick by his post The New T-List and giving us an easy to read Table of the T-List which is most informative and he also created a new logo.

Cesar is the is the Layout-and-Code- Monkey-in-Residence for Argentina’s Travel Blog. He will occasionally sneak in a post, but for the most part stays behind the scenes and lives vicariously through reading (and editing, and laying out, and uploading) the wonderful adventures of our other writers.

But Cesar has to do a little bit more of copying and pasting when he wants to make the list complete 🙂

Great Idea by the way to put your country on the map: A Country Travel Blog Guide.

Its amazing to see how these initiatives start to reflect all over the world. Also notable is that the more the lists spread, the more well known travel and tourism Blogs are creeping into the lists:-)

After adding Cesar’s suggestions I count 133 blogs on the T-List

The Trump Blog: A hilarious k.i.s.s. comment

Yes, Mr “The Don” Donald Trump himself Blogs as well. In a recent advice to Keep It Short, Quick, Crisp and Clean or K.I.S.S. he gives some advice, but look at the comments of his post where I found this one:

Posted by member1528271 on 03/06/2007 10:25 AM

Hi Mr. Trump. I am a chinese student in GuangZhou.

Tonight, a hearsay arounds me: You are bankrupt.

And I think “Oh! Gee! This cool guy is caught in bankrupt again?!”

Then I think “He is bankrupt means he has 1.7billion buck to rebuild his owning bussiness”

I don’t believe in that hell hearsay I mean. Now it is proved!

I think you are the guy if you are in desert and come across a commercia team, you will back on your track and get rich again.

In my opnion, you are the finally winner though “The Apprentice”, right?

I am appiciate to leave here, thank you!

By the way your chinese name is ???(Donald) ??(Trump)

There are more hilarious comments and I must say I appreciate The Don for not moderating them.

Unusual Scottish quote of Happy Hotelier

Edinburg Evening News Logo

I am checking out Netvibes.

I do a search via Netvibes’ Google search module with key word “Happy Hotelier” and I get this:

John Gibson wrote:

WHAT I didn’t know about happy hotelier Peter Tyrie, owner of the Glasshouse in Edinburgh’s Greenside and former owner of the Balmoral and Caley, is that he used to be on nodding terms with Sophia Loren and husband Carlo Ponti and another Italian screen goddess Gina Lollobrigida.

It was his turn to host the Savoy Gatronomes’ 36th annual reunion dinner at his place on Saturday. To qualify, everybody needed to have kick-started their career in the industry working in reception for at least a year in London’s universally acclaimed Savoy.

Says Mr Tyrie: “Working in reception there served as my introduction to the business – it still looks good on the CV – and during my stint on the desk I checked in and out big name movie stars. La Loren and La Lollobrigida have always stood out in my memory.”

Tell us why, Mr T.

This was the first time the Gastronomes, who flew from St Petersburg, Geneva, Venice and New York, had gathered in Scotland.

For many, an initial taste of the haggis and assault by bagpipes.

They won’t forget in a hurry their Glasshouse experience in the shadow of Calton Hill. The haggis cooled as, Lanson-champagned, they left their tables en masse to gawp through the windows at the eclipse of the moon. One giant rush by mankind as they surged back to finish their far-from-steaming starter.

No call for phone legend

Shouldn’t it have rung an instant bell? Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, was born right here in Edinburgh in 1847, 160 years ago past Saturday.

You’d think BT would mark such an occasion with, say, a parade along Princes Street. Then again, you wouldn’t think that of BT.

Or the city itself would have organised a traffic-stopping tribute at the West End. You really wouldn’t expect that either.

People today are too busy prattling on their mobiles to give a damn.

Anyway, I, at least, rang Alexander on the day with my fondest wishes (I keep his telephone number in my contact book).

He was out when I called. But he asked me to leave a message on his voicemail.

“Alex,” I said, “you’re still not getting your native city’s respect. You’re as well out of it. Happy birthday regardless.”

In order to understand what he was writing about I had to copy the whole post. But now click the link and look at the comments…nice huh?..closed in the meantime.

My point is it is sometimes very funny how search engines (don’t) work.

The Famous Hotel History of the Savoy doesn’t mention there is a circle of Savoy alumni.

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