Category: Blogging

Top Ten Travel Blogs – Technorati vs Invesp

Top-Ten-Travel-Blogs-according-to-Invesp

Those who follow this blog, know that I have spent quite some time with manually putting together top lists of travel bloggers according to Technorati in the past. The last one I published over a year ago on my TList page and for prior lists you can check out in my Tlist Category:

  1. The 300 of Halloween last year. which is also at the TList page
  2. The Update of January last year
  3. The update of December, 2007 ah but that post doesn’t give you a list itself…
  4. That of November, 2007

I did pray that someone would come up with a better measurement to replace my dumb work. Moreover at the time Technorati seemed too outdated and too infested with scrapers and sploggers and what all.

In June I discovered Frothy‘s Alexa only ranking.

Then came Invesp. I mentioned it already back in July, that put several measurement methods in a basket and created its own list of Top Travel Blogs.

From time to time I checked those and had a good reason not to go further with my own cumbersome list making.

But now Technorati has really cleaned its act and rolled out a completely new approach in their Blog ranking. I have a feeling that they are moving in the same direction as Google search is moving. A nice way of reinventing yourself Technorati!

Each ranking has its own pros and contras, but if you want to quickly orientate yourself about influential travelblogs you can have a look at both lists and make your pick, while I can concentrate on other content here:-)

Blogger Hopping – Meeting Gary Arndt

Blogger Hopping – Meeting Gary Arndt

I’m a passionate about people and always want to know more about people who interest me. Whenever possible, I try to connect in real life with the travel bloggers who I have met online already. So when I learned that Gary Arndt, the celebrity travel blogger of Everything Everywhere was passing through The Netherlands I jumped on the occasion and asked him to come along for a chat when time would permit. I had featured Gary already in my 10 Questions For” series in November of 2008 so from time to time we have online contact ever since.

The first photo proudly shows the result of this meeting: Gary in the garden of our little gem Haagsche Suites on July 3, 2009. The same garden that forms the logo of this blog. Off course asking attention for Haagsche Suites is one of the aims of this blog.

BTW Blogger Hopping is a term invented by Benji Lanyado.

Unfortunately we experienced a couple of Fails.

First Fail

At the time Gary was relying on his Ipod with WiFi connection to have contact with the outside world. Mostly through twitter. Much cheaper than the regular Iphone he has acquired since. So the meeting point was supposed to be a train station in The Hague. The problem being there are two important train stations in the Hague. Although I had tweeted to him that I was to pick him up at Den Haag HS – HS stands for Hollands Spoor from the time there were two separate railway companies serving The Hague – or Den Haag in Dutch- around 12.30, he apparently missed that tweet and didn’t show up. I waited about two hours hoping he would have an opportunity to connect via Twitter and I was checking my Blackberry every 5 minutes. After I had returned home he came trough on twitter as he had found some Internet café in the city. I collected him in the city. Clearly he had been waiting at the other station…Den Haag Centraal Station…all in all we lost 3 hours.

Second Fail
Clearly the second Fail is the fact that there is no free WiFi in the trains and neither in the train stations of the Netherlands. However, recently Dutch Government has announced that they will set aside funds to enable trains to have free WiFi in the Dutch trains.

Third, fourth and fifth Fail

  • Two days before I had picked up my new camera, a Canon Eos 5D II that I had ordered to enable me to make a killer back up photoshoot of the great wedding of the daughter of dear friends in that weekend. Mighty proud I was to show it off to Gary. Off course I wanted to use it when Gary and I roamed The Hague. The day before I had already shot some photos on a flash card that came with the camera. Very unfortunately it appeared later that day that that flash card (white label) was not functioning correctly. Despite several trials and errors almost all photos of that second and third July went down the drain. Luckily I noticed it before the wedding
  • Gary stayed overnight and obviously he Liked that part of his stay. Unfortunately I had to pull away for a formal dinner party that evening and had almost no time to chat with Gary as I would have liked. The next day I made up with a little Den Haag high lights tour
  • Only recently some of the photos came up again, because I had written the recovered photos into an obscure map somewhere on my computer that I lost remembrance of during the busy summer months. Hence this post appears only now.

Sixth Fail: big annoying Thalys Fail

Gary was on his way to London and wanted to make the trip with Eurostar. The first leg of that trip goes with Thalys, a train between Amsterdam and Paris. He had to change train in Brussels South station. As of yesterday the Thalys does take a new route that skips The Hague entirely. Gary had somehow managed to book an Internet ticket through a European site of Eurostar. When I brought him to the station the ticket office there refused to change his voucher for a ticket, claiming they couldn’t do that because it was an (“Invalid?”) European ticket. How stupid and how embarrassed I felt about this. I talked with the train’s supervisor and pushed Gary into an earlier train that the one he was scheduled to take, because that was delayed and waiting for that could mean Gary missing the EuroStar from Brussels to London. Later I heard from Gary that he finally got his ticket in Brussels….

Later, In September I had a similar annoying experience with the Thalys. We had a group booking from Rotterdam, but I was not allowed to buy a separate leg from The Hague to Rotterdam, notwithstanding the fact that the Thalys then still stopped in the Hague. WiFi in the Thalys is horrible expensive and finally when the group entyered the Thalys in Rotterdam it appeared their booking system was totally belly up as our whole wagon had its seats double booked. It was for the calmness of the supervisor who patiently gave everybody a seat in another wagon that there was no row at all.

Well luckily we were not so unfortunate as the partridge taken by a Thalys of the photo in Paris:-)

Post Alia
These fails put a shadow over this meeting, but after all Gary and I will always have a good story to share and the longer ago the series of fails happen the more likely you are to have fun over it with and a good laugh…forgetting the aggravations.

This is a Dutch Mars Ad which says in Dutch – directly to Gary now-: nevertheless – “Twas fun, next time again?”

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on December 7, 2016

Bits and Pieces

I’ve Transferred the links I missed from the old server for the second time to here. After my ISP crashed two or three times I’m glad today there were no crashes.

I’ve deleted most content from the old server now. Finally I can concentrate on other things than going backward and forward. Especially on the enormous backlog of posts I want to publish here.

Nobody tells you that when you export and import a WP site the photos you’ve uploaded get resized. In itself that is not so much of a problem, but but but, all of a sudden I find photos in duplicate triplicate or quadruplicate, depending on when uploaded and at what size put here in the blog…when I moved to Thesis I was glad to be able to post photos of 600 pix width rather than the old 460 pix width that I used….and now all of a sudden I am using far more space on the servers than I used to do on the old server….darn another cleaning job to do.

I’ve been under the hood of the design and have removed the background photo of the garden, because I found looking at the blog as a whole it distracted too much from the photos and the content. In addition it seemed to load from the server as one of the last items which made loading annoyingly slow.

I’ve changed the logo to one that is simpler and where the name of the blog is a bit better visible and without the tag line

With the 1.6 Thesis theme it is very easy to change fonts, sizes and colors of characters and colors of backgrounds. All in all the design is a bit cleaner now.

The next step is to bring the links and archives to a separate page and bring back the number of posts to 5 rather than 10 on the landing page and remove some widgets as they slow up the site. But then I would like my pagination back.

Stay tuned.

Winding down from 2009 WordCampNL – My Heroes

Happy-Hotelier-at-WordCampNLA rare photo of this photographer in action at WordCampNL.
Thank you Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat of PunkMedia.nl, of Flickr | Eventbranche and  @Punkmedia !

General
I attended the first ever WordCampNL. It stands for a Dutch WordCamp or a WordCamp in the Netherlands.

At first I had decided not to go, because I was very very busy. I do have to admit I thought a WordCamp would be a gathering of WordPress Newbies and/or Geeks and/or Nerds only. However, this first Dutch WordCampNL proved me wrong in that respect and in many other aspects! The people attending were normal people like you and me, some savvy and some very savvy, but all passionate in reaching out, connecting and sharing.

Unexpectedly three people gently nudged me to come… so I decided to come… eventually and last minute.

I’ll wind down in three posts:

  1. My Heroes part 1 – The Organization of 2009 WordCampNL
  2. My Heroes part 2 – The Speakers of 2009 WordCampNL
  3. My Heroes part 3 – The People of 2009 WordCampNL

Lessons Learned
WordCampNL confronted me and made me realize a couple of important things about myself in relation my attempts in proper blogging here at Happy Hotelier.

I’m not so much a talker by nature and I have to admit I’ll never be a talker. In addition I’m a two fingers typist. I’m more of an observer. I’m a reasonable photographer and I’m more than averagely interested in people. Portray photography is I the type of photography I like most. So I have to stop behaving as if I’m a writer. ll have to admit I’m more an observer who shares his observations. I think that is also important with respect to the styling and the lay out of this blog to acknowledge this more explicit that I did before. Thank you WordCampNL.

I’m not so good in multitasking as I would have liked. I cannot listen to presentations and tweet about it and make photos at the same time. It means that I also won’t be taking my eee book to future events and will not be twittering live from events. I will concentrate on taking high quality photos and adding some observations to the photos I’ll publish after the event.

The third thing is that it was a great opportunity to connect more with fellow Dutchman. Not that I didn’t connect already, but now even more so.

My Heros – Part 1 – The Organization of 2009 WordCampNL

The organization and the venue Seats2Meet in Utrecht were impeccable. What impresses me most is the “after sales services” offered. Unlike other events, the organization is still fully engaged and do their utmost to make the experience complete by providing after the event content. All keynotes in the main room were video recorded and will be published soon. There were approximately 170 persons irl and approximately 300 people following the event via live streams and twitter. I count already 465 photos of at the Flickr group WordCamp Nederland

The heroes of the organizing team:

@KoffieKitten-_MG_1524aLisa Rouissi (@KoffieKitten) of KoffieKitten and Orange Buzz NL. I had met her already at the first ever #TweetUpTheHague that she had organized together with Suzy Ogé. I still have a post about that somewhere up in my sleeve. She was on the organizing team. Constantly yawning we drove together to Utrecht via a deviant way as the road to Utrecht was blocked due to maintenance that early Saturday morning. She was one of the persons who nudged me on Friday. Thank you Koffiekitten!

Kaj-Rietberg-@-WordCamp-NL-by-@happyhotelier_MG_2028
Then we have Kaj Rietberg (@KajRietberg) of Kaj Rietberg.

@DeFries-@-WordCamp-NL-by-@happyhotelier_MG_1925
Joeke Remkus de Vries (@DeFries) of De Fries.

@ErnoHannink-@-WordCamp-NL-with-@LorelleonWordPress-by-@happyhotelier_MG_2001
Erno Hannink (@ErnoHannink) of Erno Hannink NL and in English Erno Hannink Com a fellow Thesis Theme user. Boy has that man a big smile! Here he is in dire admiration for one of the speakers, Lorelle VanFossen, @LorelleonWP of Lorelle on WordPress, who was the second person who nudged me that Friday. Thank you Lorelle!. @Punkmedia here in the background.

@JeanPaulH-@-WordCamp-NL-by-@happyhotelier_MG_1960

And, not to forget Jean Paul Horn (@JeanPaulH) of Textopus and Iphone Club NL who I knew already, but that’s another story. He was part of the team, acted as a great speaker and also as a sponsor of the venue.

A Great Thank You! to all of you for a great event!

Last edited Last edited by GJE on April 3, 2012 at 4:47 pm. I hope they put the publish button somewhere else on the dashboard in a future WordPress release. Accidentally hitting that button happens too frequent. In addition I realized in 2012 that I only did one post about the event in stead of the 3 I anticipated…

WP Meetup in Rotterdam

 

Shortly after the first WordCampNL some WordPress die hards found Lorelle prepared to privately give some tips and tricks in Rotterdam in what was believed to be the first WP MeetUp of The Netherlands. It was Cool. Again first the photos.

The first photo shows the Unilever head office in Rotterdam. Behind that was the place of the meeting. While I took the photo It was a bit in remembrance of my late brother in law who was in charge of organizing the delivery of this building on behalf of Unilever and who orchestrated the moving from the old head office to this building by Unilever. That was eons ago. i also remember his sleepless nights when glass panels started to fall from the building…