Category: Blogging

Endangered Species: Travel Blogger – About Getting Death Threats – What would you do?

Justice Denied IPI

This morning I received an e-mail from a fellow travel blogger. The mail contained a comment of a reader who is not amused by the author’s posts, to say the least.

The comment reads [off course I have edited out the foul language]:

Youguys have nothing but trying s**ttiest to pick on someone else’s business website and whatever youguys are doing is such a bad idea.
I will find out who the f**k youguys are and hire some sort of vietnamese gangs to f**k anyone whoever are female in your f**king
family.
then I would love to see your f**kin’ head chopped off and have all kinds of s**t down in your f**kin’ neck, alright?
Don’t go around and do things like that and if I ever get to see this kind of s**t once more then since I know who the f**k you are and you better be careful…
Thanks for the co-operation…

Sic! This is not funny. What to do? Erase it as spam? My first reaction is “A big no! Lodge a complaint with the provider through which the comment was posted and the provider used as “e-mail” adress.”…but it is very easy to impersonate somebody so there is no guaranty the perpetrator will be found. Furthermore I would lodge a complaint with the local police.

So most likely it won’t help. However further than that you couldn’t go if you’re an average blogger on a small budget (smaller at least than the Landlord of my prior post who can afford to sue first and talk later). Maybe it helps getting it out of your system.

If you look up death threats in various search engines you get all sorts of results. At least you’ll see it happens more. Austrian based I.P.I. International Press Institute from which I borrowed the picture, watches over Free Speach. But further than noticing that journalists are threatened and even murdered and offering public concern. They offer no handbook how to handle threats…

The incident kept in the back of my mind and I decided to post about it. Recently another befriended travel blogger got a threat of a civil law suit and took a sabattical week to get it out of his system. I hope this helps my friend getting it out of his system. I also hope the community of travel bloggers offers some thoughts here.

What would you do?

I Blog – Five Years Already!


I was too busy to notice it myself, but my first blog post dates back to June 5, 2004.

Rather than looking back in detail, which might be a bit boring, I’ve decided to finally complete the English translation and enhancement of my first ever power point presentation.

Ifitt had asked me for a presentation in Dutch for their Dutch day of Enter09, their annual conference. The 2009 edition was held in Amsterdam in January, 2009. The brief was to tell something about the do’s and don’ts by a blogging hotelier. Look for yourself:-)

Am curious to have your reactions:-)

Lost under the Hood

Lost under the Hood - Tim Street / French Maid TV

Why I got lost under the hood of computers, software and camera’s the last couple of weeks which prevented me from churning out many new blog posts that I have in my sleeve:

  • I upgraded to WordPress 2.8, but had to upgrade to Thesis 1.5.1. first. I just had installed Thesis 1.5 last month on the recommendation of fellow travel bloggers Todd Lucier and Darren Cronian.
    In upgrading to Thesis 1.5,1 I lost a lot of my Thesis 1.5 settings. It seemed to be a bug somewhere, but I couldn’t pinpoint where and lost a lot of time getting the blog in order once more.
  • For future reference I’m listing some bloggers that use the Thesis Theme and give good advice on the ins and outs:
  • And Some Travel Bloggers who use Thesis:
  • I’m trying to really understand SEO for bloggers … a bit cumbersome. Time consuming reading. However i did install a robots.txt file for both my blogs and the Sitemap generator Plugin is now working correctly…
  • During a thunderstorm I closed my office server down. It had been running year after year under Novell Netware 5.
    I was prepared for this happening: A brand new server which was already loaded with Netware 6.5 stood ready for the occasion. One tiny problem: It appeared that I needed to redo the login scripting…having some special needs as I still rely on some DOS programs – not solved yet….
    Meanwhile I succeeded to lose all my Windows XP settings for e-mail, site logons and so on. Although I have reasonable backups…the backups of my settings just didn’t work. Lesson learned: Do operate as a separate user under Windows XP without administrator permissions: Once you change an XP administrator’s password (I was only hitting a password sync button in the Netware login screen that did not give the usual XP warning) all his settings are lost. Darn! A lot of time to reconnect e-mail accounts….login passwords….sites…etcetera.
  • Some hard disks are getting full. Dire need for some time consuming reshuffling
  • Next week I’ll act as a wedding photographer. While trying some lenses and new flashcards it turned out that inadvertently I had obtained not working white label flashcards for my camera’s. Yesterday was Veterans’Day in The Hague. I lost approx 180 photos I took.
  • In preparation for that same wedding shoot I’m also struggling uphill to understand PhotoShop better than I did.
  • Have had some discussions with Tripadvisor as to why some guest reviews did not appear on their site. Wanted to report about that, but didn’t have time (yet?). Why would I actually want to have any reviews there?
  • I was invited by e-mail to attend the opening of The Hermitage Openening in Amsterdam. I Filed the form they required to get a ticked, but never got the ticket…alas.
  • Then there is that discussion again about the Dying Blogs: in the Guardian by Charles Arthur by Shiny Shiny and by Copy Blogger

Deep Sigh…continuing struggling…and maybe updating this…

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on July 17, 2010 at 3:01 pm9

2009 The Hague Sculpture – Read My Lips

2009 The Hague Sculpture _MG_0007

On Tuesday June 9, 2009 I was present at the official opening of the 2009 The Hague Sculpture exposition by the Prime Minister of The Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende.
First there was a opening session in one of the oldest churches of The Hague, The “Kloosterkerk” (or church of the convent). The CEO of The Hague Sculpture , The Mexican Ambassador in The Hague, a trustee of The Hague Sculpture and some other persons held speeches. The Prime Minister got the first brochure of the exposition. Thereafter the company moved outside where the sculptures of Javier Marin were installed, for the official opening ceremony.

There the company stopped at the sculpture from which I took the above photo on beforehand. In a sequence of my photo’s there was an exchange between the CEO and Xavier Marin. I have made a small “video” of this exchange, because there are too many photo’s to present them all here on the blog. Look for yourself:

Picasa Video
I’m not so much a video person. It takes far too much time for me. But this little video (without sound) I could produce reasonably quick with Picasa 3, the free Google photo (management) program. Picasa is also very good for organizing many photo’s…I have approximately 20,000 and counting on my computer, deep sigh.

The Ceremony
Then there was the opening ceremony itself: The freeing of a bundle of balloons that, of course, partially got hung in the branches of the trees over the sculptures. How dumb!

20090609 The Hague Sculpture Official Opening _MG_0153

Storytlr
I have experimented in telling this little story via Twitter by uploading some of the pictures to Twitpic and then putting them together in Storytlr: [ Update: Originally there was a working link here, but unfortunately the Storytlr service has discontinued since March, 2010]

Storytlr-The-Hague-Sculpture-Opening---Read-My-Lips

Unfortunately the thumbnails of Storytlr are a bit too unsharpened to make it a nice looking story. I don’t have a mobile telephone with a camera ( I prefer better quality photo’s of ordinary cameras, but it won’t be long and then the mobiles can compete with ordinary cameras), but it is clear to me that Storytlr is a nice app to spread a life stream story.

More photos of the exhibition on Flickr
If you are interested in more photos of The Hague Sculpture, I refer you to my Flickr Sets 2009 The Hague Sculpture and 2009 The Hague Sculpture – Official Opening on June 9, 2009

PS In the meantime I succeeded to upgrade the Worpress Version of this Blog to WP 2.8, which was a hell of a job, as I tried to cut corners.

Last edited by GJE on March 21, 2010 at 2:31 pm

Thesis: A new Theme for the Blog

For those that know this site and see differences from a prior visit: Yes I have changed theme(s). From now on I am using just one theme: the thesis theme.

I am still working on getting everything in place and displayed in a way I like. But I got hooked to the theme after I got several recommendations by fellow bloggers. I just plunged ahead and installed it. The main reason for change is that I did some reading about SEO (search Engine Opimization) and installed some dedicated plugins.

I like thesis’ flexibility, professionalism and the care for SEO. I also hope it loads faster than my Misty theme did. As it is so flexible, I don’t see any need anymore to use the theme switcher. The disadvantage of a theme switcher with several themes running is that every nut and bolt you change, has to be changed on every theme separately. With three and sometimes four themes running aside, that kept me from focusing on producing content. In addition this theme is so flexible that with few alterations I can completely change the look and feel of the blog, without even losing it’s main features.

In an update of this post I will flesh out some thoughts and findings.

Update 1 May 8, 2009:
Thusfar I have paid attention to:

  • Getting a favicon.ico. Now you will see my little avatar next to the URL. Why? because I saw that many browsers that hit the site want one and get a 404 message. I discovered a nifty WordPress Plugin 404 Notifier from Alex King that logs 404 hits and put them in an RSS reader for you to check them out. Higly recommended!
  • Added avatar, background image (needs a bit of tweaking as yet), background color, played around with sizes, borders and so on to get the look and feel I’m so used to. Two columns lay out. And still a lot of scrolling. I won’t place back the header image as you get more space to read the last post.
  • Placed back the various widgets. This is done via snippets of code you can insert via text widgets. Ideally you bring all tweaks in one of two seperate files that you can carry along. But then you need a lot of special Php knowledge and that is a bit steep a learning curve yet.
  • Next steps will be either a 3 column lay out, or special pages for Archives and for Links, that will result in less scrolling.
  • As a keen photographer I will have more space for bigger photos.

Still my question remains: What are your first impressions?