Category: Mini Blogging

Bicycle Film Festival 2008: Amsterdam, Rotterdam or The Hague Mayor: Be alert for 2009!

Bicycle-Film-Festival-2008

I was busy, on the road, looking after our hotel guests and trying to revamp my other Blog, Chair Blog, therefore a little less attention here.

The revamping of Chair Blog is sticky: I went backward and forward with the theme and am back to square 1: Same old Misty theme, but a lot of more posts thanks to a nifty Tumblr inspired WordPress QuickPost Plugin. At the same time Chair Blog was accepted by Woopra. Hence I have decided to terminate my Tumblr activities and fade the Tumblr posts out by gradually deleting them and incorporate them into my main blogs…. My main problem with Quickpost is that my provider somewhere hides the MySQL database of WordPress in a way I can’t figure out…have to dig much deeper into PHP/MySQL. In addition I have to find a way to present photos in a consistent way… Maybe a reader has some clues for me.

In the meantime, rather than hiring writers as I see some of my fellow Bloggers do, I am trying to get my two daughters – Yes! Happy hotelier is also a Happy Father! – FilmGirl and DanceGirl, the former works at the Rotterdam Film Festival and the latter works at the Holland Dance Festival, involved here as they do travel a lot and could have a lot of content to offer..to no avail at this moment. I know they are sometimes readers here and hope they take the bait.

So I came across Bicycle Film Festival, a festival I wasn’t aware of, but that FilmGirl probably knows of. Quite interestingly it is featured in many cities: 17 in total acros the world, and probably a cheap thing to do in these miserable economic circumstances.

I am curious why we here in The Netherlands, as one of The Bicycle Countries don’t feature it. Therefore: Amsterdam, Rotterdam or The Hague Mayors be alert to get the 2009 edition in house!
Via Living in LA Without a Car

OMG: Earthquake in Reykjavik, Iceland

After trying to get some things done and staying away from Twitter this week a bit, I just logged on and got a first hand report from my Blogging friend Hjortur Smarason that Reykjavik just had a 6.7 Richter scale earthquake.

Twitter Over Capacity

I am almost certain Twitter is not over its capacity because of this earthquake. It is fluttering for some weeks now already.

I am experimenting away to get a decent screen shot from the conversation. Just to be able publish quickly I’ve copied and pasted this from Kwout:

Kwout 2

Hjortur on twitter via kwout

Am I saved by the bell?

Maybe: The point is this: Hjortur asked me two weeks ago, if I would be interested to go on a Cruise in Iceland and blog about it. I had to decline because right now I am much too busy and also because my readership just from the Netherlands is a bit too small…..It just might not be interesting enough for his client. His relating post is this one: A Great Opportunity for Travel Bloggers

Constance who he is referring to is one of the two lady Bloggers of the Dutch Blog Vakantie Blogo who I introduced to him and who went in my place. Sorry Constance!

Update:

And here a first picture of what happens at such earthquake:

Firts Picture of Iceland Earthquake Result

Source:MBL

Update 2: 01.30 AM Local Time

Funny to see that I beat CNN by approx 4 hrs.
Update 3
While in Iceland Constance even didn’t notice Iceland was hit by an earthquake, because she was at another part of the Island. She only heard about it from her husband when she phoned home….

Last edited by gje on December 13, 2016

Tumblr and Organizing Your Blog(s)

tumblr-logo

Background

While checking stats of my other Blog, Chair Blog, I saw a referral from a Tumblr account. I didn’t know what Tumblr is about. I got curious and dug further into the phenomenon.

About Tumblr, First Impression

Tumblr is a service to set up a Mini Blog. Its site doesn’t divulge much. It has a Blog, but that is updated scantily. For one reason or another I got curious plunged into it, started with an account and found out that it is really 1 2 3… and you have a mini blog up and running. It provides information about how to host it on your own hosting service. It has a couple of disadvantages: No archive that you can easily organize or navigate and no possibility to comment.

Here is a screen shot from my Dashboard:

Tumblr Dashboard Chair Blog | Tumblr
Tumblr Dashboard Chair Blog | Tumbler

Travel Blog Carnival

I used it to put together my prior post, the week 8 review of Travel Blog Carnival submissions. Darren has organized the submissions via a special GMail account and asks the various reviewers to enter that account and make their choice. When I make my choice I like to scan each entry quickly’, make a first choice and then re read each entry in full. I found that 1 2 3 putting them into Happy Hotelier | Tumblr made it a lot easier to reread them, because the GMail set up is a bit cumbersome: You end up with your screen cluttered with all sort of posts. In this instance there were 17 posts, but some weeks there are many more. For those not into the reviewing process It may be handy to see what was choses from the submissions. A shared Wiki could be a solution, but might be time consuming again for the reviewers.

So whenever I am researching a certain subject for Happy Hotelier it is usable to quickly dump Photos, Links, Quotes in several Tumblr entries and then go back to them to finalize a post here.

Prior to Tumblr

I am a slow 2 finger typist and have far more ideas and pieces of information that I like to share with my readers than I can find time for to write, or cut and paste, neatly in a well organized entry here on Happy Hotelier.

I believed I had solved this problem for the time being by using Google newsreader and by sharing items of interest via a widget here on the sidebar where the shares from this Google reader can be found as mere text links.

In the meantime I also found out I gathered and shared already so much stuff between my shares, that clicking trough to Happy Hotelier’s Shared Items and reading it there is becoming a slow process as well and getting slower and slower, the more stuff I share.

I wasn’t aware of it yet, but I can read my shared items faster in Google reader that as Happy Hotelier’s Shared Items, it offers a RSS feed for those who might interested in my shares.

Getting enthusiastic about Tumblr

I believe any post on a Blog should go together with at least one photo or pictures as they say much more than words. In the Google reader widget you cannot add photos (at least you couldn’t when I installed it).

Some time ago Jens Traenhart of Tourism Internet Marketing suggested to me to use a WidgetBox widget when you have two Blogs and want readers of one Blog being able to notice the other Blog.

Recently I have made a widget for Happy Hotelier and also for Chair Blog.

I found out that you can make a widget of a mini Tumblr Blog with photos. I hoped for a while I could replace the Google reader with shares and widget by a Tumblr account with widget entirely. Not true, because if you have 2 Tumblr accounts you have to log out and log in to change identity (No, I never installed the identity switcher, wouldn’t even now where to look to find it) between the two accounts.

I need the Tumblr set up more for Chair Blog than for Happy Hotelier because I now know the Google with widget and RSS feed isn’t so bad after all, at least for the time being. The areas I cover here at Happy Hotelier are already wide enough. Chairs shouldn’t be added to that process. So I was looking for a separate sort of scrap book for my Chair Blog. Off course I could have created a separate Google Account for the other Blog, but that has has as mayor disadvantage that you have to switch identity at Google each time I would like to add an item for a possible Chair Blog entry. That switching slows down the process considerably.

So I set up a second Tumblr account Chair Blog | Tumbler. Chair Blog is much more a mono subject Blog than Happy Hotelier. I only want to publish there about everything that has to do with chairs and chair design. Frequently there are chairs shown at fairs or exhibitions among other furniture or art. I want to pick them up. Chairs are auctioned among other items: I want to pick them up.

The quick and easy way of Tumblr got me hooked. Over a very short period of time I was able to collect photos and links of over 250 chairs at .

Conclusions

  1. I decided to keep the Google Reader set up with widget here for time being. Those readers who like my Happy Hotelier shares I suggest to subscribe to the RSS feed of Happy Hotelier’s Shared Items
  2. As to the Travel Blog Carnival: Whenever I review a week, I will post all entries to . Then everybody can see for themselves
  3. For my Chair Blog I can now rapidly create overviews of chairs exhibited at fairs, exhibitions and chairs to be auctioned and summarize them easier in the Blog from time to time
  4. I see it as a temporary solution, because when you cut and paste stuff from elsewhere on the web, it can disappear. For instance when you refer to newspaper or auction sites there is the risk that they move their content around or hide it behind a subscription bar so that your links get lost. So in order to keep your content intact it is always better to have a self hosted blog and to keep a copy on your own hard drive (with a backup off course)
  5. I am more Happy now that I am a bit more organized

More about Tumblr

Before I dug into it I missed it, but Tumblr has its own Wiki Tumble Log If you read that and the posts they refer to you get a reasonable idea of what it is about.

Gina Trapani at Lifhacker had a nice entry about it. If you look up Tumblr on Mashable you get some more background information. I for instance learned that only in November 2007 they came around with the present version 3 that works as it does now.
Last, but not least this Read Write Web Interview with Tumbler founder David Carp gives some additional information.

Update

I’ve devoted a whole page at Chair Blog to the subject, in case you are interested.

Last edited by GJE on September 8, 2012 at 12:20 am