On a much happier note than the Spearfish Travelodge review that I just posted, while I was on vacation I missed an opportunity to ride TriMet’s MAX light rail trains on a test run down the recently-reopened transit mall in downtown Portland. Fortunately my friends made sure I was there in some form:
Photos posted to Flickr by Igal Koshevoy; I’m not sure who the photographer was.
I offer this review of a recent trip to Spearfish, South Dakota, where we stayed at the Travelodge. I cannot recommend this motel to others; what follows is a recap of our experiences.
Background: we stayed six nights (Saturday through Thursday nights) in early July 2009.
Spearfish Travelodge Problems, roughly in chronological order:
- Swimming Pool: The swimming pool was in the midst of demolition and reconstruction, despite their assurances two months prior that it would be available by the time we arrived. To their credit, they offered to reimburse admission to the local rec center’s swimming facility / water park.
- Wifi: For the first four nights, the wifi could be described as “intermittent” at best. Quite often we’d connect to the local network (get a 169.254.x.x address) but would be unable to route to the internet. On the fifth night, we were never able to connect at all, even after having the management reboot their router a couple times.
- Breakfast: The hotel’s breakfast offerings were weak, consisting only of coffee, juice, and bread products (toast, cereal, waffles). Noticeably missing was any sort of fresh fruit.
- Housekeeping: The day after we arrived, housekeeping did not make up our room until some point after 16:45. They were a little earlier on subsequent days but I believe it was always after noon. Given there were four of us, we had four sets of bath linens (towels, washcloths, etc). One day, they took away the four dirty sets of linens and only left two sets as replacement.
- Maintenance: On the fifth evening, the glass cover (approx 12″ in diameter) dropped off of the main ceiling light in our bedroom. Fortunately it didn’t break when it hit the floor and nobody was standing under it. We also noticed mildew in the bathroom.
- Attitude: Compounding the various physical problems, the staff’s attitude didn’t help. They kept pointing at my computer as the wifi problem before finally admitting on the last night that it was an issue with our room’s location. When we checked out, I had to argue to get a receipt. WTF?
I wasn’t expecting W quality at the Travelodge, but the wifi failure and general state of disrepair was disturbing. Spearfish has quite a few motels and hotels; I’d highly recommend that folks look elsewhere if they want decent accommodations.
This post was originally published in June 2009 following the launch of Social Photo Talk. It has been updated with additional supporting links as part of a presentation I gave at WordCamp Seattle titled “After Launching a Couple Dozen Blogs, I Figured Out how to Do it Right.” Jump to the bottom of this post to watch that video.
Last month I launched Social Photo Talk, a new blog powered by WordPress. I kept track of the steps as I put the site together. This is not a comprehensive guide, but a rough list of the various tasks that I took care of in the preparation and launch of the site. As I’ve launched a variety of blogs for a variety of purposes, I’ve learned a few lessons. This list of my practices has a couple simple goals: fully prepare the blog before public launch, and to be ready to accept traffic when the site goes live.
Beginnings
- Purchase domain
- Setup domain on web host (I use A2 Hosting and have been quite happy)
- Install WordPress – I prefer to install WordPress manually instead of using the “one click” installers (such as Fantastico) provided by some web hosts. A manual installation ensures I could control details if I want, plus I’ll know all of the behind the scenes database information usernames, and passwords.
- Install Maintenance Mode and activate – Maintenance Mode is a plugin which presents a (customizable) static page to visitors to your website unless they’re logged in with an administrator account. It can be used to temporarily make your site unavailable during maintenance, or in our case, to prevent access to the site until it is ready for launch.
- Setup user account (and give it admin rights)
- Delete the built-in admin account – As a security precaution, it’s not a bad idea to create a second user account that is an administrator, then delete the built-in admin account. By removing the default admin account, it prevents any malicious attacks that might attempt to use that account for access.
- Activate Akismet
- Go through each Settings panel, update as needed, paying particular attention to permalinks and the discussion (comment) options
- Install Thesis and make it the active theme. That’s an affiliate link
- Install initial plugins:
- Customize the Theme
- Write “About” Page – Every blog should have an “About” page which discusses the company and/or authors. Make it easy for people to contact you… a contact form is quite stuffy and makes visitors jump through hoops. I prefer offering an email address and a phone number.
- Setup sidebar widgets – Lorelle has a great series about WTF Blog Clutter that talks about all sorts of things that can litter ones sidebar. You don’t want to overdo it, but use the sidebar to provide value for your readers in the form of navigation, subscription options, and possibly some relevant advertising.
- subscription options (rss, twitter)
- affiliate/ads
- category archives
- recent comments
- delicious links
- OpenID integration
- Setup analytics (Mint)
- Custom 404 page
- Custom Archives page powered by Clean Archives Reloaded
- Setup Twitter account + avatar
- Favicon
Launching
- Deactivate Maintenance Mode
- Disable Twitter Tools*
- Publish queued posts for initial site content
- Announce Site to the Public
- Re-enable Twitter Tools
- Setup Feedburner (create feed, redirect WordPress) – Feedburner needs a live feed to “burn” your RSS feed. When Maintenance Mode is active, Feedburner can’t hit your feed, so I wait to burn it until just after the site goes live.
- Feedburner email subscription
- Skribit widget
- Vanity/search feeds
* Be sure to disable Twitter Tools while publishing content before you announce the site, lest someone discover it before you’re ready. Once your initial content is on the site, re-enable the plugin before you forget.
Obviously this is a fairly rough list, with some steps being quite vague (like “Customize the theme”), but I wanted to get this online both as a reference for myself and others in the future.
If you can read this, I’ve figured out how to blog from TextMate. Oh yes, I’m becoming Macified.
