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The man behind the curtain…
Well, I would like to start by introducing myself. My name is Tim Brady and for a little over a year now I have owned and operated the beautiful Forty Putney Road Bed and Breakfast in Brattleboro Vermont. Before innkeeping, I was an IT professional with various companies and agencies. I have an alphabet soup of technical credentials and have been a geek at heart since I was a kid. Most recently, I had the pleasure of meeting many of you at the Anaheim PAII conference, where I was honored that you selected my idea as the winner of the idea fair!
When I became an innkeeper I quickly realized that finding good information about Inn specific products and services was really hard. In particular deciding where to spend ad dollars was challenging and I was overwhelmed with the number of directory solicitations I was receiving every week. I started making a spreadsheet of them to keep track for myself.
I still do some consulting and development work on the side with a group of fellow geeks. We had been working on customizing a star rating plug-in for wordpress for a client. I was tinkering with site names on a spinner site for a domain name to use for the demo and came across innkeeping.org. I was as surprised as anyone that it was available and snatched it right up. With input of the whole crew, we put together some blog posts containing reviews with star ratings, based primarily on the spreadsheet I had been keeping. It was a great way to demo our rating script work.
One day we saw a crazy spike in traffic to the domain. It turns out that the robots.txt file we had set up to block indexing of the site got incorrectly edited and to top it off, some of the posts were then published in an rss feed. Within days the site was getting traffic and comments from innkeepers all over the blogosphere.
Unfortunately with the interest also came some rather evil emails from some of the directory site owners. My first instinct was to pull the site, after all it was never intended for public use anyhow. However, after weighing the positive emails with the negative, there was far more support to keep the information available.
We decided to leave the content live and use the site to develop a 2 way rating system that would allow users to submit their own ratings to wordpress. That got to be far more complex than we had anticipated. Ultimately what I have decided to do is create a separate ratings and review site “behind” the blog here.
In the coming weeks I will be sending anyone who has commented on any of the posts on innkeeping.org a link to register (for free) as a beta tester of the new site. Think of the new site as a “trip advisor” for innkeepers. You will be able to rate any and everything and share your thoughts and experiences in an organized and searchable fashion. Find some great towels, the perfect glasses for juice, an amazing graphic designer - you’ll be able to share those stories with others and help us all out. Only innkeepers will be able to join and see the content (you will have to use a published innkeeper email address to register) so that it can be truly an open discussion amongst fellow innkeepers. I hope that it will become a great resource for innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers.
In the immediate future, I look forward to putting together some posts that are no longer directory centric. I have plans to share a lot of good information here, especially technical information and how-to’s. I have had a lot of fun “tweaking” our inn and am looking forward to sharing some of my tricks with you. I hope that you will do the same here!
That said, if you would like to contribute some content, please email me (innkeeper at innkeeping dot org). Contributors will be listed with a link to their inn on the main page of this site. If you have an innkeeper related product that you would like us to look at and review, please contact us as well. We do not “sell” reviews or participate in pay per post programs however.
Thanks for the many great emails supporting the concept of this site and I look forward to your continued participation.
The no longer mysterious - Innkeeper…
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4 comments for “The man behind the curtain…”
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Tim!! Wow! What an amazing revelation! Could you call it your coming out party?
Well it’s nice to know that this site is under the direction of someone we trust. I’m sad though - how can WE find out about the great graphics person? ( in Laguna it’s $900 for one flyer. I went through 100 artists on an online art bidding site and their submissions didn’t work for us.)
Thanks for the revelation!! I’m working from home for awhile and a staff member just sent me this news. I’ve got to call David!
Deborah
Hi Tim,
Who is the person behind you in the cape?
Paul
Paul, His name is Frank. He is an innkeeper in North Carolina (but I forget the inn name). That photo is from the “idea fair” at the PAII conference in CA this year. Frank was the MC and host. What you dont see are the “Randy, Paula and Simon” - it was an American Idol theme
Interesting website. I’ll admit that the amount of web directories that all want our $$ can seem overwhelming with questions such as…
What makes one site better than another?
Are the free ones any good?
Heres a point to note re web directories and that “free” is not always good as putting your business on these directories can directly affect your placing on Google etc in a very bad way.