Crazy Dog Old Lady

If you have ever seen the Simpsons, you are familiar with the crazy Cat Lazy, some fictional crazy ass old lady who mumbles and yells while she throws cats to people.
Right by the Blue Almond Hostel, we have a similar lady. She doesn't own any cats, but

1. She mumbles
   
2. She looks crazy
3. She's Old
4. She owns 8 dogs

To make the insult even worse she has name them after me; Juan 1, Juan 2, Juan 3 and so on. The dog are hideous and in very poor sanitary conditions. I can't imagine how the house must be in the inside, gross i assume.
We have pleaded to the government entities in charge and so far our cry for help has been ignored.

I have a secret admirer 100% awesome

I just got this on my email from the hostel website, awesome! Besides funny she or he sounds Japanese!

This is an enquiry e-mail via http://bluealmondhostel.com/ from:
T

I like you so much!!

I love stay 2 nights in de hostel; one for to meet you and the other lets leave to the imagination (one night to hot with you)

when you have availability??
let me know that.

Testing Hostel World

We are currently beta testing Hostel World reservation system for the months of May, June, July and August to see if its better than booking.com. So far it has proven inferior on some many levels that we might end up our beta testing pretty soon. Nonetheless we invite you to give it a go in the following link.

http://www.spanish.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/Blue-Almond-Hostel/Isla-de-San-Andres/46230

Why won't I allow visitors in the hostel?

I could list a million reasons why one of the rules we enforce the most is the no visitors allowed one, but for now i'll just list the ones i can think of before my potatoes are cooked.

1. Your visitor cost me money.
2. Your visitors void my insurance.
3. Your guest may disturb the experience of other paying guest.
4. We are a small hostel, almost no one locks their doors, so your visitors could easily get into people's rooms if they wanted to.
5. Your guests shorten the lifespan of things in the hostel.

What to do is your visitor is sexy and want to show you his/her fun areas.

1. Take him/her to Blue Moon Hotel (right downtown) it offers rooms by the hour with disco-club, mirrors on the ceiling, Jacuzzi and a bunch of other classy stuff.

My potatoes are ready!

Broken computer.

My computer broke, that's why the website is still under construction. February is sold out. We never imagined we would have such a good run starting the business. We have met some incredible people so far and in about 8 months we'll decide whether we expand or not.

Tweaking the booking interface to make a RSS

No fancy hacking here, just a workaround to a lack of RSS feeds of Booking.com

This tweak works for me, as my city at the time of this writing only has 2 hotels, so its easy to show up in their "Recently booked" feed.

1. Go to http://feed43.com and start a new feed.
2. Copy your hotel's booking link
3. paste address where it says "Specify source page address (URL)" click "reload"
4. Define extraction rules, mine were:

Global Search Pattern:

< li id="hotel_id_259881" >{%}< /li >

Item (repeatable) Search Pattern:

data-roomname="{%}"{*}
< time datetime="{%}" >{*}
< strong >{%}< /strong >

Your rules probably won't be the same, play around. Click "extract".
In my case this gives me:

{ %1} = Double Room
{ %2} = 2010/11/24 15:23:12
{ %3} = 12 days, 17 minutes ago

5. Define output format. write whatever for the "Feed Title" options, but make sure you give "RSS item properties" some thought as this is where you format your item. In my case i formated this way:
Item Title Template: A { %1} was booked on { %2}. That is give or take { %3}!
Item Link Template: I used my affiliate ID, that way i get commission for my own bookings which is probably borderline against their rules
Item Content Template: blank

The output will be a RRS feed that checks booking.com for the latest bookings made, identifying only your hotel and formatting it to a string of your choice, Please note that i have put spaces on the HTML above as blogger sucks and doesn't allow code on the post.

Testing the blog

RSS is not working the way it should
RSS is not working the way it should
RSS is not working the way it should RSS is not working the way it should
RSS is not working the way it shouldRSS is not working the way it shouldRSS is not working the way it shouldRSS is not working the way it shouldRSS is not working the way it shouldRSS is not working the way it should

RSS is not working the way it shouldRSS is not working the way it should
RSS is not working the way it should
RSS is not working the way it shouldRSS is not working the way it should