The 'Upload' Form

Worked 12 hrs tuning & combining previous work on the 4-part info upload form (which involves general info, a photo, selection of type(s) of business from the various categories, and finally finding the business location on a Google satellite map. (And it still needs more.)

Sick

Slept most of the day, beaten temporarily by (i think) gastroenteritis ("stomach flu").

North Lake Tour

I visited every tourist-oriented business i could find north of Rush Creek. The list:

Trinity Alps Resort...

Pinewood Cove
Trinity Lake Resorts at Cedar Stock...

Scott Museum
Jaktri Market
North Trinity Lake Community Hall
Sasquatch (closing ~permanently 9/26)
Mini-Kat
Trinity Lake KOA
Enright Gulch Cabins & Motels
Carrville Inn
Quicksilver Cabin
Sunflower Cabins
Eagle Creek Ranch...

Coffee Creek Country Store
Ripple Creek Cabins...

Coffee Creek Campground & RV Park
Bonanza King Resort
Coffee Creek Ranch
Creek Stone Vacation Rental
Alpen Cellars...


So many of the sites were so beautifully maintained, with flowers, green lawns.

(An interesting story at the Mini-Kat: The place originally was owned by the owner of the Ycatapom Inn. The Inn was a big thing; the ~drive-in was relatively small; hence the name, despite demise of the Y-cat.)

Business is not good; one major site told me it was 10%(!) of normal.

Some cited the problem of no restaurants (outside of the summer season, when there are 2: Cedar Stock, Trinity Alps Resort) in this entire portion of the county. B&Bs need restaurants.

Move Complete

ok, the 'Visit Trinity' site (files & database) is now completely relocated to TrinityCounty.com/Visit. I made various small changes.

The 'About Trinity' page remains a draft. I think most locals would call it accurate, but perhaps not suitable for a site intended to encourage tourism. I welcome suggestions, or, better, a complete narrative.

Upon requests, I made minor additions to Trinity County Chamber & Weaverville Fire Dept sites.

Labor, Art, Code

Worked hard in the field with the Haz-Reduction crew all morning; then volunteer-docent'd at Main Street Gallery for Trinity County Arts Council, what a contrast. Visitation was light, so spent most the time on my laptop moving the database from my development site over to Trinity County Chamber of Commerce's, making the structural changes to accommodate multiple biz-types for a single biz, and then rearranging the old data among the new tables. The database changes worked (after fiddling with user permissions), woo-hoo!, but turns out there seem to be other differences on the new (Velocity) host vs my development site host (HostMonster), relating to writing files and code interpretation. Dang, i hate this kind of thing. If it works on one, shouldn't it work on the other?! But fact is the underlying PHP interpreter is changing all the time, and also there are differences in configuration (very complicated). By 9pm, i have the much-duplicated/much-tweeked TCCOC site looking like the Original.

Folks tell me my article re: the project did appear in the Trinity Journal.

Velocity Progress

Travis at Velocity (the Chamber's web-host) has the new interface set up on his end; it looks good! And he can expand the storage allocated for the Chamber.

Added Autumn in the Alps to the Chamber webpage.

Looked again at the new database structure, which i need to do so that any business can belong to more than a single category (e.g. a resort might be accommodation, boating, restaurant, more). And i need to migrate the old data into the new structure. And move it all over to Velocity. It requires some time and a lot of concentration; i don't want to mess it up.

triage

On successfully closing-in my under-construction house at Covington Mill before snow flew, but out of money, I was unemployed from October08 to May09. During that time i worked to develop many different avenues of involvement. My 'worst fear' was that too many of these initiatives would come to fruition. My worst fears were realized.

So I'm working 14-hr days, not always efficiently, but working. I have a full-time good-job with Weaverville Fire District. And then there's this project, which i must complete by end of september, because i said i would. And volunteer commitments: Trinity Center Fire Dept; Weaverville Fire Dept; Trinity County Arts Council.

Incredibly, there are demands even beyond that! TAPAC is rebuilding the front of the theater; they're renting expensive lift-equipment, but there are so many labor-intensive details to the construction; it's taking a long time.

There is too much. Whatever's to one takes from all else; it's triage. I'm guilty, for every thing i do not do.

//

Travis (Velotech) says the database capability is in place. It was taking long so i'd put it out of mind. I'll need to try it out. Another concern is capacity; seems TCCOC has already consumed 3/4 of the 1GB capacity, and i haven't even begun moving files, photos, & database over there.

Down River

Another typical 14-hr day, THIS one special because it's the first of 5 excursions to interact with the Businesses, the folks on Trinity's economic Front Lines.

After 1.5 hrs of frustrating computer insanity (printer & network), finally Pat Zugg rescued me & i was off, Down River...

Visited:
Oregon Summit Monitor
Junction City Park
Junction City Store
JC Cafe & Deli
BigFoot Campgound & RV Park
Trinity Canyon Lodge
Straw House
BigFoot Rafting
Steelhead Cottages
Trinity River Rafting
Wilderness Adventures
Trinity Adventure Park
Grover's Gulch
Del Loma RV Park
Redwoods & Rivers
Burnt Ranch Store
Hawkins Bar Mini-Mart
Simon Legree's
Paula's Corner Collectibles
Trinity River B&B and Chalets...

Lazy Double B
Salyer Store
SkyCrest Lodge

Talked to so many interesting folks, they expressed frustration: county government, Forest Service, fires, the recent suction-dredge ban (what, winter floods don't stir up the mercury?); indeed: with government in general. Impression: responsible independent individuals, giving it all, barely getting by.

My typical experience per site: I exit pickup with notebook, camera, GPS. The person there is in defensive-mode. I tell 'em i'm from the Chamber of Commerce, there's a vision of a website, free, you don't need to do anything. Their persona completely changes, immediately, so friendly, welcoming, indeed enthusiastic about the project. These folks put up with so much, a continual barrage, solicitations for useless advertising.

May it be different this time.

Details, Prep

A myriad of minor changes, plus i finalized the Handout for tomorrow, which'll be my first series of biz contacts.

Trinity Journal Announcement

Sent an alert of what's going on to the Trinity Journal.

WFD Live

I activated the new look for the Weaverville Fire Department website. Here's the old site. And the new one.

Trinity Center

Early for volunteer fire department training, i explore the town...

"The Mall"...


Historic IOOF Hall, moved from Old Trinity Center before inundation by the Lake...


'Yellow Jacket', closed, for sale...


The Boat Ramp, "Closed – Unsafe Access”...


Once productive ranch and timber land...


The Marina...


Historic Ycatapom Inn, empty and For Sale...

First Upload

Hodge Management was the first to take advantage of the do-it-yourself upload feature. Thank you!

Formal Announcement

I email a detailed description of the project to members of the Trinity County Board of Supervisors, cc'd to TEDC board members and Pat Zugg of the Chamber. And i ask Pat to forward the note on to all Chamber members, as well as to the other Chambers of Commerce and related organizations in the county.

Re-routing

Made minor improvements to Trinity County Chamber of Commerce homepage, mostly just eliminating excess whitespace so one needn't scroll so much, but also added a link to the new-site-development info, and added the site's first new press release since 2006.

No word back yet from VelocityTech re database capability. I'd been waiting for that before transfering all my files over to TrinityCounty.com from AllThingsTrinity.us. But i can't wait any longer, i need to get the P.R. part of this project on the road. So i added code: anyone browsing to www.TrinityCounty.com/visit will automatically be re-routed to www.AllThingsTrinity.us/visit. I'll move the files some other day.

WFD more

Worked 14 hrs on the new Weaverville Fire Dept site.

WFD

Spent the day working on the Weaverville Fire Department website. Here's the old one. And the new one, i hope you'll agree, an improvement.

upload

I did a first draft of a page businesses can use to UPLOAD their info. (For now, the response you'll get looks odd, but TRY IT OUT.) I'll then review the data received, then incorporate it into the website.

Cars

I added 'ads' on the Trinity County Chamber website for:

• Cars on the Green, coming up this friday-saturday at Trinity Alps Golf Course.
• Allison&Victor at Trinity Alps Performing Arts Center this saturday.
• Trinity County Fair.

Cyber-Progress

Travis of Velocity Technology, Weaverville, returned my call. I now can FTP to TrinityCounty.com. Regarding his web-host database capability, it's a bit shy of standard at this moment, but, wow! he'll add it for me, right away! What a guy!

Database Revisited

There are of course hundreds of attractions in Trinity County. The user will be able to navigate among them according to groupings. So, example, Accomodations -> Motels -> Lewiston Valley Motel.

The database I set up experimentally would only allow any individual biz to belong to one group. But what do you do with a place like Cedar Stock, which has a restaurant, bar, cabins, boat ramp, marina, etc? Or the Whitmore Inn, a B&B but also a historic building? Obviously they belong to multiple groups. So today i modified the database structure to accommodate that.

Locating Your Biz on a Google Map

For (almost) every tourism-related biz in Trinity County, the Trinity-Visit! website i'm developing will display its name, a photo, a description, and contact info. Customers will also be able to use a Google Map to find the locations of businesses of selected types.

Although i will collect a lot of info myself as i travel around the county, business owners will also be able to upload their info to the website themselves. So today i programmed a Google Map that will allow business owners to indicate exactly where their biz is located. It's not fully functional (or pretty) yet, but feel free to play with it!

Where to put it?

Consulting with TEDC directors, and with Pat Zugg, dedicated volunteer President of the Trinity County Chamber, we've decided to put the site under the Chamber's website, TrinityCounty.com. [Other candidates were my development site AllThingsTrinity.us and TrinityEDC.org.]

So i need to copy the website files over to TrinityCounty.com. But nothing is easy. That site is hosted by Velocity Technology of Weaverville (velotech.net). The username/password Pat gives me doesn't work. It's saturday; no one at Velocity answers the phone, or the email.

Ready Set Go!

I spent most of last winter (unemployed) generating the base code for the website. So much of that is done. I started talking to TEDC and TCCOC about the idea last May. Unfortunately it took TEDC 2 months to secure a go-ahead on it; meanwhile i'd found a good job, with Weaverville Fire District. So now i'm way overloaded, and it has to be done by end of september.

But the design is database-driven; all I have to do is 'drop' a business's data (descriptive text, photo, contact info) into the DB, and the PHP code that i wrote will automatically pickup and display the new information to the site.

So most of the effort is i travelling about the county and talking to people. That, i know, will be fun and interesting, and it's that effort that will be documented here, in this blog.

This economy's been collapsing for too long. Lets do something about it.