Paul Solheim - webmaster

Mayor of Yungay sentenced to 17 years in prison for ordering radio journalist’s murder

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 06:00:00 GMT

The Ancash regional higher court yesterday sentenced Yungay mayor Amaro Léon Léon to 17 years in prison for ordering the killing of Antonio de la Torre Echeandia, the presenter of a news programme on local Radio Orbita, who was stabbed to death on 14 February 2004 in Yungay (400 km north of Lima).

The two people who carried out the murder, Antonio Torre Camones and Pedro Angeles Figueroa, received the same sentence. All three were also ordered to pay 20,000 soles (5,000) euros each in damages. Léon was arrested on 31 March 2004 at the request of the Yungay prosecutor’s office, which said he had De la Torre killed to prevent him broadcasting a report about Léon.

In his programme “Con verdad y justicia” (With Truth and Justice), De la Torre criticised mismanagement by local officials and allowed listeners to make comments on the air. He had often received threats prior to his death and had already been the target of a murder attempt.

Arrest warrants have been issued for two other suspects in the murder, the mayor’s daughter, Enma Léon, and Moisés David Julca, who are both on the run. Lawyers for the three defendants convicted yesterday said they would appeal to the Lima supreme court, which will probably issue its ruling next month.

(Reporters sans frontières - Peru)

Is Google Going to the Opera?

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 06:00:00 GMT

The rumor of the hour is that Google is acquiring Opera, the Norwegian company with the cool web browser.

Since I am a proud Norwegian, avid Opera and Google user, it would be cool if this turns out to be true.

The rumor string goes like this:

Gary Price points to Dirson who points to Pierre Chappaz (former president of Yahoo! Europe).

Some say Google are after the mobile business of Opera.

Word from Huaraz insider - Tim Norris

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I had words from Tim Norris of California Cafe in Huaraz.

Tim and Louisa runs the California Cafe which has become a Huaraz institution for climbers and trekkers from all over the world. They serve excellent coffee and are famous for their rich and filling breakfasts.

Tim is a wealth of information on trekking and climbing conditions around Huaraz and especially on the conditions in the Huayhuash area. Everytime I see Tim he seems to be helping some trekkers or climbers preparing for their adventure with advise and useful infomations.

Also the California Cafe has a great selection of books and magazines and it is a really nice place to kick back and relax.

Tim is also webmaster on huaylas.com which is a treasure trove of information on the mountains around Huaraz. huaylas.com also has a variety of maps of the area and with zoom to Huaraz city center with pinpoints for the hotels, restaurants etc. Tim is writing the Huaraz report which is displayed on huaylas.com and I think Tim mentioned that the weekly report also is given to "The South American explorers club".

This is what Tim wrote about the recent months in Huaraz:

"Things have been good this year. It rained a little in september, but has since then been very nice. Attached is a picture of the sunset from just a few days ago. It seems that travellers have caught on to the fact that the weather has been nice and we have still had relatively good business in the last months."

What a beautiful view. Thanks for making us all long for the Cordillera Tim - a great picture!

Word from Huaraz insider - Kristinn Kristinsson

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:00:00 GMT

Had words from Kristinn Kristinsson a couple of days ago. Kris is the dutch film director who runs huaraz.com and is famous in Huaraz for making a movie with the Peruvian "Superstar" Sonia Morales. He has just been on a trip to asia. Pictures from his journey can be seen on huaraz.com:

http://huaraz.com/japon/

http://huaraz.com/miffy/

http://huaraz.com/china/

http://huaraz.com/thailand/

Everyone connected to Huaraz are looking forward to watching his movie in preparation "la ruta del jaca". Kris explained to me once that the title translates to "the journey of the guinea pig". Seems the title is playing on several levels - in english a guinea pig is someone beeing "experimented on" or the first person trying something, in the andes in Peru it is considered a delicatesse and eaten barbequed on a spear on special occations like birthdays and fiestas.

The website for the movie "la ruta del jaca" is:

http://www.rutadeljaca.com/

A traiiler can be watched from this site giving us a small taste of the movie being made.

Huaraz Improvisation and the Escape Tactics of a Depressed Climber

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

I come across an interesting resource for people planning a trip to Peru today:

"Travelblog - free inspiration" has blogs from Huaraz and other parts of Peru.
The blogs are from people visiting Peru and most have photos from their trips.

A great resource for Peru (the section from Huaraz is a bit thin so far).

I read a post "Huaraz Improvisation and the Escape Tactics of a Depressed Climber" about trails and tribulations with altitude sickness etc. I found it interesting how a traveller coming from Cuzco was describing Huaraz (after some critique of Huaraz, architechture etc.)

"The best aspect about Huaraz is that the people are very friendly and there is no one trying to sell you anything on the street. The street venders sit and wait for you to approach, are very nice and not pushy, and their art and jewellery is more often hand made, if you find the right vendors. No pushy restaurant girls, no postcards, no shoeshine (well, a little but they don’t hound you) and no happy hour dudes! Ah, I can breathe too, fewer taxis (but still a lot) means less pollution and a cool breeze keeps the air above the town clear and the mountains visible."

http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Peru/Huaraz/

http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Peru/

That's it from us at the Hotel Santa Cruz today.

SiteAnalyzer and some website statistics

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

This is a new website for a new business (Hotel Santa Cruz opened it's doors 15th august 2005).

We are excited to track the trafic and take actions to increace it. Maybe some people will find it interesting to track the website statistics and the actions we take as we are building this website?

First let's take the status today 20th nov. 2005:

Exploring what search engines crawl a "site:domain.com" seach on MSN gives 212 results, the same on Google gives 8 results. "links:domain.com" on MSN gives 13 results and on Google 1 results. I installed the Google toolbar for Firefox today and checked our PageRank, it is now 1.

The numbers from our web statistics (last 7 days) are:

Referrals:	18
IP Lookups:	59
Pages:	182

So far the Santa Cruz website are not having a lot of trafic.

The actions taken recently are submitting the website to cirka 120 search engines (using a program named webceo). The website has earlier been submitted manually to 6-7 directories like the Open Directory.

We have started to use a DNN module named SiteAnalyzer from www.bizmodules.net to view and analyze the traffic on our website.

Let's conclude this first posting on web statistics with 2 graphs from today:

New homepage and Climbing Huascaran Story

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

Today the homepage was changed so that 3 featured stories are being displayed with photo on the top of our homepage. I hope travellers will find useful information on trekking and climbing in the cordillera blanca easier this way. The list of latest stories are moved to the bottom of the homepage. 4 small images was added to all pages so it should be easier to find our contact information, introduction to the hotel etc.

Also Bjørnar has added a description on climbing Huascaran for those looking for the next big adventure.

Software upgrade and information on DotNetNuke modules

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

The www.santacruzperu.com website is running on the open source software DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com). A couple of days ago this software was updated to version 3.2 and we upgraded our server today. DotNetNuke is running on the Microsoft .Net plattform and is an open source project with over 200.000 members in it's community.

The DotNetNuke (DNN) software comes with some 15-20 core modules (HTML, Links, Image, Blog, Forum etc), in addition there are something like 250 3.party modules available at the time of writing this. Our website are using a few 3. party modules so I will present these briefly:

LanguageSelector and MultiLanguage HTML from Apollo Software. This is what gives our site the limited multi language we have at the moment. When switching language by clicking the flag some of our pages are switching language, at the moment these are:

Welcome area on homepage

Introduction to Hotel Santa Cruz

Activities in the area

Contacts / Hotel Santa Cruz map

News And Stories are written using the NewsArticles module from Scott McCulloch. This module makes it possible to have contributors write articles and give certain users the permission to approve articles before they are published. We can also specify start and end-dates for an article. On our homepage you can see the latest articles and/or featured articles from this module. We will most likely wait for this module to become multilingual before translating our "News and Stories".

Our photogalleries are realized using a module from Orizonti Group named Media Gallery. We are using the 1.7 version which are the latest, but are hoping for a new version soon. We miss the ability to do automtic slideshows and to let users upload and maintain their own photogalleries.

The Huaraz Directory and the Links directory are realized with a module called GoodDogs Repository. This module is now a core DNN module and the new core release should be just around the corner. I await this new release and hope they have fixed the bug which are causing the category listings to show wrong number of listing when more than 1 repository exists on the website.

That is the 3. party modules we are using on this site at the moment, and the upgrade to DNN version 3.2 was fine for every module!

Trekking Santa Cruz and Ishinca

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

Exciting content has been added to the site recently. Bjørnar Arnesen has added a nice description of doing the Santa Cruz Trek. Bjørnar has done this trek a couple of times and has taken some really nice photos as well. Also from Bjørnar is a description of trekking and climbing in the Ishinca valley.

We have also added a Huaraz directory to the website. Our aim is to include information here on all entities located in Huaraz and of interest to the traveller planning a trip to Huaraz. To become a complete resource input from you our readers are needed. At present entities in the directory can be commented and rated.

A link directory has also been added. This is a resource containing links to websites that has information or services relevant to the traveller going to Huaraz and/or other places in Peru.

First blog entry on SantaCruzPeru.

paul.solheim@gmail.com — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 06:00:00 GMT

My name is Paul and I am the webmaster for the www.santacruzperu.com website.

When not designing software at www.faktnet.com or adding content etc. here and on www.solheims.com (our extended family site) I like struggling up the Andes on a mountainbike or trekking with a heavy backpack in the Cordillera Blanca.

Born	20. october 1963
Nationality	Norwegian
Hobbies	Bicycling, trekking, history and this hotel.

Hope to be able to give you some interesting stories from building this website and the Hotel, running a Hotel in Peru and some stories from my trips to Peru and South America.