Critiki's latest new features: Themed Image Galleries, username photo credits

I'm guessing no reviews on Mai Kai is because we all know it is the tops. Nevertheless I'm on my way.

Humuhumu, Critiki is hubba-hubba! Hee hee. Sorry.

Seriously, I'm very impressed. Looks fabulous--all dark and elegant, I love it--and, it's extremely well-organized and readily usable. Not to mention, it works great too!

And it's FUN. I could get addicted.

I just added a rave about the Mai Kai. What can I say? Some may find this odd, but the Mai Kai and Minnie's are probably my two favorite tiki spots of all. Of course, I raved about Minnie's too.

I have a few good snaps of Minnie's, and the other Modesto Tiki spots too, and will upload 'em to Earthlink webspace next week for you to peruse. I did email this to you, but it bounced back for some reason...

Thanks for the terrific work, and see you soon, gorgeous!

XOXOX

Tikivixen

Too Big for words.

aka Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!

Score!

oh, oh, one mo' thang...

for hotel/motel reviews (yes, I added the Tropics Modesto's first Critiki!) you might include some rating options such as "what about actually staying here (or is it just nifty Tiki history)","is there on-site booze or food", and, "how's the inside as opposed to the outside".

E.g., for Tropics Modesto I'd answer 1 (well, okay, 2, I've seen worse!), "no", and "outside 10, inside 0". for those questions...

Just a note for those who care: last time I checked, the Tropics Indio still had its wonderful vintage neon sign. sigh

With Sven's blessing, I've just completed adding a new Book of Tiki Index feature to Critiki. Each location has a list of pages where more information can be found in the BOT, where applicable. It's almost certainly a bit spotty, as I sometimes didn't know what location an image was of, and not all locations in the BOT are in Critiki yet, and I'm really sleepy at the moment, but it's way better than nuttin'!

I've got a stupefying backlog of info & pictures to get into Critiki, plus improvements to make and emails to respond to. If I haven't gotten to something you've sent me yet, I'm terribly sorry and I hope you can understand. Rest assured that I've got a behind-the-scenes To Do List management system, so nothing should fall through the cracks.

One section that is WAY too thin is the Home Bars. For this section, I will not add your home bar without your okay, and I will not approach you about adding your home bar -- I don't want to put you in a potentially awkward position where you maybe don't want your bar in there, but feel like you can't say "no." So, it's up to you to come to me and let me know you want your home bar in Critiki (I can leave the street address or any other info out). I think this is a GREAT option for those of you who have recently lost your fabulous home bars... let it be documented for posterity, right along with other past masterpieces like the Kahiki! As it stands right now, the section isn't doing much, so if I don't get it beefed up soon, I may yank it.

I also added the latitude & longitude (in the locked-unless-you-have-Tiki-Road-Trip-and-if-you-don't-why-the-heck-not? section) a while back, I don't remember if I posted about that here yet. I've got a handheld GPS myself now and I've found it terribly useful.

Whee! As always, thank you so much for your continued support for Critiki. I love coming home at the end of the day and seeing that new people have signed up, and that there are new critikis that have been added. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I live in Las Vegas and Cheeseburger in Paradise is okay. Has some decent decor. I will try to get some pictures for the database.

I am proud to have my bar listed there.
We’ve lost three beautiful Tiki Central home bars in just one month. Unheard of !!
It's about time some of you got off your mai tais and build that tiki oasis you've been dreamin about and putting off for so long. COME ON!

As long promised, I've finally added the Browse by Rating feature. You can use this feature to pull up the Top 15 or Bottom 5 locations in any critiki category, as rated by website visitors... for instance, you can pull up the Top 15 in Drink Quality, or the Bottom 5 in Service. It takes more than just one person submitting a critiki for a location to trigger its inclusion in this process, so you will find that there are many categories where the list isn't complete. This is most evident in the Former Glory category.

Former Glory is my way of allowing you to rate favorite tiki locations that are no longer around. Since they're gone--in many cases, long, long gone--the odds are not good that you have actually been there, but you have probably formed an opinion based on what you've learned by hearing about it. These locations have only one critiki category: Former Glory. Don't feel shy about throwing your gut feeling in there.

Overall, the Browse by Rating feature will improve dramatically as more people add their critikis, thus increasing the number of locations that are eligible in the pool. Every day new critiki ratings are being added, thanks so much to those of you who are taking the time to share your opinions with others!

hey! thanks for the nudge to voice our opinions! i entered critikis for all the seattle (islands, ohana, luau, general store) and portland (alibi and jasmine tree)restaurants/bars we've been to in the last few months.

i'm afraid i've skewed the jasmine tree's food quality up a bit.. i enjoyed our dinner (except for the won ton soup.. which was a mega disapointment). we thought the canned pineapple on the tounge depressor was amusing! todd and i enjoyed reading your description of the food!

elicia

Hee! I thought the stick looked more like it came out of a corndog. After re-reading my text on Jasmine Tree, I'm wishing I'd taken the time to try the food there again, it can't have been that bad. I try to be neutral in my text about these places, but I guess I wasn't in a fair state of mind when I wrote that.

Thanks for the sudden onslaught of critiki ratings! Needless to say, the critikis become much more meaningful once several people have rated a location, so it's not just one person's opinion.

It's been a major pain in the keister for me to deal with photo submissions, because all of my email accounts are too full and I haven't taken the time to finish setting up my email server yet. I've come up with a much better solution: I've created an account at Fotki.com just to handle Critiki submissions.

Here are the directions on submitting photos to Critiki using the new Fotki setup.

You'll need to log in to upload photos:

Screen name: critiki
Password: critiki

Go ahead and upload anything you'd like to share, and send me an email to give me a heads up that there are new photos for me to check out. I may not use all your photos (I may already have a similar photo, for instance).

p.s. -- If the Fotki thing doesn't work for you, I can also accept photos on CD. Email me and I'll send you a mailing address. If it's neither here nor there for you, though, Fotki is a little easier for me.

I had it all backwards -- the best bed is the one that's stumbling distance from Tiki-Ti, or the Mai Kai, or the Lagoon Room, or the Alibi, or the Kon Tiki, or...
Critiki

[ Edited by: Humuhumu on 2004-06-30 15:28 ]

That's a great new banner ad on top Humuhumu.
Congrats to the success of Critiki!

Hanford: thanks for putting the Critiki banner up...

Humuhumu ~ as if i didnt already have Critiki bookmarked :)~ its nice to see your crisp logo atop my other favorite site!! i'm using your creation to plan our New England Vacation this fall (still cant convince Todd that Atlanta is in the Northeast..)

elicia

Hanford, bless his tiki-lovin' soul, made that banner for me. Thanks, Hanford!

I also want to thank Crazy Al for allowing me to use a picture of his bee-utiful tiki as a graphic on Critiki. That's not him on the banner, I didn't want to use his tiki where I didn't have room for the copyright statements, but you can see it in its flame-tongued glory on every page of Critiki now.

I've come back from my Highway 99 Tiki Road Trip with lots of new information and photos for Critiki, and some ideas for some improvements, so I'm going to be pretty busy with it over the next few days!

[ Edited by: TNTiki on 2004-11-06 18:39 ]

Hey Critiki...

You missed a location in Huntington Beach. It's called the Aloha Grill. Good Tiki restaurant right on Main St with THE BEST chicken wings I've ever eaten in my life..."Hawaiian Drums" .. made with Char Siu and some other stuff...totally delicious, and a huge portion for cheap...supposed to be an appetizer, but I get it as a meal.

Look into this place.
http://www.alohagrill.com/

Thanks for the photos, TNTiki! I sent you an email about them--can you upload the original files? The ones you uploaded are a bit too small for me.

Tikiyaki -- I'm often torn about what to include in Critiki and what to leave out. My aim with Critiki is to catalog locations relevant to midcentury Polynesian Pop, but not necessarily every location that has a Polynesian feel.

It's a hard line to walk. In remote places like, say, Iowa, I'm more willing to enter a location that has a tiki, or just the potential to maybe have a tiki--even if the place turns out to be a dud, I can provide a service by getting that info in the database and warning people not to waste their time.

However, in a tiki-heavy area like Los Angeles & Orange County, I'm much more likely to draw a distinction between the two, and not include something that is Polynesian, but is not midcentury Polynesian Pop. I've been imperfect in my application of it, to be sure, but I just don't feel comfortable adding every single plate lunch restaurant, Hawaiiana shop, or surf shop in the area: the poly pop stuff would get overwhelmed.

I've similarly opted to not include every single bamboo & thatch 20s-30s jazz joint: while an important predecessor to Poly Pop and thus an interesting part of the history, there are just waaaaaaay too many of them and not enough information about every single one of them to make them interesting enough to track (but I have tried to include the biggies).

Perhaps someone should start a database of plate lunch restaurants to fit that need. :) But that's not my passion.

Next time I'm in the HB area, though, I'll pop in and check it out.

Hey, are you going to allow us to add some text comments to the reviews? I think it help...

I-Tiki

[ Edited by: I-Tiki on 2004-07-14 22:03 ]

On 2004-07-13 15:27, tikiyaki wrote:
Hey Critiki...

You missed a location in Huntington Beach. It's called the Aloha Grill. Good Tiki restaurant right on Main St with THE BEST chicken wings I've ever eaten in my life..."Hawaiian Drums" .. made with Char Siu and some other stuff...totally delicious, and a huge portion for cheap...supposed to be an appetizer, but I get it as a meal.

Look into this place.
http://www.alohagrill.com/

You could post it to the Plate Lunch Review Thread in the Tiki Drinks & Food Forun.

[ Edited by: TNTiki on 2004-11-06 18:39 ]

On 2004-07-14 21:57, I-Tiki wrote:
Hey, are you going to allow us to add some text comments to the reviews? I think it help...

You already can! When I was designing Critiki, I realized that if I incorporated text comments/reviews from visitors, it would be too similar to what was already going on here at Tiki Central. That's why I have links from location pages on Critiki to discussion threads on Tiki Central--you can think of those links as a "Critiki Visitor Reviews & Discussion" link. If a location you want to review doesn't have a link, simply create a thread in Locating tiki and post your review. If you don't have all the information to create a new thread in Locating Tiki, don't sweat it--just send me a PM after you've created the thread, and I'll use my Magical Moderator Powers to fill in the info for you, and then I'll make sure there's a link from Critiki to that thread. It's perfect!

I'm also going to be working on getting some of the great threads on locations that are in Main Discussions moved into Locating Tiki; feel free to pester me about a particular one you'd really like to see moved, and I'll tackle it (do that by PMing me, I don't see the UMods).

TNTiki--thank you so much! Don't worry about it right away, though, go ahead and let yourself get settled (and your new dog, too!). Whenever you have a free moment will be fine. Beggars can't be choosers!

An exciting announcement... Critiki has been unlocked!

All of the address, phone numbers, maps & other detailed information is now freely available, all you have to do is register (which is free and painless).

Up until now, this information was available only if you could prove that you owned James Teitelbaum's Tiki Road Trip. As you know, James & I collected our data totally independently and separately, I decided to lock my data up as a courtesy to guide people to James' book. James' book has been available for some time now, and if you don't have it, for chrissakes, why not??!!?? Go buy it right now, you'll love it. However, the time has come for my work to be available freely as I'd originally intended, and I hope that it will be more easily and more readily used.

Hey, Humu, I think this is a good move. When we were in Seattle over the holidays, I wanted to check Critiki for Seattle tiki places and I couldn't because I didn't have James' book with me. And we REALLY needed to get outta the house!
Thanks!

humuhumu ~ thank you for sharing your labor of love with everyone! Critiki is the last website that i use before heading out on a trip.. so Priceline, Hotwire and Orbitz saves me money on travel ~ and Critiki lets me know what places to visit!

ps: tikibot..why didnt you contact me? we would have loved to guide you around! next time, ok.. promise!

Hey, DB! Sorry, it didn't occur to me until we got up there. We didn't know when we might have time to visit with anyone as we were only there three days, but it turned out we wanted to get the hell outta the house as much as possible, if you know what I mean. Ah, family and the holidays!
Next time, we promise! We hope you can make it down to the Crawl or Oasis - I'll buy you one...or three!

Hopefully this will reduce the risk of travel disasters, Tiki-bot! (You know you could have just called my cell & I woulda given you guys the whole run-down. :wink: )

Another exciting announcement: I've created an RSS feed providing the latest five updates to Critiki:

http://www.critiki.com/updates.xml

A lot of you probably aren't very familiar with RSS, but it's terribly handy. For instance, if you use MyYahoo!, you can add this to your customized news page by clicking Add Content, and then selecting the "Add RSS by URL" link to the right of the big gray "Find" button. There are all sorts of RSS readers out there.

Mahalo, Humuhumu,

For your continuing effort in spreading the joy that is tiki (and sometimes disappointment at the incredible tiki palaces which have been offred up to the gods).

I kept forgetting to bring my copy of TRT to work; I was going to buy another copy. Now I don't have to.

On 2005-01-10 19:20, christiki295 wrote:
I kept forgetting to bring my copy of TRT to work; I was going to buy another copy. Now I don't have to.

Oh, but you oughta anyhow. It's an incredible deal for such a huge amount of information, and an incredible amount of effort went into that book, it deserves every bit of support you can give it. I try to keep multiple copies of all the books (BOT, Tiki Quest, TRT) around, so I have some at home (for daydreaming and reference) and some at work (for explaining myself). This book in particular just begs to have an additional copy purchased to keep at the ready in your glove box or travelling bag.

On 2005-01-10 19:20, christiki295 wrote:
I kept forgetting to bring my copy of TRT to work; I was going to buy another copy. Now I don't have to.

:(!

Oh my god!

I don't think I said what I meant correctly -but now that I've put my foot in my mouth.

Suffice it to say - the tikibars signed version does need to be left only as a coffee table book. I do need another to actually use!

:)!

I've found it convenient that I have a "travel copy" and a "house copy" of TRT.

About the time the travel copy is completely torn up, I hope James'll have a second edition.

It's my sentimental favorite of tiki books because it was the first tangible evidence I had that there were other tikiphiles.

The new Critiki developments just keep comin'!

I've expanded the Browse by Globe feature on Critiki... before, the only globe you could view was one that showed only tiki locations that are currently in operation. I've added a second globe that displays all the locations in Critiki (with defunct ones marked "Gone," to make sure you don't get your hopes up inappropriately). It's fun to be able to visualize where all the old original tiki places were! Plus, it might be handy for thift store and antique mall hunters to be able to eyeball what old tiki places were around an area they're visiting.

To see the new globe, just choose "By Globe" under the "Browse" section on the left hand side, and then select the globe you wish to view from the drop-down box.

I've gotta say, the Globe is my favorite feature in Critiki, it's so fun to spin that sucker around and daydream!

I've just rolled out another new feature on Critiki:

Browse by Destination

You'll find it under "Browse" on the left side of every page in Critiki. I've written overviews of tiki for popular destinations... so far the ones that are available are San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Daytona Beach, and Highway 99 (California's Central Valley). Coming soon are guides for Los Angeles, Orange County, Chicago, New York and Las Vegas, and eventually I'll get to a bunch of others, too.

So now, hopefully, when someone posts "I'm going to be in San Francisco for a few days next month, what should I see?," we can just point them to the guide in Critiki!

Also: I'm sorry I don't have a way yet to reset your password... I encrypt the passwords for your protection, so I don't have any access to them. There's a way I can reset you to a different password and then let you log in to change it to something else, but I haven't gotten to it yet. I feel bad about those of you who have forgotten your passwords... I'm going to try to write the code to handle that this week.

Critiki is even more incredible than ever ~ i REALLY loved your Destination: Seattle guide. truer words never spoken: this city is crazy to navigate in, even with a GPS!

thankyou thankyou thankyou ~ you're the absolute bestest!

Humu - you are sick!
Critiki is awesome.... I can tell how much work you have put into it... really nice work & obviously a incredible resource!

Nice job......

Thank you so much for your kind words, I can't tell you what it means to me when I hear that people enjoy using Critiki.

I've made a small improvement to Critiki that I think is a nice one: it used to be that you could only see the five locations that were most recently updated or added, and you couldn't tell what the update was. I've added a "more..." link just under the "Latest" section that takes you to this page:

http://64.81.235.211/cgi-bin/latest.cgi

It shows you the 25 latest updates to Critiki, with a short blurb telling what the update is. I've also improved the RSS feed so that it works the same way, and I've added a handy-dandy "Add to My Yahoo!" button on that page for you My Yahoo! users.

I'm finally getting to some of my embarrassingly long backlog of updates, thank you to all of you who've sent info or pictures who have been so patient while I get through it.

Hopefully next weekend I'll finally tackle getting the DNS working so you dont' have to see my stinky IP address all over the place and everything will be critiki.com. :)

Just awesome , Thanks for sharing your hard work with all of us , cant wait to see more.

Damn girl! You keep out doing yourself.

And your getting popular too!! Check out the Retro Radar web site. Scoll down to January 15.
http://www.retroradar.com/

(I would have posted this sooner but I've been away and just saw it today.)

"The only time I ever said no to a drink was when I misunderstood the question."

Will Sinclair

[ Edited by: JerseyRED on 2005-01-31 14:44 ]

If any of you have forgotten your Critiki password, here's instructions on what to do:

Reset Your Critiki Password

Basically, just email me to let me know you need your password reset, and I'll create a temporary password for you, which you'll then log in with and change your password to something only you know. I can't just tell you what your old password was because it's encrypted, I can't see it.

Ooh de lally! An exciting new feature, which has been in the works for some time now, was completed today.

Now for every location in Critiki, instead of a a link to only one thread (if that) for a particular location, you get a link to all the conversations that have been linked to Critiki. So now instead of heading to the Tiki Central "Search" link when looking for info on a particular location, give Critiki a whirl. It's not totally comprehensive, as there are still threads that need to get linked, but it'll only improve as we get more locations linked.

Big thanks again to Hanford; he's put a lot of effort into modifying Tiki Central fundamentally to allow this sort of linking, and he's the one who built the new fancy-schmancy location search results page.

I'd love to hear what you think!

Whew! I've just moved Critiki over to a new server -- you'll notice two things that are different:

1. it's faster! A lot!
2. no more dippy IP address in the url!

If you have old links (ones that contain the old IP address (looked like a bunch of numbers), instead of "www.critki.com"), they should be automatically redirecting, but someday that'll stop, so PLEASE take a moment to update your links. Hanford & I are going to do a fix on all the old posts in TC that refer to the old address, so you don't have to worry about those.

Please let me know if you encounter any goofiness by emailing me at [email protected] .

Thank you, and enjoy!

Humuhumu,

Just went on Critiki. What a great resource! Just wanted to say thanks for all you do for the Tiki community. See you soon.

Nicktiki

I was just browsing Critiki a few days ago and was mumbling to myself about how slow it was.

The new server is a big improvement. It's incredibly faster!

Thanks!!

-Another satisfied customer.

F#@K YEAH!!!

Sorry 'bout that -- too excited to be ladylike. I've wanted to get something like this going on Critiki for years. Check it out -- Critiki now has Critiki Maps! Special nod to Scott McGerik, I was inspired to start poking at the new Google Maps API after seeing how he'd used it on his site.

There's now a "Browse by Critiki Map" feature, which starts off with a view of the whole durned planet. A less intimidating introduction might be to click on "View on Critiki Map" when you're looking at a location page, which will take you straight to a map of the area around that location, with all the local tiki spots on it. That's pretty frickin' cool! It only appears if 1) you're logged in, and 2) I have accurate lat & long data for that location. I've intentionally not collected that info for Home Tiki Bars. 'Cause that'd be creepy.

Like Google Maps, it won't work on every single browser out there, but it'll probably work for 98% of you. It can be pretty memory intensive -- the laptop I use has serious memory problems, and it limped along okay; it's downright zippy on Hanford's machine. Be patient, let it load, and start playing with it!

Here's a list of the supported browsers, with links to download an upgrade if you need it.

Critiki - Ooga-Mooga - Humu Kon Tiki

[ Edited by: Humuhumu 2005-09-08 23:18 ]

thats got to be the coolest thing ive ever seen...great work humu...

wow. amazing. this is going to make vacation plans even easier!!! and with soaring gas prices, its wonderful to see where everything is at once.

you're the bestest, Humuhumu!

Wow! You must write HTML in your sleep. Very, very impressive.

Great job Humu!