Dumaguete's No-Tell Motels

As one leaves Dumaguete city proper, on the North Road, passing the Airport you will eventually come upon the town of Sibulan. As you approach Sibulan from Dumaguete, you come to, what is called, by Google Maps, San Antonio Street. Of course, there are no street signs - Maslog Elementary School is on the corner.

Traveling up San Antonio Street, you will also wind up in Sibulan via the barangays of Maslog and Cangmating.

The peculiar thing I've found about San Antonio Street is the prevalence of, what are called in Philippines, Drive in Motels. In the U.S., we might call such places No-tell Motels.

Word is, these motels are basically used as the location for a ....uh.... "third rate romance, low rent rendezvous".

There are four of these No-tell Motels, located very close to one another, on San Antonio Street; Wild Wind, Queen of Hearts, Triple 888 and Honey Bee.

I don't have personal knowledge of the workings of the motels, but I'm told by reliable sources that the rooms are rented by the hour, with a hidden garage available for each of the rooms.

As I mentioned, the main highway is called Negros North Road - heading north from Dumaguete toward Sibulan. The Google map calls this highway South Road.......I suppose it is for folks heading into Dumaguete from Sibulan.

Updates on the Website

I've managed to get a few posts involving hotels and resorts in the Dumaguete area onto the dumaguetecity.net website. My plan is to get more hotels listed before moving on to another category. Catering to visitors to Dumaguete, rather than locals, I will try to develop Labels and categories which might appeal to foreigners.......not only Hotelsand Resorts, but Restaurants and Spas (where massage is available).

During the last few days, I've been unable to start on this project due to a SNAFU with Immigration. Fortunately, I should be able to start working on this tomorrow.

New Website Up and Running

For several years, I've owned the domain name dumaguetecity.net. For the first few years, I had the web hosting done by the same company that registers my domain name. However, when company A began charging too much for their web hosting, I changed over to company B for the hosting while keeping the registry with company A.

I recently received an email from company B letting me know that my current billing cycle would end March 15 - the dreadful Ides of March, no less. The price to renew was much more than I was willing to pay to continue having the hosting done by company B.

My original goal with this website was to try and make a few bucks with Affiliate ads and Google AdSense. For a couple of years, this was breaking even. I was getting enough revenue to, at least, pay my web hosting fee. Unfortunately, the web site has not brought in any money in quite a long time.

To make matters worse, my web design capabilities have not kept up with the upsurge in mobile web surfing. I was never able to get the hang of designing a site that was "mobile friendly".

I looked at the situation, and decided to cancel my hosting account with company B at the end of the current billing cycle and use Google's blogger.com (where this blog is located) to host the domain name as a "blog".

It's free....and free is good.

After setting up a new blog called dumaguetecitynet, I was instructed by Google to go to the domain registry site and change the DNS (CNAME) in order to redirect traffic from dumaguetecity.net to the blogger.com address.

Easier said than done.

I went onto company A's website and made the changes as given by Google. I was told changes could take 24 hours. After 36 hours, I began a live chat with a rep from company A. I was told that I'd have to contact company B to make the changes. I was to contact the hosting company not the company that registered the domain name.

After a couple of on line chats with Ron, the tech from company B, I was finally able to get everything up and running.

Now, when you go to dumaguetecity.net, you're led where I want you to go.

Fortunately, the website is now mobile friendly.

Upcoming Changes to the Website are in the Works.

I have had difficulties with my website, www.dumaguetecity.net.

For the most part, I've been trying to design the website myself with my limited knowledge of html. Unfortunately, with the rise of mobile usage and the overall decline of desktop pc surfing, I've haven't done such a good job keeping up. Google has let me know in uncertain terms that the website is not mobile friendly.

It will be three years in March since I last renewed my account with a web hosting company and the agreement expires on March 15. I've decided that rather than renew the account, I will cancel my business relationship with Webhostingpad  and use Google's blogspot site to host dumaguetecity.net from now on. I've been using a different company to keep my domain name registered. I'll continue to use that 2nd company.

Using the blogspot site with their themes, I'll be able to have the website both mobile and pc friendly, although I'll need to made a few adjustments on how I manage the pages. That will take some thought.