Here’s what the travel folks at Golf Magazine suggested a few months ago for a quickie in Chicago depending on how much you want to spend (three nights and three rounds).

3 Budgets – Chicago

What do you think? Are you surprised not to see any mention of Village Links of Glen Ellyn? I’m not sure what Golf Magazine was thinking. But definitely check out the other “3 Budget” links on that page. It’s a cool feature and one I always look forward to reading.

I’ve started this project multiple times in the past. Each one has failed, quite miserably I might add. I’m determined to stop that trend this time.

One big factor for success is that keeping it up has to be low maintenance, because I have constraints, real and imagined, on my time and attention. I just won’t write detailed reviews of all the golf courses in the Chicago area. It ain’t gonna happen; it doesn’t fit into my daily routine.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. Taking pictures of golf courses and posting them on Flickr (in full resolution) does fit into my daily routine. But it ends there. I don’t crop them, I don’t make notes on them, I don’t title them, and I don’t even delete the crappy ones. Those parts don’t fit into my routine. But I want these pix to be part of the golf dialogue in this great city in a more focused fashion than Flickr affords. You know what I’m saying?

Does that make sense? I want a dialogue on golf to come through on this site. I want it to be a site people visit to talk about public golf courses in the Chicago area and to gain information on the fine fields of play in proximity of both locals and visitors.

It will not be a place where people come to hear what John Steffen has to say about Chicago golf. I’m not going to create long, involved posts that have opinions and rants. This will be a no-narcissism zone. This is going to be a digital golf community where anyone passionate about Chicago golf can voice their opinion.

So my focus is going to be on creating the infrastructure for a digital golf community. That means I need to focus on nitty-gritty things like the best way to sort and categorize all of the courses in the region; or how users and members interact with Wordpress so that comments and opinions can be shared effectively; or how to situate the home page so that people can quickly find what they’re looking for.

That’s where I’m going with this, kind of Chowhound-ish but a little more focused. Am I making sense?

That’s right, you can see my in-process database of Chicago region public golf courses using the link above. My usage of Delicious links to do this is not typical, but I think it’s a perfect web service for creating a database of all the different options we have within about three hours of downtown.

We’ll talk much more about how to use this database in a series of posts to come shortly, all labeled with the delicious tag. But suffice to say, this is the type of infrastructure that I was talking about in my “hello world” post from a few days ago.

At the Delicious links page, I’ve sorted the homepages for close to 200 golf courses in the area by region, price, rating, and whether I’ve played it or not.

I’m building it out right now, so keep your eyes peeled for more directions on how to use it.

The word is infrastructure for 2009; that’s mostly what I’m working on for the rest of this year. Which means I’m doing a lot of planning and designing, plus building some core utilities that will help users navigate Chicago public golf.

So please be patient, because in 2010, it’s for real! I’m not kidding this time.