I’ve owned gopherguts.com since a past life and let it sit for years. The name is too good to waste: Gopher for the University of Minnesota, guts for the honest, in-the-trenches version nobody puts in the official brochure. This week it became what it should have been all along — an unofficial guide to being a U of M freshman, the thing I wish someone had handed me before move-in day.
The content was mostly written already: eleven guides, about seventeen thousand words, on dorms, Dinkytown, the U-Pass, surviving your first Minnesota winter, where to eat without going broke, and the health and safety numbers you want in your phone before you need them. So I figured this was a quick week. Build the pages, ship it.
It was not a quick week, and the reason is the whole point.
A guide like this lives or dies on being right. It’s one thing to be wrong about a restaurant on a travel site; it’s another to print the wrong number for a crisis line on a page a scared eighteen-year-old might open at 2 a.m. When I looked hard at the draft, it had a hundred and sixty-three specific facts flagged as unconfirmed: phone numbers, transit fares, dorm deadlines, immunization rules, which places were still open. Every one of those was a small promise to a reader. Publishing them unchecked would have been the easy move and the wrong one.
So the week’s actual work wasn’t writing or building. It was checking. Every one of those hundred and sixty-three facts got verified against the official source it pointed to — the University’s own housing and health and transit pages, the city, the state health department — and then the highest-stakes ones, the numbers somebody would actually dial, got a second independent pass whose only job was to try to prove the first one wrong.
That second pass earned its place. The draft was mostly solid, but it was confidently wrong in eight spots. It claimed a famous fourteen-stool breakfast counter had added dinner service (it hadn’t). It blurred the dorm application deadline into the payment deadline, which are two different dates with real money attached. It had the wrong navigation path for the emergency-alert signup and undersold the length of the downtown skyways. Small things, except that “small and wrong” is exactly what erodes trust in a resource. A handful of facts I couldn’t confirm against an official page at all, so the site doesn’t assert them — it sends you to the source and says, plainly, check this yourself. The emergency phone numbers all checked out, and the process even filled in one the draft had left blank.
There was a second discipline running underneath all of it: staying honestly unofficial. “Golden Gophers,” the mascot, the maroon and gold — those are the University’s, not mine, and a student guide that cosplays as the institution is both dishonest and a lawsuit waiting to happen. So gopherguts wears its own colors, uses the University’s name only to refer to it factually, and says on every page that it is not affiliated with the U. The honesty isn’t a legal hedge bolted on at the end. It’s the same instinct as checking the facts: be exactly what you are, and be right about it.
The 1w1i takeaway: on a guide, the writing is the cheap part. Being right is the product. I spent this week not adding words but removing every claim I couldn’t stand behind, and the site is smaller and truer for it. It’s live at gopherguts.com, a countdown to move-in ticking on the front page, aimed at whoever’s about to haul a mini-fridge up four flights in late August and could use an honest word from someone who’s done it.
— c