Sabrina gave a great session at CreativeCamp Kilkenny last weekend on how to blog like a boy - or in other words how to make your blog look great and be user-friendly.

Her slides are available here, with her talking points in the comments of each.

One of the points that she raised was about blogrolls - they need to be relevant and up-to-date. A while back I got sick of constantly updating mine manually, so I found a better way to do it.

*If you use Google Reader then you can use it to track your blogroll automatically*

I mentioned it at the session and Will chased me today for details, so I thought I’d lay it out in a post, step by step.

Firstly, you need to decide what blogs you want to display in your blogroll and then in Google Reader you need to place all of these in the same folder or tag them with the same tag. Next step is to go into the “Settings” for Google Reader and access the “Tags” tab.

On the “Tags” tab you will see an option to make each tag public/private. Make the one you want to share *public*.

A new option will appear to the right of that tag, allowing you to “add a blogroll to your site” - click this.

You will get a pop-up where you can choose the colour of your blogroll and then you can copy and paste the HTML code anywhere you fancy. If you are using WordPress and a widget ready theme, then simply add a new text widget and paste the HTML code into that!

The great thing about using this to manage your blogroll is that it will update automatically as you add/remove blogs from that folder in Google Reader, which is much quicker and easier than modifying your blogroll manually.

The biggest date for most people in the Irish blogosphere in the coming weeks won’t be Mother’s Day. It will, of course, be the Irish Blog Awards held on March 1st in the Alexander Hotel in Dublin.

Before that, under the umbrella of IWTC, will be the inaugural Ireland Geek Girl Dinner, organised by Martha Rotter and sponsored by Microsoft. This event isn’t totally exclusive, as men can attend, but only when invited by one of the geek girls. Since Paul Walsh had been begging for an invite for a while now, I finally took pity on him and invited him!

The end of the week sees the 2008 Irish Blog Awards ceremony taking place at the Alexander Hotel. Once again, Damien Mulley has put in a phenomenal amount of work in organising this event. Unlike some of the other technology awards ceremonies on this island, it’s a more informal event, costing only €10 entry, which is donated to charity. The shortlists have now been announced and the hard-working judges have slogged their way through reviewing all these blogs in order to find the winners in each category.

On the same day as the ceremony, several different meetups have been arranged, as people take the opportunity to catch up with those travelling in from round the country. Firstly, we have Red Mum’s Photo Meet, where they are welcoming people of all skill levels for a simple non-themed photo walk - should see some great shots out of this!

Just after this is the Ladies Tea Party, organised by designer extraordinaire Sabrina Dent. If you’re not into tea, then don’t worry - Microsoft Ireland have kindly offered to sponsor some nibbles on the day and I think a lot of us will be swigging back Martinis!

Sabrina was also responsible for the wonderful logos in use for the Photo Meet, Gourmet Brunch and Tea Party:

On the day after the Blog Awards, Deborah is organising a Gourmet Brunch for those left around Dublin.

A few others will be heading directly back to Cork for WebCamp/BlogTalk 2008, including a bloggers dinner that is currently being organised by Alexia Golez / Tom Raftery. However, I reckon that I’ll be taking a rest on the Day after the Blog Awards!

The following weekend sees the latest incarnation of the BarCamp phenomenon in Ireland. CreativeCamp in Kilkenny Castle on Sat 8th March. I’ll be attending, along with my Husband, George. He, along with several of his colleagues, will be representing Blacknight, who have been sponsors of all the Irish BarCamp style events so far. Their MD, Michele Neylon, was even kind enough to purchase the domain barcamp.ie when I bugged him about it, so that all future Irish camps can have their own sub-domain there.

I’m also delighted to see that the CreativeCamp organisers have ditched the traditional wiki format completely. It never worked on the previous camps, and I’ve bitched about it at length before. They have a lovely sign-up system, where people can input the details of the talks / panels that they want to organise and it transfers to the speakers page here The exact same applies to the registration and attendees pages.

I’ve signed up to be on one of the panels, entitled: Women & Technology - grabbing the blogosphere by the balls - a panel discussion facilitated by Krishna De on women & technology (as titled above).The panel includes Elly Parker, Sabrina Dent, Martha Rotter & Alexia Golez. I guess I should really start prepping for this to make sure I have something coherent to talk about!

I was at the inaugural PodCamp Ireland in Kilkenny on Saturday, which proved to be a really fun day.

As it was shortly after the honeymoon and I was still tired AND I don’t podcast, I was simply planning on turning up as the driver for my mother, Grannymar, I had no plans to talk or really participate. That was blown to shreds almost as I walked in the door, when Krishna spotted me and mum! We were asked to do a talk on mum’s experience podcasting, so we rehashed “Getting Granny Podcasting” the talk that I originally gave at BarCamp Cork just over a year ago (Original Video). The talk was well attended and we received good feedback at the end.

The last session of the day was a panel on the future of social networking and communities - what can be done to build communities and how did we see it changing in the next 5 years. As they were setting up the panel, Krishna grabbed me again and asked me to sit in. I’ve watched panels at several of these type of events, and considering I can usually pontificate on most subject matters, I jumped at the chance to be on this one, instead of sitting in the back and heckling as I normally do! If you fancy watching the video of the panel session, here it is (beware - it runs to 88mins in length!):

As my prediction for the next 5 years, I suggested the following:

Currently we build blog communities by people commenting on posts that others have written and seeing the responses. Often the only way to both comment and see responses is to visit the site/post in question. I stated that in the next 5 years we would see new platforms or growth of existing ones, allowing us to combine reading RSS feeds, commenting and seeing responses to comments within the one site/platform. Imagine being able to click a ‘reply’ button in Google Reader, type in your comment and have it auto-published to the blog post in question, without having to type in your identifying details each time or deal with annoying captchas.

It was interesting to see a twitter from Paul Campbell this morning that linked to an article on TechCrunch about Fav.or.it, a product that seems to do exactly what I was talking about!

It looks like I can tell the future after all!

How’s your grammar? For a lot of people I know, it’s not very good…

Test your knowledge here.

I got 100%.

I’ve been himming and hawing about whether I should write this post or not - the last time I opened my mouth to stand up for girl bloggers (choosing of categories for the las Irish Blog Awards) I was shouted down quite vociferously!

But I think I can get away with this one…. K8 recently awarded me a “Rockin’ Girl Blogger” award!

It’s a meme that’s been doing the rounds and when you receive the award then you get to award it to the best girl bloggers of your choice. As K8 describes it:

It’s a sort of… pass the pink idea, sort of like a little dig of appreciation to your fellow girlie bloggers.

With that in mind, I took a run through my blogroll to see who I should award one to and the results are in. Being typically me, I didn’t stick to just 5 girlies, as I had 6 very deserving people that I couldn’t choose between…

Grannymar - how could I not? The woman who barely knew anything about blogging a year ago now has her own domain and is entertaining people with her wisdom and wit day after day…

Beaut.ie - the girls only came onto the scene late last year but they’ve revolutionised beauty blogging in Ireland and thoroughly deserve ‘yet another’ award!

Red Mum - Mother, Photographer and great drinking buddie, her column paints a true picture of life with a teenager while her photos display the many facets of Dublin life.

The Humble Housewife / Frugal Tiger - Deborah dispenses both delicious recipes and thoughtful money saving tips - an essential in today’s costly Ireland.

Maman Poulet - Recently moved to a nice spanky clean new home, the pilot of the mothership casts her acid tongue over Irish politics and anything else that catches her fancy.

Mary Gilmartin - The ultimate girl geek, the languages that she knows certainly aren’t the worldly ones that you and I speak! Follow her path to learning Japanese and other tidbits that cross her path over at her ‘Crossing the Net as I Work’ blog.

Darnit, I’ve been tagged by Grandad, so I now need to do some thinking. Eight things that you didn’t know about me:

1. I’ve played in two ‘men-only’ rugby matches when I lived in France. First time was for the local town team second string, they had 14 players for a match and the opponents had 15, so instead of canceling they asked the opponents if I could play (I was their First Aider) and the opponents agreed (let me just say that I did have rugby experience). They were kind enough to make me captain (really just to ensure that I understood what the ref was saying) and went light on their tackles. I can’t remember if we won or not, but I strongly recollect our team being clapped off the field and me getting multiple ‘cheek kisses’ from our opponents - as they commented, they were not going to get a chance to kiss one of their opponents again soon!
2. In one year my hair was red, green, blond & brown. This was also the year I lived in France.
3. I believe that i was strangled in a previous life, I have a total phobia about people touching the front of my neck. A friend once grabbed me there when joking around and she ended up halfway across the room, it was a totally instinctual reaction!
4. I don’t drink coffee ever (can’t stand the taste) and I rarely drink tea - usually only when eating shortbread in winter. I hate it when people always offer me tea or coffee, especially when they’ve been repeatedly told for years that I don’t like it. My favourite drink is ice-cold water.
5. Party Trick 1: Most people can cross both their eyes in towards the centre, but ever since I had surgery on my eye muscles as a teenager to correct my squint, I’ve been able to control just my right eye. It really freaks people out when I swing just my right eye in towards the centre. It also nearly earned me a spot on Podge & Rodge last year, but the guy who can drink and then cry milk was deemed to be even weirder!
6. Party Trick 2: This one dates form my university days… I’m a ‘well endowed’ girl, so I can hold and drink from a beer bottle without using my hands… I’ll leave this one to your imagination!
7. Party Trick 3: The newest party trick is one I learned this year when on a trip to Arizona. The wonderful Phylis from the Philippines was also visiting and we had a few drinks in the bar. She asked the barman for some maraschino cherries and proceeded to try and tie the stem in a knot in her mouth. I just had to have a go, and managed it - three times in a row. The men at the bar decided my husband was a very lucky man…

If you’re not familiar with the letters and numbers above, they are US movie classifications.

Via the Limerick Blogger this week is a little service from Mingle2 (a dating service I believe) that looks at your blog, website or My Space page and then gives it an appropriate rating based on the words used within.

My site easily came up as a ‘G’ rating, but I think there’s more fun to be had here… Who do you think would get the worse rating - Mr Mulley for his liberal use of the word cunt recently or Mr Twenty Major for his consistent use of all swear words?

Mr Mulley

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* gay (2x)
* dead (1x)

Twenty Major

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* fucking (6x)
* cocaine (4x)
* cunt (3x)
* dangerous (2x)
* sexy (1x)

Yup, looks like Ireland’s most foul-mouthed blogger runs away with yet another title, Use of the most swear words in a blog!

What about those paragons among us? Are they as clean as they seem?

Grannymar

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* pain (3x)
* breast (2x)

I know my mother had trouble encouraging me to breastfeed, but was I that much of a pain?

However the funniest one that I found had to be the Humble Housewife… Parents are now warned!

Humble Housewife

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* knife (2x)
* crack (1x)

So apparently cooking terms are now PG-rated - who’s have believed it?

Hmmm, I wonder if posting this post will cause my blog to slide downwards from it’s clean ‘G’ rating?

Another one from Mingle2, via Paul Walsh this time. Apparently I’m 84% addicted to blogging, which makes me more addicted than Paul!

84%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

I’ve had various drafts of this post floating around my head for a while, but I was pushed into action this week by a post by Flirtysomething (which has since been removed) - she linked to an article in the Sindo and asked if it was similar to one of her blog posts. Well, yes, it’s a bit similar, but the fact is if you talk to anyone about weddings in this country then those are the points and stories that are going to be told…

Flirty’s original post on the subject can be found here, and like all writing and commentary on the topic of weddings, tends to make me cringe. ‘The average cost of an Irish wedding is 25k’, ‘Couples going into debt’, ‘Competitive Wedding Syndrome’, etc, etc… Each and every bridal magazine we pick up is exhorting that we should have the best of the best at our weddings, hotels push their expensive packages and bridal gowns are getting more dramatic and more expensive every time I look.

I can’t believe the amount of money that people are spending on weddings these days. I can’t for the life of me consider in any way spending 25 or 30k on one day of my life… Why would you want to put yourself or your parents into debt for the sake of that? In planning my wedding this year, I’ve been focusing on three things:

1. Don’t turn into a bridezilla
2. Find a way to invite everyone that I & the hubbie want there on the day.
3. Keep the cost of the wedding to under 10k.

Not becoming bridezilla is a difficult one, everyone wants to have input into the planning process, guest list etc. The key thing to remember here is that the person paying for the wedding pretty much gets final say, so if you’re the sort of people that run to your parents for money, then you’ve all but given them carte blanche to control the proceedings. In my case, it was myself and my hubbie that were paying for the majority, so we’ve been the ones to make the decisions.

Another key point is to ask the two sets of parents to provide the names of the people they would like to see on the guest list, ONCE. i.e. they can give you one list of names and that’s their last chance at it. They will be worried about leaving people off, so will think longer and harder about it. Make it clear to them that the guest list is at your discretion and the names they suggest may or may not be rejected. An alternative is to suggest that they pay for the dinner/drinks of anyone additional that they wish to invite, this keeps you within your original budget.

Finding a way to invite everyone that the bride and groom want there is harder than it seems. You will often prefer one set of cousins to another, but it’s hard to declare that by sending invites to one set and none to others. The tradition in my family is to invite aunts & uncles to the full day and cousins to the evening. I made exceptions in two cases - my favourite cousin will be one of my bridesmaids and her sister is traveling over from the UK, so there’s no point in her only coming for the evening. Most of the rest of my cousins are a lot closer geographically speaking, so it will be easier for them.
As for the final point - how to keep a wedding for 120 people to under €10k in cost - well it’s a whole other story in itself, so I’ll keep that for a future post or two… Plenty of tips and tricks on the way soon!

Donncha will be delighted! I finally got moved over from Blogger to WordPress thanks to the wonderful Niall from Blacknight! Niall slaved away over my blog for an evening and managed to undo all the screw-ups that I had mangled my blog with!

My Archives hadn’t been working properly before but they are good again and there’s a search that will let you find any of my previous articles.

I’m hoping to get a few posts up tonight about BarCamp last weekend and a copy of my presentation on ‘Death and Divorce in the Digital World’.