A brand new blog, Me and My Mac, for Ken Stanley as he chronicles his transition from being Bill Gates’ bitch to Steve Jobs’ rent boy – a slogan I came up with mysef and of which I am inordinately proud. In the annals of my web design portfolio, this ushers in what may retrospectively be known as The Illustrator Phase, which is odd as I usually dust off Illustrator about once a year – but it’s just been the right choice for a handful of clients in the pipeline.

I’m aware of the fact that this is an ironic weekend for this to have happened, but my work computer has officially keeled over and died. This is doubly ironic given that I was vaguely aware all was not well in Computerville, and just yesterday procured an enormous USB stick so I could back up my current projects folder.

Sticking the USB key into the computer? Is what finally killed it.

This is apparently a malady stemming from peripherals. It started with an increadibly troublesome printer that would freeze my entire system with each communication attempt to or from the PC, and finally ended in a blaze of absolute nothingness with the aforementioned USB issue.

There is a long day of mountaineering level rescue attempts ahead of my husband, but I am not terribly hopeful that this is going to end well. And on the off chance that this story does have some kind of happy ending, it is unlikely to be a quick one.

The real issue, however, is that all of my current projects in progress for all pending clients are locked on that dead hard drive. Even if this all gets sorted by the end of the long bank holiday weekend, a forced vacation during repairs is going to mean an enormously crunched work load, even if this event doesn’t mean starting completely from scratch for every single project.

Fortunately, I thrive on disasters, so it will all come good one way or another.

Unfortunately, if I promised you something this weekend, it is unlikely to appear. I will look at everyone’s deadlines, reshuffle in order of deadline priority, and get everything out early next week. When I know what the production schedule looks like, everyone will get an email from me so we can be sure nobody is being pushed to a new deadline that isn’t going to work for them.

I am, of course, very sorry this has happened and will do everything possible to make all of the pain mine and virtually none of it anyone else’s.

The last irony is that of course, I do have a back-up system in place. I back up all accepted layouts, all production designs and code, and every iteration in between. What I don’t back up is the 32 versions I go through before I send someone a suggested design. It just happened to work out that right now, I have about six clients in this awkward pre-production phase.

And yes, you can bet that the new computer system, in whatever incarnation, will involve a nightly, if not hourly, new back-up routine.

Greetings from my manic world, a planet so very insane I have virtually no idea what day of the week it is anymore. Given this fun fact, I’ve decided that since any day could be a Sunday, I’m going to roll out a Sunday Style just because I damn well feel like it.

Today’s topic: the joys of working from home. While any number of people are inclined to bitch and moan about the challenges of churning out designs, code and copy from a lonely turret, I myself am a fan of the self-imposed den of uninspired isolation.

While I’ve worked in some very nice professional spaces in my time, I don’t care how big the corner office may be, how expansive the view, or how fast you can get an intern to bring you a half fat double shot fair trade extra foam latte – you still cannot wear bunny slippers to the office. This fact, coupled with the annoying presence of other humans and the doubly irritating lack of cigarettes, makes working at home a complete and total winner for me.

Unfortunately, I am no longer allowed to wear the fabulous bunny slippers outside of the house. This leaves me with a fundamental question of what I can roll out of bed and wear that will allow me to comfortably sit on my arse for 12 hours a day and still have a husband at the end of the night.

• Yoga pants. I don’t care if they are so three years ago. They are comfortable, and while they don’t have monkeys stamped on the booty like my favourite pyjamas, they also don’t make my husband threaten to divorce me on the grounds of irreconcilable humiliation when I walk the dog in them.
• Monkey knickers. In 12 colours. My personal protest against not being able to wear monkey pyjamas all day long. Unfortunately I can no longer find them online they do not ship to Ireland, and no, you cannot have mine – don’t be disgusting.
• Fake Uggs. Because bare feet and bunny slippers are apparently unacceptable attire for short public outings. In the summer I wear flip flops; in the winter I wear €20 red BearPaws from TK Maxx that make me look like a cross between an elf and an Eskimo. This is still better than divorce, and way cheaper than £130 for Uggs, too.
• A good support bra. Because let’s face it: nobody lounging around in monkey pants is going to willingly choose to endure the discomfort of an underwire. Having said this, nobody wants navel-gazing boobies, either. The best solution is to wrestle the twins into the lingerie equivalent of a hammock. Depending on the demands of your rack, this can be either cute and cozy or something entirely industrial strength.

And there you have it: more information about the underwear and daily attire of your friendly neighbourhood web designer than you ever really needed to know.

Dear Internets:

I am completely willing to admit I do not know everything. I believe in taking advice on the things I am clueless about, usually from you and your pal Doctor Google. Foolhardy, possibly; but it’s always worked for me.

This year marks a transition for me from being part-time employee and part-time freelancer to being full-time self employed. It also marks the year in which we will, at some point, be applying for a mortgage. (Yes, I am 35 years old. No, I don’t own my own house. I’ve also lived in three countries in 10 years and been broke in all of them; give me a break.)

So while getting my financial ducks in a row is a high priority, the broader world of full-time freelance is also a bit of a mystery I hope to unravel with your help.

Things mama never told me about service providers:

• Where can I find an accountant or financial adviser in Cork to do my stuff and give me advice about setting aside enough money for taxes and paying PRSI and all that jazz?
• As my previous employer will no longer be paying my mobile bill, which I’ve never even seen, I need to know which provider and plan to go with. Hint: I like to talk. I do not believe SMS is a medium in which real adults can carry on real conversations. That said I really only use my mobile when traveling in Ireland (about once a month) but can rack up several hours in calls then.

Speaking of money, down to the nitty gritty:

I have no idea what market rates are in Ireland. I design sites, I code sites; I provide consulting and strategy for online marketing and positioning; I package and brand products; I write understandable web copy that reads like it comes from humans; I do site assessments, usability analysis, and user testing.

For all of these things, I have been charging a figure that is less than €50 an hour, except for usability testing – I charge test group costs plus the same hourly for that. The people who are paying me are telling me to charge more, and I know they’re right but I have don’t know what the right numbers are.

• What should I be charging for all of these various things?
• How can I keep costs accessible for people who have fun and interesting projects but low budgets? I often like those projects; they tend to refresh my creativity and I don’t want to price myself out of ever being offered them.
• If you’re booking clients months in advance, do you take a deposit now to block out the time for them at a future date? Usually I do 50% up front and 50% on delivery or go-live, depending, but getting 50% now for something I am not going to get to for three months seems a little dodgy.
• What do you do if you’re killing yourself to stay on top of a series of tight production schedules and a client doesn’t have their bits ready for their project’s agreed upon start date? My contracts state that if they can’t deliver their clearly articulated To Do list, delivery dates will be pushed accordingly, but what if you literally do not have room for slippage?

So, dear Internets, do you have any words of wisdom and experience for me? This is my year of Getting Things Done, and I’d like to do them right.

Yours, always,
Sabrina

The things I get myself into, I tell you.

Anyway, Ellie Parker and I are delighted to announce the upcoming launch of Sass.ie, going live sometime this month. We’re going to be aggregating posts from women bloggers in Ireland to help promote some of these great bloggers into bigger audiences.

But we’re going to build a ton of content around that, too. Our hope is that Sassie will also be a single point of contact for women (I hate the word portal) to find out about networking events like Girl Geek Dinners or to buddy up to attend things like CreativeCamps and Barcamps, as well as being able to access a well-written and well laid out body of information on running and promoting web sites from commerical enterprises to personal blogs.

We’ve actually got grand plans to cram a lot of high-value stuff in there, but right now all you can do is take a quick look, read what’s in the pipeline, and add your name to the alerts list so you’ll get a quick email when the site goes live.

And yes, by Jove, men are very welcome to join in, too!

Back from today’s Creative Camp and staying with my friend Katherine, who has very kindly let me hijack her cable internet. (Open wifi in Kilkenny: not so much.)

I was a bad, bad camper in that I turned up for lunch, did my two gigs and then turned around and went home to relieve the dog sitter. We travel everywhere with Eimear, but I’m just going to start taking her with me to these things so I can, you know, actually attend them.

Anyway, the panel went really well, and I panelled with brilliant women (Ina, Matha, Elly, Krishna moderating) although I’m a glutton for punishment and I like the hardball questions

I really had a great individual session on How to Blog Like a Boy, with a super responsive audience who laughed a lot and seemed engaged. If you’d like to see the presentation, its on Pix.ie. All of the text is in the first comment for each image, so you just need to click through them sequentially to get the actually content.

It was well attended by both men and women and afterwards, when I had adjoined to the smoking room (the great outdoors) a few of the men attending came up to me to say they were not, in fact, currently blogging like boys but felt suitably kicked up the arse now. That was interesting and oddly gratifying.

And for the record: yes, I speak like I blog and my language is just as salty, if not saltier, in person. Ireland has done bad, bad things for my potty mouth.

Here at chez moi we’re off to CreativeCamp a day early as we have plans for Friday night that will put us in Kilkenny on Saturday around noon. Given that little scheduling hitch, I have to say that Keith and Ken and the whole Kilkenny mafia have been 32 flavours of lovely dealing with me, because I have been a perpetual pain in the arse about this:

Is there public transport? Are there projectors and screens? How long do I have? Can you save slots for me? Which slots? What’s for lunch? When is lunch? Do I need a dongle? Can I have a pony?

And not a single one of them gave up and just shot me.

But that is not the end of Irish excellence today. I had two more stellar experiences today that really demand blog love.

First of all, the people at Blacknight got a name registered, DNS sorted and free sponsored hosting in place less then three hours after we faxed in a rush request for a .ie domain name. It’s for a super top secret, soon to be revealed web project Elly Parker and I are kicking off at Creative Camp. We’ve been working on it for a while, we just didn’t realise that this weekend was, uh, this weekend. Anyway: Blacknight. Awesome service.

Second of all, a couple of people have emailed me to say they can’t make CreativeCamp but are interested in my presentation on How to Blog Like a Boy. Since I refuse to read off my (very minimalist) slides, my presentation notes are the bulk of my gig and the slides are just summary backdrops. This means I can’t just make a PowerPoint download; it would leave all the context behind.

Marcus Mac Innes at Pix.ie to the rescue. I uploaded all of my slides as JPG images into an album and he entered all of my notes by hand in the first comment of each slide, one by one. Pix.ie users can’t use HTML like paragraph and break tags yet, and some of these slides have four or five paragraphs of notes and citations, so he saved my stressed out bacon. (Slides go live after Camp.)

Flicker, who wanted me to upload three test images and then wait more than a week until they’re reviewed so I can prove I’m not no longer a pornographer, can kiss my booty. Or just, you know, hire more staff.

Anyway, CreativeCamp, Blacknight, and Pix.ie all get 10 out of 10 for being outstanding, home grown examples of utterly fabulous people.

Give them your money and your love.

PS:

I have a yenta streak a mile wide. I am, in fact, an unabashed match maker. I love pairing things up, although this may be more symptomatic of OCD than a predictor of success in my backup career running a dating agency for geeks and nerds.

In any case, this week I’ve delivered a match made in heaven. I paired stock image site LuckyOliver up with color palettes site COLOURlovers with a cool, cool contest:

Pick an image off LuckyOliver, create a palette from it at COLOURlovers, and be in with a chance to win cool prizes.

Which, by the way, start with a $300 iPod Touch and end with an iTunes gift card. Bonus: all prizes can be redeemed for cash instead of McProducts so that those of us who think Macs have been rendered useless as doorstops now that they don’t weigh anything can play too.

I am a self-confessed contest whore, but I’m picky with it. All those book cataloging sites with contests where they’re offering up yet another Amazon gift certificate as a prize seem like wasted opportunities to me. Amazon will give you no love and send you no traffic. Why not pair with an online book seller who is keen to share traffic and will promote your contest with equal love and will ship £€$100 worth of books anywhere in the world to the winner?

(Despite the fact that I love craft marketplace Etsy, I was really, really annoyed when I filled out a tedious, poorly formulated marketing survey there only to find out that I couldn’t win the survey contest because I wasn’t in the US. That’s just rude.)

Speaking of crafts, promoting a new book on crafting? Buddy up with a popular yarn house for prizes, and ask people to knit or create (and photograph) book covers as contest entries. Even if you end up paying for the prize pack yarns yourself, you’ll get way more back from your partner’s traffic than you spent in cash. What’s more, that traffic is your target audience, and if you have good content, they’ll come back and stick around.

Plus, “I made this for this contest and photographed it and you can see it here”? Total blog fodder. Everyone who enters will blog about it. Viralpalooza!

So, please: go out and make friends in your niche. Share the love to spread the word. And no more Amazon gift certificates!

The universe works in mysterious ways. After having won the Best Designed Blog award, I now cannot get Windows to boot on my workstation upstairs. I am instead trapped on my laptop, where my full compliment of graphics programs consists of the less than helpful Microsoft Paint. This is what happens when you win a design award and don’t thank PhotoShop: It cuts you off at the knees and leaves you with no design headers.

I have no idea what I said when I went up to accept my award, but as Annie pointed out, it’s a slightly odd award in that technically, it isn’t about your topic, your content, your readers or your comments. “I’d sincerely like to thank Adobe PhotoShop for being a pig of a program” isn’t much of a speech though.

What I hope I conveyed in my stutterings is that it means a lot to me to have been so accepted by the Irish blogging community. I’m a transplant, I have a hideous American accent, and I barely made it into eligibility for this year’s awards since I only started blogging here in November. I was delighted to win, sincerely. Thank you!

And now on to the gossip. People who were not what I expected:

• In addition to being a trifecta winner, having a new book out and being unbearably nice in person, Twenty is not remotely scary. Who’d of thought?
• Bock the Robber? All front. The sweetest, friendliest, nicest crumpet of a bloke ever. He was just lovely to me, although I see he’s gone back to being grumpy this morning. And my God, he smells divine.
• Una, who does indeed rock, is about twelve years old. Seriously, I was concerned her mammy let her out of the house without an adult to accompany her at street crossings.
• Paul Walsh is disarmingly doe-eyed in person. I, however, was armed with vodka. Wow, did that not end well. Oops.

As I said before, if I mentioned everyone I met on Saturday, we’d be here until next year. So instead, I’ve decided to hand out awards to people who were simply outstanding in a number of unofficial Blog Awards categories:

• Best Stickers: Elly Parker, for the hilarious What Would Mulley Do? stickers that kept turning up in the strangest places.
• Best Dressed Blogger: MaryRose. Second time I’ve met her and each time, she looks totally put together and stunning. She has promised to hook me up with her stylist because I have got to learn what to wear when pyjamas are not an option.
• Best Eyebrows: Sinead Gleeson. Eyebrows that artful require a dedication to grooming to which I can only aspire.
• Best Hat: Ken McGuire. You go, sk8ter boi.
• Best Stalker Fan: Darragh Doyle. Oh my God, I just want to bring him home and pet him and love him and call him George. So fabulous.
• Biggest Bar Tab: Deb Hadley. A girl who apparently cannot say to no to buying everyone a drink. I was standing next to her when she checked out, and Jesus wept (literally) over her bar tab.
• Best Constitution: Suzy, who was somehow able to make it to brunch the next day while everyone else slacked off with sore heads. She and Mrs Suzy also did a champion job holding down registrations.
• Most Interesting Conversationalist Who’s Blog I’d Never Read: Jo Murphy. Seriously, if we had more time, we could absolutely chivvy the world into being the liberal bastion of our dreams. Alas.
• Most Angelic: Aisling from Beaut.ie turned up wearing a stunning dress and looking completely ethereal from head to hem. Cow!
• Most Argued Over: Aoife McIndieHour. The husband and I are disputing who called dibs…
• Worst Aftermath: Elana. All the hangovers in the world don’t beat this for pants.

A special award goes to Ross Costigan – not for Best Hair, but for Weirdest Conversation:

Me: Jesus, I hate Americans.
Ross: Ha ha ha, right on! Me too! Where are you from?
Me: Oh, umm, New York.
Ross: [Implodes with does not compute.]

And yeah, there’s a story there; no, it doesn’t involve a Blog Awards attendee; and yes, I will post that rant later this week.

Finally, and this is very important: I have lost the card (and therefore the name) of the tall, charming US-admitted Irish un-lawyer selling his soul to BigTelco. Please, please drop me a line if you read this.

Last night was really quite the night. If you want the very abbreviated version: Twenty Major is the hot. And I won an award!

Everyone seems to be doing the rounds and shouting out to everyone they talked to at the jam-packed Irish Blog Awards last night. I have no idea how they can do that; I feel like I met absolutely everyone who blogs in Ireland, everyone who’s ever read a blog in Ireland, and everyone who’s ever shagged someone who’s read a blog in Ireland. There were a phenomenal number of people there, and one of the great surprises of the night was that every one of them, with a single exception, was incredibly nice.

The exception is the drunken bastard who kneecapped me with his shitkickers whilst staggering by the bar and didn’t offer so much as a passing “sorry.” Fucker.

I am absolutely chuffed to pieces and so grateful and full of so many things to say, but also so tired. I had four entire hours of sleep last night, and I’m shattered and incomprehensible. I have to go to sleep with my award under my pillow, but I’ll come back tomorrow to dish the dirt!