So the fabulous Katherine and I are leaving clients, partners, children and dogs behind for a Ladies’ Holiday in Italy, where we’ll be hanging out in Pisa and Florence for five glorious days, doing not much of anything at all except possibly peering at a keeling over tower and booking tickets to the Uffizi to avoid the queues. Since my previously planned Prague jaunt got cancelled, this will be my first holiday in four years.

I am actually gagging to get on a Ryanair flight, it’s that desperate.

Obviously when you’re in Florence, you don’t give a damn where you’re staying because it’s Florence and it’s all stunning, but we got a great deal on the four star Hotel Monna Lisa and there is a possibility I may die of gorgeous before I even step foot in the place. I’ve no idea if there’s WiFi, but it doesn’t matter because even if there is, I seriously don’t want to hear from you.

So I’m leaving on Friday the 5th and returning on Wednesday the 10th at 19:20 – alas, too late to catch the last train back to Cork. Thus I will be spending the night in Dublin at The Maldron in Parnell Square. Thus if you would like to meet up that evening for a drink, I am at your disposal from approximately 8:30 PM.

I can rarely be arsed to go to Dublin, so it would be nice to see the people I rarely get to see outside of conferences. I’m not fussed about where as long as it’s nearby and there’s the possibility of a bar snack since I won’t have eaten. Let me know where, when and who in the comments and I’ll be there!

Damien Mulley tipped me off to the Maldron’s current deal (thanks for all the suggestions, Twitteroos!) and may also be in town that night, so I suggest we apply the wisdom of crowds and simply demand en masse that he come out and play.

I like VistaPrint – I’m all about the cheap and cheerful. Because I do regular print runs, I subscribe to their annoying sale emails, since once in a while I actually want to avail myself of a discount offer.

This is what this past week’s promotional mails from VistaPrint look like in my Inbox:

• 19 November: 10 great November benefits for you, Sabrina!
• 20 November: 34 FREE products + 12 discounts = get started now!
• 22 November: Save 100% 12 times over – Last 24 hours!
• 24 November: FREE! FREE! FREE! (Postage too!)

To be perfectly honest, I’m normally so blind to these near-daily missives that I really couldn’t tell you if their subject lines were substantially different a year or even a month ago. But what I can tell you is that in the present climate we’re watching everyone from banks to airlines go under, and consumers are particularly sensitive to the scent of circling vultures.

At this point I’m fully expecting tomorrow’s email to be titled FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WILL YOU PLEASE JUST ORDER SOMETHING FROM US!!!!!!!!!

For the record, I do not think there’s any kind of financial issue at VistaPrint. But I do think you want to be particularly careful about your sale messaging in this climate.

I actually need to print business cards. But I’m holding out for the offer that comes with the free pony.

Everyone who attended the Train the Trainers course in August agreed to offer their own free class in turn, and I’m fulfilling my promise to Damien Mulley by holding a Blogging Master Class on 2 December, 2008 in Cork. This is an excellent opportunity to meet other bloggers, learn some new blogging skills, and get your arse kicked by me without having to pay for it like normal clients do.

What’s a Master Class? It’s a term from music education and refers to a particular format for learning:

The difference between a normal class and a master class is typically the setup. In a master class, all the students (and often spectators) watch and listen as the master takes one student at a time. The student usually performs a single piece which they have prepared, and the master will give them advice on how to play it, often including demonstrations, and admonitions of common technical errors. The student is then usually expected to play the piece again, in light of the master’s comments.

And whilst I’m not pimping myself as a blogging master (there is no such thing), that’s broadly what we’ll be doing. Over the course of the afternoon, we’ll take four people’s pre-prepared blog posts in turn, and edit for content, formatting, voice and technical details like images and linking. As with a traditional master class, this will be an actual, hands-on learning experience. Unlike a traditional master class, there will be no cellos, but there will be lots of group participation.

That will take two or three hours, and we’ll wrap up with a mini-workshop on maximising and marketing your blog, because when you put that kind of effort into your posts, God knows you deserve some readers.

The workshop will cover:

• What and when to blog
• Writing compelling content
• Using categories and tags effectively
• Learning from statistics
• Promoting your blog
• Strategic linking
• Cheap and cheerful tools

Although the exercises are always good practice, this course is more geared towards business bloggers than personal bloggers, and preference for hands-on editing will accordingly be given to those blogging in a commercial capacity.

Date: 02 December, 2008
Time: 1 – 5 PM
Venue: Lancaster Lodge, Washington Street, Cork
Cost: Free. Woo hoo! Parking also free
Bring: Laptop, wifi thingie, draft blog post

So if you’d like to come along, please click here to register – I’m happy to do this with a minimum of three people and maximum of twelve, and I promise it will be fun.

And that yes, there will be fag breaks.

Update: There are three eight people signed up already, so this gig is definitely on. Woot!

Michael Kane of CuriousWines.ie had a spec for his website that looked like a €25,000 custom back end job. Working with ecommerce goddess Katherine Nolan, we were able to pull 95% of his wishlist out of the bag with a heavily hacked off the shelf ecommerce system for a tiny fraction of that cost. We also added some very cool features like product tagging and reviews along the way to create a nicely dynamic site.

They’re launching with a very cool giveaway contest for Christmas, and a special 24 hour discount code on Twitter, too!

Ireland squealed with delight today with the news that FOWA (Future of Web Apps) is coming to Dublin in March. I, too, was delighted – until I looked at the speakers list.

It’s not that I don’t like who’s speaking. It’s that I don’t like who isn’t speaking at Future of Web Apps:

• FOWA Dublin: 8 Male, 1 Female.

OK, I hear you say, but be fair. It’s a small speaker lineup. And if we decide that nobody cares about Silverlight, for example, there’s no reason to invite MS developer and Silverlight evangelist Martha Rotter to travel all the way from Dublin to, umm, Dublin. So let’s just be generous and assume that with a bigger pool of speakers, they do a little better.

• FOWA Miami: 10 Male, 0 Female.

Well, everyone knows that female developers are very hard to come by. We’ll ignore for the moment that FOWA clearly isn’t limited to developers – Gary Vaynerchuck is an amazing speaker who clearly really gets the web, but the guy couldn’t program his way out of an open paper bag – and move on to a more female friendly field. After all, if some random guy in Belfast could pick out 26 amazing female designers, surely the guys at FOWA managed to dig up a couple for Future of Web Design.

• FOWD NYC: 17 Male, 1 Female.

Perhaps web design isn’t as female-friendly as I thought it was. Given that, nobody should be shocked to discover that next week’s Future of Mobile in London isn’t exactly heavily weighted towards estrogen, either:

• FOM London: 35 Male, 3 Female.

On the plus side, Helen, Jemima and Vero clearly needn’t worry about the queue for the ladies’ room.

Seriously, I call bullshit on this. For those of you playing along at home, that is 70 men and 5 women across all upcoming conferences. That is simply not good enough, on any count, at any of these conferences.

The FOWA/D/MO events are put on by Casonified, a brilliant web dev group with a very credible proportion of women, both leading and supporting in a vibrant, high-profile company. According to their website, “It’s important to us to always be honest, even when it’s not convenient.”

And I think that if we’re honest here, getting the outstanding, credible women into these lineups often isn’t convenient. It requires that you acknowledge that the gender balance in these fields is fucked. It requires you to make an effort to push forward some role models for the next generation of women coming up in these industries. And it also requires that you make an effort to recruit the outstanding women across these sectors instead of waiting for them to come to you.

Because statistically, they simply will not. But they need to be there – because it’s important to the rest of us to see them so that we’ll step forward, too.

For the record, and for the benefit of people who really should know better – namely, people with blogs:

• The container is a blog.
• The entries held within it are blog posts.
• That’s it. It’s pretty simple.

Please stop inviting people to read your “latest blog.” It makes you sound like a moron and makes the pedants among us want to start pulling teeth. With pliers.

Thank you.

Today’s post sponsored by six bloggers, two “social media specialists,” one journalist, and by the letters P, M and T.

WeddingDates.ie allows couples to search for available reception venues across Ireland by date and by county. It’s a simple idea that turned into a powerhouse website, and I’m delighted for Ciara Crossan, who has enough energy and enthusiasm for 12 people and will totally drive this to success. Front end design by me, back end Django development by Python god Bartosz Ptaszynski.

The site soft-launched a few weeks ago, but today rolled out a really interesting survey on the recession and wedding budgets, with a very cool prize draw. So if you’re engaged, go check it out and maybe win a swanky hotel get away and golf package!

Marriage has utterly ruined me. I mean, using the yardstick of the “ruined woman” I was pretty thoroughly ruined prior to marriage, but nevertheless, getting married has had a number of unfortunate consequences I couldn’t have predicted.

I spent ten years living on my own, and while it was very enjoyable and rewarding in many ways, it was also exhausting. Living on your own means you have to do absolutely everything for yourself, from figuring out how to network the house to remembering when to take the rubbish out each week. Or every other week – I never actually got the hang of that.

In any case, while it’s great to be entirely your own pilot, it is also exhausting. So when I joined my life to another human’s for the rest of my natural days, I immediately and happily offloaded half the stuff in my head onto my husband.

After all, I’m fond of telling people, there are two of us. Surely each of us only needs to know how to do half the things in the world.

While this is a great plan in theory, in practice there are some pitfalls. Namely, your spouse going out of town and effectively leaving you with half a brain to once again run a complete life.

That works just about as well as it sounds. Two years ago, when John was in Edinburgh for a month and the housekeeper was on holiday in Poland, I had to Google up an owner’s manual for my hoover because I literally could not work out which bit was the on switch. Last week, standing in the middle of Tesco for the first time in months, I had to ring John to ask which aisle the tinned tomatos were in. Then I had to ring back 20 minutes later to ask what brand of butter we buy and where they hide that.

Tonight, after having worked a 16 hour day that started at 4 AM, I was absolutely desperate to snuggle up on the couch with the dog and a blanket and watch The Fellowsip of the Ring, which I’ve never seen and have had from Moviestar.ie for three weeks, but John (probably justifiably) refuses to watch.

Except I’m watching recycled television instead. Because like the punchline to a bad joke about women and technology, I cannot figure out how to make the DVD player work.

Quite honestly, I wept last night. More than once.

I never thought I would live to see this. This is so much more than a Democratic win; this is a turning point in American history. I honestly thought the US was too divided, too suspicious, too protectionist to elect a black man to the presidency in my lifetime.

I was wrong. After eight long years, I was willing and ready to elect any democratic candidate; the DNC gave me my dream candidate. But I never, for one minute, believed that he’d be elected. I loved him, I supported him, I donated to him, and God did I ever want change, but I simply did not believe the US had changed enough in the last 40 years to put this worthy man in the White House.

It has. And though he ran on a promise of change, the fact that America was willing to elect him – to donate, to campaign, to phone bank, to canvass, to work, to fight, to vote to elect him – means the change has already begun.

No matter what he does in his presidency, the impact of that change will reverberate for generations. For millions of children, the literally unimaginable barrier has been broken. And if he can, they can.

And I am so very, very happy he did.

I forgot to mention: we’ll be kicking off around 8PM, so feel free to come by at any point from then. We’ll keep the Obama Family Chili warm for whenever you turn up!

Again, we’re at 18 Gilabbey Street, which is at the bottom of College Road, and if you get lost we’re on 021 234 9938.