Since a fall from a train at a certain notorious station has rendered me one-armed for at least the next four weeks, I have spent some time recently considering the manner in which I might attempt to keep food in our bowls and a roof over the dog.

One cannot code with one arm. This leaves either phone sex or business boot camps as viable options, and since premium numbers are actually ridiculously difficult to get in Ireland, I’ve opted for boot camps.

Business Boot Camp is a service where you provide me with a limited amount of information about your existing site or your startup plan, and I give you very practical feedback and suggestions for:

• Site presentation, call to action and navigation
• Messaging and communication
• Product definition and price point
• Marketing strategy, online and off
• Search engine friendliness and optimisation
• Blogging and social media strategy

I don’t normally offer this as a stand alone service, partly because all my design and development clients get it as part of the normal package whether they want it or not, but mostly because I will kill myself before I put the word “consultant” next to my name. Most consultants I’ve encountered deliver very little value over an extensive period of time; Boot Camp is designed to give you excellent value immediately, which has to be vastly preferable.

It is important to note that whatever the To Do list we come up with for your site, it is unlikely I will be able to do it — this is not one of those marvellous website health checks designed to rope you into hiring your “doctor” for additional work. Your Boot Camp assessment will be tailored to what’s best for your business, not mine.

Creating and implementing your Boot Camp List should give you:

• A roadmap for the direction of your online business
• Resources and ideas for implementing that roadmap
• Better quality Google traffic
• A lower bounce rate and a stickier website
• More leads and a higher conversion rate

The charge for this is an extremely reasonable €300 and you should expect to spend about two hours on the phone with me after I’ve finished rummaging through your site or your business plan. You should also expect some very frank home truths and a good sized helping of salty language.

The salty language, as always, is free.

I’m back from Galway and the Irish Blog Awards 2010 with absolutely no voice whatsoever, a lovely award, a girly swag bag of happiness, and a huge smile on my face.

The carefully made plan for this weekend was to travel up to Galway on Friday to be well-rested on Saturday, a plan that when horribly wrong when I woke up at 6:00 am with awful shoulder pain, two eyes glued shut by the conjunctivitis I picked up in hospital, and a suspicious croak in my throat. Six hours was the most sleep I’ve had since dislocating my shoulder but so, so far from enough. I entertained idle and exhausted fantasies of cancelling the Ladies Tea Party all morning, but instead opted to drink double espressos whilst desperately wishing I was 28 and still taking speed.

At 3 PM everything got massively better when Ciara Crossan and I stepped into the Linda Evangelista Suite at the g hotel to setup for the Tea Party and almost died. It is squeal-inducingly stunning and the staff did an amazing job setting up for us even as Ciara and I exploded the suite into a temporary workshop of bags, tissues paper and boxes. Des Byrne from L’Onglex dropped off 40 bottles of nail varnish remover, Ruth Crean dropped off 40 adorable pocket mirrors, Curious Wines dropped off two cases of gorgeous wine I selected especially for the pretty labels, and by 4 PM we were just about ready.

For the record, everything at the g is gorgeous, from the rooms to the views to the food to the manager. We actually had to convince GM Damien O’Riordan that every single attendee was very well versed in pouring her own wine and picking up her own brownies and that the hotel did not need to staff this party with a butler. The service is that good and that friendly and that amazing.

By 4:30 the suite was overrun with women oohing and ahhing over furniture, beds and bathtubs and enjoying an atmosphere that could best be described as frolicking. The DIY Nail Bar was a huge hit, with women dragging extra chairs into the world’s plushest bathroom to varnish their nails and posing for photos in the incredible bathtub. There was a lot of laughter, a lot of chatter, and a lot of glasses raised on the private deck overlooking the beautiful water view. Alas it was over all too soon, as it always is, and at exactly 7:01 PM we drained the very last bottle of wine, collected our swag bags and piled into 10 taxis to head to the Irish Blog Awards.

For the past three years my focus around the IBAs has been on the Tea Party, which is excellent as it keeps me from fretting over nominations. Normally when various award short lists come out and I am lucky enough to be on them, I look at everyone who is nominated in my category, figure that as I’m in it there’s at least a non-null chance I might win, and gather a few coherent thoughts about what I might say if that happened. This year, I looked at the list for Best Business Blog, looked at my sparse posts for the year, and promptly ignored the fact I’d been short listed because there was less than zero chance I’d win.

Which means I was genuinely shocked and literally speechless when I did. Traditionally, this is the point at which you say “nobody was more surprised than me” but in fact a great number of people were equally surprised; I’m the first to admit it is an odd and unlikely win. I think I said on stage that last year I only wrote 24 blog entries; the number was in fact a whopping 40, but I tend not to count the site release posts.

I’m as confused and baffled as the next nominee, but also delighted. I won my very first award in Ireland at the IBAs in 2008, when I took home the glassware for Best Designed Blog. Since then I’ve picked up other gongs from various other award events, but none mean as much to me as the two Irish Blog Awards on my shelf. This is the community I care most about; it’s the people I love to work with and who’s opinions and endorsement mean the most to me. The fact I’ve got one for making a well-designed blog and one for the content that goes into it means the world to me, so thanks to all of you for reading and commenting, to the judges for voting, to Red Cardinal for sponsoring, and to John Handelaar for holding me up in the moment when I actually thought I might pass out from shock.

I sincerely apologise to Curious Wines, Contrast, Simply Zesty, and Sugru for winning. And no, you can’t have it back.

I cheered at huge volume for Pat Phelan, Sinead Cochrane, Maman Poulet, Red Mum, Panti and Beaut.ie, all of whom are most worthy winners in their categories and very deserving of their gongs. Huge cheers also to Damien Mulley, Rick O’Shea, Rymus and the video team and volunteers who make the IBAs the class event they are each year. It is a huge undertaking to pull off an event of this scale and each of them deserve all of the kudos in the universe.

5 AM and my bed seemed to arrive very early indeed, although not as early as our 9:30 wake-up call on Sunday. I dragged myself into the shower, opened my mouth to sing a few lines of something, and… nothing. Literally no sound came out. The suspicious croak from Friday and failing voice from Saturday has descended to full-on laryngitis and I cannot speak at all, although I do a very fine imitation of a chihuahua that’s been stepped on when I try. Never in your life have you heard a more pathetic “arf” noise. Were I able to laugh, I’m sure I’d find it hilarious.

Weekend scorecard: one fractured shoulder, one lost voice, one chest infection, two red eyes, 24 empty bottles of wine, 9 hours of sleep, one award and one fantastic day.

I’d happily, happily do it all again.

Last week, as previously mentioned, I made my way to Las Vegas for Mix10. I’d never been to Vegas before, and was very excited – though less keen on the Cork > Dublin > Gatwick > Vegas journey this trip entailed, what with that totalling 22 hours and all.

For the record, I love Las Vegas, and think we should all move there. It’s like Disney for grown-ups, and as long as you embrace the Matrix and its transparent artificiality, it’s sort of magical. I also really enjoyed MIX, and learned a lot; it was a great experience and I’m glad I went. Highlights for me:

• Getting to hang out all week with Martha Rotter and Claire Dillon from Microsoft Ireland, who looked after me in spectacular style and have my undying gratitude for making my trip possible;
• Getting to meet Joey deVilla, aka Accordion Guy. I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of him and didn’t know Accordion Guy was famous, nor did I realise I had parked myself at the Cool Kids Table in the lounge, but he was just plain nice to me. He has a Vegas Travel Diary that perfectly encapsulates this trip, and a toilet that tweets.
• Standing within 6 feet of Douglas Crockford and Dr. Dr. Dr. Bill, who also answered a question for me in a session he ran as an open conversation with just one slide (it was a good slide, to be fair.)

Interestingly, when I went to Nishant Kothary’s excellent session on The Elephant in the Room, his last slide was about a conversation he’d had with Bill Buxton that was virtually identical to my last blog post. I was flabbergasted and delighted in a way that is probably only meaningful to me, but I consider it a highlight of my geek life to have my crankypants validated that way. In fact, it ranks right after getting an email from an old-guard hero of the internet saying he liked a design I did for a project he was involved in.

In Vegas, I stayed at the Luxor, which I am well aware is virtually always a mistake. However, if what you need is a room on the strip for $79 a night, it’s a pretty sweet deal. I actually liked #1091, my ground floor, casino-front room; sure, the rooms really need a refurb and I was sleeping 20 feet from a slot machine, but on the plus side, I was also 15 feet from Starbucks, and Starbucks buys you a lot of points in my world.

Less impressive: the Luxor provides wired ethernet internet access only and the hotel has no open WiFi. It has WiFi, mind you; I saw plenty of Luxor nodes, just none open for guests. This is very frustrating, and after getting no reply from “all access” @LuxorLV, I typed $sudo apt-get install firestarter into my Ubuntu-running eeePC and opened up a public access WiFi node.

This access point was called, obviously, TheLuxorSucks, and ran for four days. And that, kids, is why you do not place signs in your hotel inviting people to tweet you and then ignore the unhappy geeks.

Sadly, while I am typing this entry one-handed, it is not because my other hand is busy rolling dice on a Vegas craps table. After a rather epic return journey flying Vegas > Gatwick > Dublin and a three hour train journey from Dublin to Cork, I fell (literally) at the last hurdle before reaching home and slipped spectacularly on the wet platform at Cork station, dislocating my left shoulder. So instead of going to my badly-needed bed, I went via ambulance to A&E at Cork University Hospital, where I waited for 6 hours to be seen, x-rayed and discharged with a suitable sling and referrals to the fracture clinic and physiotherapy.

For the record, while I realise the health service is in a terrible state, I’ve no real complaints about that experience. While it was a long night, I consider 6 hours at an urban A&E with a paediatric unit to be an appropriate L4 triage wait time. Paediatric and life-threatening emergencies should always take precedence over stable patients with managed pain. (Infants are notoriously unreliable patients.) Similarly, a few years ago when I went into the Mercy as a L1 triage, I received excellent and immediate care that was entirely responsive and appropriate.

People die of heart attack, blood loss and infection; nobody dies of a dislocated shoulder.

Anyway, here I sit typing slowly with one hand. I can’t dress myself, cut my own food, or bend over to pet my dog, and I’m pretty sore. I’m also exhausted, although not too tired to put a personal injury law suit at the top of my To Do list today. There is something ironic about the fact that after doing that website last year, I found myself referring to it today, but also nice that I know what this long process will entail, and doubly nice my fabulous solicitor takes my call on a Saturday.

So there you have it: I love Vegas, MIX and Simon McGarr; not so much the Luxor and Irish Rail, who can kiss my crankypants arse.

I do not, for the record, believe in celebrity. Maybe because I grew up in NYC surrounded by famous people, it’s a pretty meaningless concept to me. I can tell you that Tom Cruise rents movies like everyone else, that Isabella Rosellini eats at restaurants like everyone else, and that Cher goes to the grocery store like everyone else, too.

As a result, I am probably hard to impress. The people I admire, I admire because of what they have to say or what they’ve done, not because of who they are. I mean, even the most amazing people are just people – mostly people who wish you’d buy them a beer.

After all, everyone poops.

But if the internet excels at anything, it’s making celebrity out of molehills. It is very, very easy to get sucked into your own PR, and to start believing everything you read about yourself. I’ve watched, and continue to watch, many people trip over their own internet egos in spectacular fashion and it is, frankly, embarrassing.

A little over a year ago, when I noticed my online profile escalating rather sharply, I made some fairly rash decisions about how to manage my internet ego. This is what I decided to do:

• Stop Reading Web Stats: While it’s nice that when I write a blog post, a big bunch of people turn up to read it, that’s just weird for me. I started blogging when there were like 300 blogs online, total. I blogged before there was blogging software; I hacked a guest book script to do it. I still write for an audience of 50, and that’s how many lovely people I like to pretend are reading.
• Turn Off Twitter Notifications: Lots of interesting people turn up in my @replies or are re-tweeted by the small, trusted circle I already follow, and I find them organically. I don’t need the ego pat of knowing when someone new finds my Twitter account.
• Turn Off Google Alerts: Likewise, I don’t need to know every time someone mentions my name. Often what’s said is wrong, offensive, or just so weird it’s more harmful than helpful. When I want fucking moronic, I read 4chan.
• Say No to Blog Interviews: Like newspapers and magazines, one has no control over what comes out on the other side, but I’m sad to say that in my experience bloggers are more problematic. Often the result enrages me. Very rarely does it make me happy.

I feel compelled to point out that the Smashing thing angered me not because of anything Lee Munroe did, but because of editorial choices on the part of Smashing. Not a single site of mine (and Lee sent in several) made it to the showcase part of an article called Showcase of Web Design in Ireland. Either I’m good enough to make the cut, including the showcase, or I’m not. Keeping my words but cutting my work smacks of tokenism, and I’m done with that.

Granted, I am sensitive to this issue because the context in which I am most likely to be mentioned is as a “Top Female Web Designer.” The web is awash with female web designers; I do not understand the compulsion to gather us together and stick us in a special little ghetto. I don’t want to be praised for my gender; I want to be respected for my work on its own merits.

Having said that, I’m perfectly cognisant of my abilities. I punch solidly in my weight class, but I am not a top-tier web designer. I create very nice, very usable sites for great people at nifty companies at an accessible price, and that is good enough for me.

No matter what Google Alerts may try to tell me.

WordCamp Ireland 2010 wrapped up this afternoon, and at exactly 4PM as the last punter walked out of the amazing Set Theatre, I melted into an incredibly pleasant state of complete and total relaxation. Doing this again may be worth it just for that sleep deprived, adreniline fuled, frantic-rush induced state of Nirvana.

WordCamp was, in a word, fun. I’ve posted a quick thank you post over on the blog, but I also have some more random thoughts as I sit here enjoying my swanky hotel room for one last night before going back to the real world.

We could not have pulled this off without the amazing staff at Langton’s. Everyone raved about the hotel. Nothing was too much trouble. You don’t know how many people are coming to dinner? Not a problem. You need two sets for the stage? Not a problem. You need snacks we don’t stock for the kids, and you need them right fucking now? Also not a problem because we will get in a car and DRIVE TO THE SUPERMARKET FOR YOU.

Failure of snack planning aside, much ado was made about the fact that this was a family-friendly conference with child care. I’m not sure anyone who attended had ever been to a conference with child care before. I’m not sure Katherine and I had ever been to one either, but it never occurred to us to do anything else. And, honestly, it was easy. I’ll write more about it later but basically: two babysitters, €60 worth of kid tat from World of Crap, an activity schedule and you’re away.

Everyone should do this – the kids were not disruptive, they were not noisy, and every single child (including our favourite escape artist) was cooperative and very well behaved.

Kids aside, there were two distinct camps of attendees at WordCamp. People who came from a BarCamp sort of background had, in general, a great time. The venue was big and plush, speakers were both impressive and totally accessible, and if not every camper could fit into every session they wanted to attend, well there were a zillion other sessions and coffee in the ballroom.

The tiny percentage of people who came from the Vegas – Le Web – NextGen circuit were less happy. There were not always enough seats, these folks didn’t seem to circulate well in the frequent coffee and meal sessions, and they generally seemed undewhelmed. On the other hand, I expect people from that sort of background to be able to do the math on their  ticket price and adjust accordingly. SXSW is $395. MIX is $1400. Le Web is €1,200. WordCamp is €50.

Is WordCamp Le Web? No. But it’s not €1,200 either.

The speakers who were scheduled for the Conservatory were champions. We had two days of glorious sunny weather – in March, in Ireland – and it killed this glass-topped room for projectors and as a workable venue. Loads of speakers switched to a white-board presentation style effortlessly and far more smoothly than I would have been able to, and I admire every single one of them (and apologise and promise to sort that for the next WordCamp Ireland.)

I gave a talk – luckily not in the Conservatory – on using WordPress as the base for your social networking world domination plan, and it was solidly mediocre. In all honesty, given the fact that I had had five hours of sleep in the preceding 72, I was tremendously pleased with myself for doing even that well. It was not my best performance, but doing it was by far the biggest effort I have ever made to get on stage and stay cognisant for 45 minutes, and it felt nothing short of triumphant to pull it off at all.

Katherine did rather better, having had a grand total of 11 hours of sleep since Thursday, and I was delighted for her that her presentation was so well received. Neither one of us, however, is ever speaking at a camp we are also organising ever again. It is simply too much to take on.

And because it will take us more than a year to recover, we’ve also decided that the WordCamp Irelands we organise will be every-other-year events. It’s not feasible, given the time commitment, for us to do this every year, but we have already opened the calendars and flicked forward a few pages to look at when we might do WordCamp 2012.

Edit: Fuck it, we’re up for 2011. It’s on!

And yes, there will be more sandwiches.

Photo Credit: Donncha O Caoimh