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

March is shaping up to be a mad, mad month. Also a broke month, as I’ll be travelling a lot. Since I do not travel well, I’ll probably only complete one billable project between all these events. But I’m very excited about each of these trips and thus, they are worth the pain, jet lag and poverty.

At least, that’s what I’ll be telling my bank manager when I ask him for an overdraft extension…

March 6 -7th I’ll be at WordCamp Ireland, although I’m actually travelling up to Kilkenny on the 2nd to prepare all week – 200 bags do not stuff themselves. There are still something like 30 tickets, so get ‘em while they’re hot.

March 14 – 18th I’ll be in Las Vegas for MIX10, staying next door at The Luxor. I’ll know virtually nobody but the schedule looks great and there are some talks I’m really keen to go to, although nothing is going to keep me out of CSI: The Experience.

March 27th I’ll be getting drunk sipping tea in an extremely posh suite at the g for the Ladies Tea Party before the Irish Blog Awards. I just love Tea Party; it is so friendly and fun and great to meet so many bloggers in a smaller setting. Come along!

March 27th, assuming I have not passed out by 7 PM, I’ll also be at the Irish Blog Awards. It is genuinely a great night out, and hopefully I’ll be cheering for a few clients who make it from the long list to the short list. Go team go!

The event I look forward to most every year is the Irish Blog Awards, although honestly it’s mostly because of the Ladies Tea Party held before hand. And this year, when it was announced that the awards were being held in Galway, I set my heart on one of the swankiest venues in Ireland.

Thanks to help from Maria Moynihan and sponsorship from L’Onglex, I’m delighted to announce that the L’Onglex Ladies Tea Party will be held in a posh, posh suite at the posh, posh g hotel. The date is 27 March from 4 – 7 PM, and this year’s event will include food, drink, tea, cakes and even gift bags!

And frankly, given the amount of changing, primping, and even hair dying that went on at last year’s event, we’ve given in and decided to open a DIY Nail Bar so you can strip off your old colour and prepare to paint the town and your toes red (or Absolutely Alice, or Pompeii Purple, or…). We’ll provide all the varnish, L’Onglex and cotton wool you can eat; just sit down with your fingers and toes and get your glam on.

As in previous years, tickets are €17 and must be pre-booked on the honour system. If you don’t know anyone, don’t worry; the whole point is to meet other women bloggers and make friends before the awards. It’s a great, fun and buzzy afternoon, and you are genuinely welcome.

Here come the girls, baby…

What: The L’Onglex Ladies’ Tea Party
Who: You. A pre-event mixer for Ireland’s women bloggers.
When: Saturday, 27 March from 4 – 7 PM
Where: The absolutely fabulous g hotel
Why: Food, drink, nail painting, general merriment
How: Tickets are €17 per person and are limited to 40.
Registration & Info: NOW OPEN

Please ask questions here or follow @LadiesTeaParty on Twitter :)

Katherine Nolan and I are delighted to announce that WordCamp Ireland, Ireland’s first conference for WordPress,  is officially launched. We’ve spent a mad few days talking to venues, sponsors and speakers and all systems are go: we’ll be taking over Langton’s Hotel in Kilkenny on March 6th and 7th, 2010 along with 35 speakers, 200 attendees and a metric tonne of swag.

It is going to be a great conference with both excellent speakers and loads of social activities so you don’t sort of get stranded in a corner (we hate that) and is specifically family-friendly so you can bring the whole gang. The venue is also handicap accessible and utterly amazing – we are so excited it’s all come together like this.

This site was a snap to do because Katherine and I work pretty much flawlessly together. I did the pretty, she did the clever, and we’re in total agreement about everything to do with conference organising. It’s like marriage, only perfect :)

PS: Follow @WordCampIRL on Twitter for updates, or see the blog.

Barcamp Cork is on, baby, and it’s the 14th of November. I’ll be there giving a talk on Five Things Every Startup Should Know. I also highly recommend Paul Sweeney’s Connection 2.0: Communicating with Customers After the Web, mostly because I made him do it. (If you run an app or deliver a product or service, it’s essential.) Sign up here.

The night before Barcamp, Girl Geek Dinners is coming to Cork! It’s a great, casual night for women involved in tech – from bloggers to programmers – to get to meet each other. We’ll be at Gourmet Burger Bistro on Bridge Street, and dinner is €18 per person for starters, dinner with vegetarian options and dessert with tea or coffee. Sign up here.

I’ll be trekking up to Dublin for Business Camp Dublin and presenting a variation on Five Things. John will also be coming and will be presenting on (I think) commercial revenue streams for non-profits. It should be a fun event and Eimear the Wonder Dog will be in tow. (No autographs, please.)

When Martha Rotter invited me to Dublin to speak at MIX essentials, I was delighted. Mostly because she wanted me to do Stalinist Web Design again, and I’m looking forward to the chance for a do-over with this presentation to heal my psychic wounds from FOWD.

Also, since Microsoft fired me about 12 years ago, I’m secretly thrilled every time they buy me lunch or invite me to something. I’m even more thrilled when they graciously offer to put me up at The Morgan because the Hilton Dublin is a no smoking hotel. (I’m in no way a prima donna and I don’t need my M&Ms colour sorted or anything, but I do need an ashtray.)

MIX is on the 24th of June and registration is free. I’m very excited Leeanne Lowe [t] is coming down from Belfast to speak as well; her talk on Guerilla Web Strategy looks great and I’m looking forward to meeting her. And to getting a chance to catch up with some Dublin people, too – if you’re around for drinks or dinner either night, let me know!

I’m delighted to announce a new, two-part training day for small and medium businesses on 12 June in Cork called Putting the Internet to Work. It may sound hokey but this full-day, hands-on seminar is specifically designed to help businesses build online strategies, market effectively, and move forward in what we’ll politely call a new economic climate.

You can download complete details here, but in a nutshell, Martina Skelly and I will be conducting a crash course in digital marketing, covering blogging, social media, and the full Google toolbox from SEO to PPC Adwords campaigns:

Building Business Through Social Media

The Social Media seminar runs from 10 AM to 1 PM and covers:

• The Whys and How-Tos of blogging for small and medium businesses;
• Understanding and leveraging social networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook;
• Tools and metrics for quantifying results from blog and social network campaigns.

Putting Google to Work for Your Business

The Google Tools seminar runs from 2 PM to 5 PM and covers:

• Safe and effective SEO strategies to improve natural search engine results and rankings in Google;
• Using Google AdWords to run cost-effective PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns;
• Utilizing Google Analytics to pull it all together, monitor results, and calculate ROI.

We’ve tried to keep costs low while also keeping seminar sizes small: registration is limited to just eight people in each session. You can register for the full day for €150 or choose either half-day session for €80.

We’d like to make this day available to everyone who’d like to attend, so if you need a bursary, just let me know and we’ll do our very best to get you there.

WHO: People marketing small and medium businesses
WHAT: SEO, PPC, blogging and social media [full details]
WHERE: Lancaster Lodge, Western Road, Cork
WHEN: Friday, 12 June 2009, 10 AM – 5 PM
HOW: Registration is now open!

One of the many reasons I have been quiet on this blog for the past few weeks is that despite having any number of things to say, whenever I sat down to blog, the only thing that wanted to come out of my mouth was variations on OH MY GOD I HAVE TO PRESENT AT FOWD PLZ KILL ME NOW.

For those of you not familar with FOWD, it is a big deal. Despite never having heard of FOWD until a few months ago, that fact that FOWD is a big deal was made crystal clear to me by 300 people all saying “Oh my God, you’re presenting at FOWD? That’s a really big deal!”

Though nervous about this gig, I was excited about my topic and happy with my presentation. I didn’t know if the audience was going to be happy with it, but I knew it was what I wanted to say.

Granted, a talk called Stalinist Web Design is never going to be the easiest sell, but I was totally prepared to win, lose or draw on my own merits. What I wasn’t prepared for was getting completely and utterly thrown by failing technology when my presentation refused to advance the split screen (Slide view for the audience, Notes view for the speaker) after the first slide.

This is, apparently, how the universe punishes web designers who refuse to use Macs.

One the plus side, the endless interval between slide one and slide two did mean I got to hear several hundred people sing Happy Birthday to me, which was deeply embarassing but also delightful.

On the minus side, it also meant that when technology was finally beaten back into submission, there were no longer any notes on my visual view. No doubt someone more polished at this than I am would have made a more graceful recovery, but at that moment in time I was so grateful that I had an old fashioned, dead tree printed copy of my notes that I might very well have cried had I not been busy trying very hard not to vomit.

And so for Episode #308 of Do As I Say, Not As I Do, I actually read my presentation directly off the 13 pieces of paper in my hand.

For those of you not familar with the cardinal rules of presenting, they are:

• Never read off your slides;
• Never read directly from your notes – use them as prompts;
• Never blow your nose whilst you are mic’d.

Luckily, I blew my nose beforehand.

Anyway, this turned out to be one of those presentations people mostly either loved or loathed. (The fact more people hated Microsoft totally doesn’t count – that’s like shooting fish in a barrel.) I like people with strong opinions, so I’m as accepting of “was arrogant” as I am happy with “was fabulous.”

Mostly, I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad Carsonified invited me, glad I turned 37 in London, glad I got to meet a ton of genuinely nice and interesting people, and glad I got to speak at FOWD.

And really glad I didn’t vomit.

The end of April will find me in London, speaking at Future of Web Design.  Nobody is more surprised I was invited than I am, but more to the point: nobody could possibly be more terrified.

I’m not usually nervous about speaking in public; I do it pretty often, at all kinds of events. However, having thrown a huge strop about the state of the “Future of” conference series, I’m putting myself under a lot of pressure not to completely bomb this one. After mulling it over for a few months, however, I have finally concluded that the best way to pull this off and avoid vomiting all over my (very tasteful) Ferragamos is to just go ahead and be my normal foul-mouthed, acerbic self.

Thus, I will be presenting Throwing Client Collaboration Out the Window: The Stalinist Web Design Model.

Web designers and agencies of all sizes almost universally promote themselves as agreeable team players in a collaborative partnership. But what happens when you throw that practice out the window and adopt a process that isn’t a collaborative creation, a model where you don’t give the client choices, and a project management style where you constantly say No to the customer? Sabrina Dent argues that the clients are just as happy, the end users are better off, and the design and build takes less time with fewer tears.

I may never work again, but at least I’ll have something to talk about.

I am delighted to announce that plans have been formalised and the 2nd Annual Ladies Tea Party and Knitting Circle will be held at the Cork Airport Hotel. We will be swanning about one of their spiffy private apartments prior to the Blog Awards, which will hopefully be a nice setting and mean more mixing than last year.

The ticket price of €17 per person covers everything – venue, food, alcohol, and soft drinks – thanks to help from these lovely people:

Sponsor: Curious Wines
Booze for this event is lovingly sponsored by online wine retailer Curious Wines, who apparently heartily approves of ladies tippling (or toppling) into their teacups.

Sponsor: Campaign Monitor
The fine email marketing software folks at Campaign monitor have very kindly sponsored food for this event, and made managing the registrations pure bliss.

Donor: iFoods.tv
Brownies for this event are being hand made by Niall Harbison of IFoods.tv, so you'll get to say a handsome famous chef has personally baked for you.

Donor: Piosa Cake
Jo from Pisoa Cake is - oh joy! - bringing beautiful, yummy, fluffy cupcakes. Please confine your drool to your own cupcakes only.

Obviously, the title of this event is complete and utter farce. Having said that, Marian has suggested that anyone interested in knitting or crochet bring some work and we can have a bit of a stitch ‘n bitch whilst we’re there.

Registration is limited to 30 people. You need to complete a registration form for each person attending, and it’s first come, first served.

Who: You. A pre-event mixer for Ireland’s women bloggers.
When: Saturday, 21 February from 4 – 7 PM
Where: Cork Airport Hotel, Apartment 201 (NOT room 201)
What: Food, drink, occasional knitting, general merriment
How much: €17 per person.
Registration: NOW OPEN. CLOSED. Full.