After spending so long deliberating what direction to take kenmc.com in, I figure a complete change is as good as the rest.

Happy New Year to all.

Project 365. 365 Photos. 365-A-Day. Photo-A-Day.

Call it what you like, at this stage, the majority of people know what they are – a collection of photos (at least 365 of them) designed to chronicle a year in the life of something. Some people take a photo of a sunrise a day. Some people take a photo of their face for a year. Me, I’ve just decided to chronicle the gap between 2011 and 2012.

I turned 28 on Tuesday, had a cracking meal with some cracking people and arrived home with a load of photos from the night. But I’m shooting things every day, whether for work, theatre, food or something else. The phone goes with me everywhere and the pocket camera goes with me everywhere (and certainly has the scratches to prove it).

So, inspired by a friend that’s doing something similar since she lost her job earlier in the year, I’ve decided to run a 365 photo blog what happens between birthday 28 and birthday 29. Some days there’ll be one photo, some days a dozen. I know there will be food, technology, festivals, singing, dancing, wedding planning, the US, Canada, sun, snow and more involved. Keeping to it is one thing, but having set the site up as a Tumblog (Tumblr-type blog) with a mobile interface, it shouldn’t be all that hard.

It started on May 31st and there’s two days there already.

KLCK gathering in Kilkenny, pic via Amanda Webb

The second Monday of the month is almost upon us which means the next KLCK Bloggers Network meeting is just around the corner as well. I was invited along as a guest speaker for last month’s gathering which took place in Kilkenny. 18 or so people made the night, the good numbers sparking some interesting conversation about blog promotion, mailing lists, WordPress plugins and the like.

The November gathering takes place this coming Monday at the Johnstown Business Centre in Johnstown, Co. Kildare.

We have an excellent speaker lined up for the night. John O’Connor from Red Oak Tax Refunds will be talking about measuring the success of our blog and we are introducing a round table discussion on how to find inspiration for our blogs. We are hoping that this round table discussion will encourage more knowledge sharing amongst the group and enable novice bloggers to get more from our meetups.

It’s shaping up to be a great meeting and as always …

The network is aimed at connecting bloggers new and experienced in counties Kildare, Laois, Carlow and Kilkenny with the meetups rotating between every month.

It’s a 7pm kick off, there’s no charge to go along and if you’re new to blogging, looking to build your blog or just get out and about for tea and chat,then Johnstown Business Centre is the place to be on Monday evening. You can follow the group’s activities on Facebook.

I had been thinking about it long enough, taking photos long enough, tweeting about it long enough and getting in the neck from friends long enough.

The “it” I’m referring to is food, my love of food, and now I’ve taken all of the above and finally started up a proper food blog.

I’ve got a year’s worth of photos on the iPhone and HTC that are primarily about food. I kept a tumblr blog going until mid summer which was made up just of photos of meals – breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, anything went. But a trip to Foodcamp over the bank holiday weekend gave me the kick in the arse / boost I needed to put everything in the one place and start writing about all things food. And so, if you didn’t get a nudge from me on Facebook about it, I present Any Given Food.

There’s about a week’s worth of posts on there at the moment but the notebook I’ve been keeping should see me through to the Spring, which is certainly enough in terms of content to get me started. That said, I’m not a conventional food blogger by any means. I can’t see myself painstakingly describing recipes (I’m very much “throw in a bit of this, some of that, bang it in the oven”) kind of home cook but the blog will carry posts on local markets, a wealth of foodie photos, dinners out, gluten-free bits and bobs and whatever else takes my foodie fancy.

I’m directing my food tweets via a new account, @anygivenfood and I’ll be posting extra content as I get it over on the Any Given Food Facebook page.

As of this morning I’ve also released a podcast feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/FoodcampPodcasts) for the Savour Kilkenny Foodcamp Podcasts so if you missed out on Foodcamp last week you can grab yourself some of the talks. There’s four available to download at present with more to come over today and tomorrow.

Thoughts and comments much appreciated and if you would like to subscribe to the new blog use this RSS feed.

I don’t usually go out of my way to speak at events or gatherings, social, business or otherwise. But when Keith Bohanna asked if I could fill in for him at last night’s KLCK Bloggers Network gathering in Kilkenny I figured I couldn’t say no, the event being on my doorstep and all.

I would equate the gathering last night to something akin to Open Coffee only minus the coffee and a bit more formal. The KLCK Bloggers Network was formed by Amanda Webb (of Spiderworking.com, in the running for best videocaster at this year’s Irish Web Awards) and Lorna Sixsmith of Garendenny Lane who I had met previously at Kilkenny Open Coffee (also turns out we’re both writing for a Carlow magazine). The event itself was held in the Kilkenny Pembroke Hotel who were providing one of their conference rooms complete with projector, screen, notepads, pens, all you would need to run an event like it.

While I was the second speaker on the night (which worked out a treat in terms of the content), Marie Ennis-O’Connor was first up to bat leading a great talk on driving additional traffic to your blog, from starting out as a blogger to building a community around your blog through email, comments, guest blogging and more. The audience (about 18/19 of us there) was a mix of beginner and experienced bloggers with some people simply coming in to get an understanding of what blogging is and does for people.

My own talk was quickly cobbled together yesterday on the back of what I call my WordPress toolbox – the plugins I deem essential to any WordPress installation and ones that I keep handy in a zip file whenever I’m starting a new blog either for myself or a client but I felt it went well for something that was a technical overview of additions you can make to your WordPress blog for the both the admin side of things and your theme out front. You can get the list of plugins and links here on Slideshare. The slides also feature a glimpse of the new branding I’m rolling out across the business later in the month.

Last night was the fourth monthly gathering of the network which heads to Kildare for November and should be back in Kilkenny come February or March. The name – KLCK – is an aconym for Kildare Laois Carlow and Kilkenny and they’re actively looking for topics for discussion that would benefit all in attendance, along with speakers. If the rest of the gatherings are along the lines of last night then they’ll be well worth heading along to. Having it hosted in the Pembroke created an opportunity for people to stay on for drinks and further the conversation in the bar but there’s signs there of a good group and network in the making, with everyone being able to contribute on some level from the own experiences. One thing I did note though is that for the 18 people in the room, there were only four men around the table, one of them being me as a speaker for the evening. Makes a change from the male-dominated Open Coffee mornings in Kilkenny.

That said, it’s also opened me up to the notion that I need to get to more events. Outside of Kilkenny, I think Media2020 and the Blog Awards in Galway were the only events I’ve been to for the year. Time to get back on the road, maybe as far as Kildare for the second Monday in November…

Sure enough, there’s a lot I’m going to do this year between work, theatre, travel, music, business as usual really.

What I missed throughout the year was a regular sense of blogging, something I’ve thorougly enjoyed over the past five years and something I plan to return to with much more vested interest in 2010.

For now, it’s the first day of a new year and those reading this I will assume are both alive and well. That’s the way it should be

To each and all I hope the new year does you well and you the same. Get up and get out, get on with your projects, turn your hobby into something new, open new doors and meet new faces. All the time while you’re doing it, have a blast as well.

K

While the meat of the day was in the actual talking and conversation part (as more often than not is the case), I had put some slides together as a handout for the eighteen or so who attended. Cathy Fitzgerald has been working away on getting the ArtLinks courses online over Christmas and the Blogging For Beginners presentation on Slideshare is currently the featured presentation in the careers section.

You can view / download the slides here.

Another one on ‘Getting Ahead In The Music Industry’, a talk myself and some of the KKM crew ran in Wicklow in November 2007 should be making its way online in the next few days.

Some of the presentation may indeed be dated at this stage but will get a revamp soon enough.

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The long awaited WordPress 2.5 has been released. In fairness, some of the advances in WP2.5 are as great that it could well have been labelled WordPress 3.0 but who’s to argue with version numbers.

Before rolling out upgrades across a number of my own blogs and blogs I manage for others, I’ve been doing the precautionary thing of testing WP2.5 locally with a variety of homemade themes and some of my regular plugins.

Plugin Issues

So far I’ve only found an issue with with Alex King‘s Popularity Contest plugin – if you try to activate the plugin under WP2.5, for the moment, you’ll see it triggers a fatal error. This can be fixed as outlined here

Open popularity-contest.php and scroll down to line 59. Replace require(’../../wp-blog-header.php’); with require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);

However, in running the plugin locally I found that after making the changes in order to get the plugin to activate, it wouldn’t create the two tables needed in order to run, so these had to be entered manually (via phpMyAdmin). To create the tables, you’ll need to run the following SQL queries.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity` (
`post_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`total` int(11) NOT NULL,
`feed_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`home_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`archive_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`category_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`single_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`comments` int(11) NOT NULL,
`pingbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`trackbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`last_modified` datetime,
KEY `post_id` (`post_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity_options` (
`option_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`option_value` varchar(50) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

Note that PREFIX refers to your WordPress table prefix, in most common cases it is simply wp_ unless you’ve got multiple copies of WordPress running in the same database.

Initial Impression

Love it. I downloaded the latest SVN version only yesterday in the office though never got around to playing with it (of course not knowing the full release would hit today). The admin interface is much smoother, I’m liking the customisable dashboard (I used to edit the admin index and strip out everything bar the ‘write a post’ link and stats) and the overall colour scheme is much more appealing. I was never a visual editor user before (and won’t change in a hurry), but I do like the changes they’ve made, including the full screen option for those intensive blogging moments.

I’ll have a full play around with the gallery / media functions yet as well as making sure my other preferred plugins (sitemaps, podpress etc.) are all up to working order before doing a widescale upgrade.

You can download the latest version of WordPress 2.5 right here. You can also see a full list of new features right here.

That said, the course will be promoted to creative practitioners working within Kilkenny, Carlow, Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow and should attract a good blend of visual artists, musicians, writers and the likes. This will be the second course I’ve been involved in putting together for ArtLinks, having facilitated a “Getting Ahead In The Music Industry” day (my 90 minute talk focusing on effective use of the web for musicians) in Wicklow last November.

For musicians who are new to blogging and don’t want to wait until May for a chat, have a gander of Kyra Reed’s recent blog post for TuneCore on Why Every Artist Needs A Blog.

It is also nice to see that the Kilkenny Arts Office have also started the ball blogging about their Artist In Residence programme at the gallery at 72 John Street.

Kicking things off on the first of March is the third annual Irish Blog Awards. Damien Mulley is in the driving seat again on this year’s awards show to be held in the Alexander Hotel in Dublin. The Alexander was a great venue for the awards last year and whether you’re nominated for a category or not, it makes for a great social and networking occasion. Let the hair down, have a few drinks and mark a date in the calendar that recognises the quality of bloggers of all genres in the country.

Also on the day there’s a “Ladies Tea Party” being organised by Sabrina Dent and Ina O’Murchu. This takes place in The Market Bar, about a 12 minute walk from the Alexander and is an open invite to all female bloggers in Ireland to have a gathering pre-awards show. Drop in for a few hours from 4:30pm on March 1st.

Not only is there a tea party on the day, but Red Mum is organising a meetup for photo bloggers as well, something I might try and get along to, depending on how early I can get out of Kilkenny.

On Sunday March 2nd you’ve got the third WebCamp event, to be held in Cork at the Kingsley Hotel. With talks in the morning and breakout sessions in the afternoon, the topic for the day is social network portability. Workshop fee is €50 for early bird registrations and €60 at regular cost. Full details can be found here.

If you’re hanging around Dublin after the Blog Awards then you might be interested in a gourmet brunch being organised by Deborah a.k.a. The Humble Housewife. Starting from 1pm in the Ely Wine Bar on Custom House Quay, the event is for food bloggers, fans and readers of food blogs and friends. RSVP by February 1st to lay claim to a place at the brunch.

The week continues over Monday and Tuesday as BlogTalk 2008 hits Cork, the fifth international conference on social software. Speakers include John Breslin, Gabriela Avram, Anna Rogozinska, David Cushman, Salim Ismail, Rashmi Sinha and many more.

Forward to the end of the week (Saturday March 8th) and CreativeCamp takes place in Kilkenny. Following the success of PodCamp in Kilkenny last September, it’s nice to see another event on my home soil, and another event I’m directly involved in organising alongside Keith Bohanna and Tom Corcoran. Two of the talks on the day have been confirmed so far and registration is open. You can sign up to attend here (free) and sign up to talk here (we’d love to hear you).

There’s also rumour of a bloggers’ dinner taking place in Kilkenny on Friday 7th, more on this as and when it is revealed.

Track it on Jaiku or keep up with all the links above!

I’m gearing up for a Christmas period without internet use. Podcasts will wait, blogs will wait and the world will keep on spinning.

So, over lunch today, I pressed the lovely ‘mark all as read’ button in Google Reader. Sure, I went through all my Irish blog subscriptions, skipping daily links, browsing over the meaty posts and at the end I abandoned every one of my tech blogs, podcast blogs, football blogs, music blogs by pressing that nice grey button at the top of Google Reader.

At least now maybe I’ve a chance to catch up with stuff, or keep abreast of new blog posts. I’ve been swamped in the last fortnight, flat out busy in all directions. I’ve started blogging about Euro 2008, I moved and revamped Liverpool Access (which got re-ranked on request) and behind the scenes I’ve been working more with some local bands and putting spare time into getting a plan of attack together for Devious Theatre next year.

And all the time, the unread messages count in Google Reader keeps climbing, and climbing.

It is likely that the same will happen over Christmas, a week’s worth of activity from some daily news sources can mount up. Not finding the time to pour over all my subscriptions of late I’ve been using Google Alerts, while keeping a daily eye on activity in the land of Jaiku (where I can filter subscriptions people publish).

I’m sure the mobile text alerts will keep me going over the holiday period. While I’m telling myself I’ll nip into town over Christmas for some coffees and an hour or two on the laptop, I’ll likely be more inclined to spend some time on the lake with my new kayak (arriving this Saturday) or spending time in the pub catching up with the McGuire clan.

Mark all as read – just a good a feeling as cleaning your desk before leaving the office for Christmas.

I’m marking two years of kenmc.com as a blog. That in itself means I’m blogging around the two year mark overall, or actively blogging, whether through kenmc.com or any number of the other blogs I have run / am running at present.

I’ve met some terrific people over the past two years due to blogging and interaction with the blogging community in Ireland and I’ve had my eyes opened to many an experience, service, thought or otherwise as a result. I’ve been to BarCamp (Waterford), PodCamp (Kilkenny) – mind you I’ve yet to make it to an OpenCoffee – but these events I wouldn’t have heard about or become involved with if it wasn’t for blogging.

As a result of PodCamp I’m now back producing the Playlist Mix podcast, the sixth episode of which went out earlier this week. That in itself, reviving the podcast, has provided more opportunities and contacts for me musically.

To everyone who reads the blog (past and present), to new readers and to the entire Irish blogging community – thanks for continuing to inspire me to blog, to try, to test and to enjoy letting go in one of the most creative and easily accessible means of communication there is!

Now, I’m off to get a can of coke with my breakfast, do something a little different for the morning.

If its not blogging about something, its thinking about blogging about something, helping someone put together a blog or just having a general discussion about them – including last night pre gig in Paris Texas (I’m now playing music every Wednesday night in Paris Texas in Kilkenny if anyone is around for the summer) though last night’s discussion was more about the blogging future and development of KilkennyMusic.com as a music news / PR source, but that’s something for another Saturday discussion to be had.

91%…. Take the test for yourself…

Thus far on Liverpool Access I’ve managed to average just over a post a day, I’ve live blogged games, shared videos and over the course of the year been able to refine my blogging approach from more of a news-based style to personal opinion-based style which I feel is working better for me. My thanks to those who continute to read LiverpoolAccess.com on a daily basis and if you’re a Liverpool fan and not already familiar with the blog then give it a look, let me know what you think.

Its been going great so far – the last two nights (public) sold out and tonight’s show is also sold out also leaving some tickets for Saturday’s run. I cut myself off from the internet around 4pm to get down to the theatre. I’ve also taken the mad step of deleting the internet profiles on my phone so I’m not tempted to check in, send emails, all of that kind of thing. Coupled with the RSS diet I started a while back its affording me some nice time to switch off! You’d sometimes forget just how much work there is in running a theatre production!

In the Irish blog o’sphere there is a good element of transparency and a great sense of community. We’re not afraid of saying who we work for, who we represent, what our interests are commercially or personally – nice transparency. What I’ve yet to come across – and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong – are people stepping out and bad mouthing who they work for online. Sure enough, you might hate your boss or management and you might talk around the water cooler about it or yap in the pub about it but you don’t go blogging about it!

I worked with AOL for some time a few years back, before I had any interest in blogging (but not too long before) so email was the big thing. So was professional misconduct and the two went hand in hand – you don’t bitch about staff or insider details in email, you don’t (or try not to) make personal mails from your company account, forward emails from your company account, anything that has the potential to bring the name of the organisation into disrepute.

Whether its an organisation you’re working for employing hundreds of people, a small company with fifteen of you there or a small startup (my situation in 2005), it pays to have a little professional courtesy and a little common sense.

From the report –

If there is a negative impact on the organisation’s corporate image which is so serious that it breaches the implied term of mutual trust and confidence, the employee could be dismissed for gross misconduct

And I think thats what it is, common sense. You bite at the hand that feeds you enough and it will eventually bite you back. But blogging isn’t a “new thing” any more and neither is getting fired for it. The term ‘Dooced‘ was pretty much coined by Heather Armstrong who was fired for references made about her employers on her blog back in 2002, just a year after running the blog; ‘Queen Of The Sky’ Ellen Simonetti was fired from her job at Delta Airlines because of events on her blog ‘Diary of a Flight Attendant‘; staff at Wells Fargo and Friendster have been fired in the past for blogging
. More recently there was the case with Sam Sethi getting the flick from Techcrunch UK before Christmas.

The three of us in the office including myself, Aidan and John blog on several different fronts and as a business trying to develop itself and its clients the last thing we need to do is go pissing people off. It might be different in our case as we wouldn’t be blogging about hating our own business, but you’d still not see us naming and shaming clients, buyers or suppliers. However, if it was me in a position over 20 other people and one disgruntled employee decides to take things to the web and bad mouth the business or but the business in a bad light thanks to his remarks online I don’t think I’d have any hesitation in taking action – its just something you don’t do. Even if you’re freelance, why would you want to go bad mouthing or showing up a previous source of work if you’re actively looking for others. Things that get published to the web have a tendency on sticking around….

Late night rant aside, CNN.com published an article while I was finishing up in college just over two years ago and its final points as as important now as they were two years ago.

1. Know where your employer stands on blogging
2. Blog on your own time
3. Practice safe blogging (like not giving away business secrets)
4. Don’t hide your blog from your boss – be open
5. Use good judgement – don’t use your blog to talk about things you’d never say in real life
6. Others will disagree with you – be aware

I’ve had people approach me this year asking “should I tell the manager if I end up telling a funny story from work” (or something along those lines) – I say you better. Be honest and upfront about it. Take from it what you will but for those people getting into blogging, open your eyes when your blogging. People are reading, people are visiting, search engines are keeping track of your posts and you can be held accountable at the end of the day.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a code-of-conduct type thing, its just common sense in relation to your employer and your own job security. If you value your job, don’t put yourself in the firing line.

See Google BlogRank by Steve Rubel and the original post here.

The blog itself has been running since a few months but it fell into the blogging trap of a good hive of activity in the opening stages and serious lack of activity – to the point where it hasn’t seen a post in three weeks and I’d rather it was a daily or bi-daily blog.

So, thanks to the import/export featured of WordPress 2.1x I’ve pulled all the mobileblogr.com blog posts in here (just need to review their categories) so as not to lose them as they’re all relevant when it comes to technology.

I’ve no further plans for the domain (current PR3) if anyone is interested and will be pulling the hosting plug on it tonight. Rather pull the whole thing now than just let it drag on and on and on….

It doesn’t mean the end of mobile tech coverage, just means the posts will end up in a new home on kenmc.com. Thanks to those who read the blog and passed comments over the few months but I reckon it has to be done. Now, on with the day…

See also: Post on mobileblogr.com

Gerry’s three tips for Google:

• Use words (as keywords) that people will genuinely use to search for. e.g. Who searches for ‘low fares’ when people want ‘cheap flights’?
• Get links! Google counts your links (incoming links) as votes, so get links from other sites and get yourself seen.
• Use a good ‘title’ meta tag. No explanation for the non-techies other than if you’re a manager, get whoever looks after your website to make sure there’s a good ‘title’ meta tag in there. For the uninitiated, a ‘title’ meta tag contains the text displayed in the title bar at the top of your browser window and is used by search engines when returning results from your page. e.g. mine starts with ‘Ken McGuire :: Creative Imagination’ followed by the blog post’s name.

Mick goes on to talk a little about Slugger O’Toole and how specialised blogging earns you a specialised audience which can potentially give you power in the market place.

Makes for a good listen. The segment runs for a quarter of an hour or so from just after the news to the 21 minute mark in the podcast.

Sure, not as many as Tom Raftery who would have been a serious shoe in for that pint at the blog awards but sure there you go. Guess now we can concentrate once again on the blogging side of things and not the statistics that go behind it!