Miramus presents Dork Adore: Lovely things for geeks
We’ve been busy working away on a brand new project over here at Miramus. Please allow me to present to you Dork Adore: Lovely Things for Geeks. A special haven we’ve set up for nerdlingers.
Here’s the blurb:
Dork Adore is brought to you by Katie Lee, founding editor of Shiny Shiny – the first gadgets site written by women for women. Dork Adore isn’t here to give you the latest tech press releases, it’s here to provide the best advice, opinion, reviews and the odd bit of geek news.
Since the site is written by a group of dorks, you’ll find every obsession covered, from TV to beauty; lifehacks to coffee makers. If you want to get in touch, click here.
Please feel free to have a mooch about, maybe click on a few links and read a few articles. And if you’d like to leave us some comments, or email me with any non-crazy thoughts, please do! You can use the contact form on Dork Adore here.
The site is written by Emma and me, as well as lots of very lovely contributors and you can find out more about all of them over on the About page.
Parentdish Update
As you may already know, we’ve been working on AOL’s Parentdish UK site for a while now, and it’s been enjoying a successful few months of late, including a steady increase in traffic, some great articles that have spawned some interesting discussions, and an entry into the Top 100 British Mummy Bloggers!
The British Mummy Bloggers list is updated monthly and voted for by blog readers, so it’s encouraging to see that we’re moving up the chart each time it’s published.
We have a strong writing team at the moment, and so we’re not currently looking for any more regular writers. However, we would like to hear from you if you have any one-off feature ideas. Please contact us here with your pitch.
Don’t forget, you can also follow Parentdish on Twitter.
All new Katielee.co.uk – complete with fancy “K” favicon
Well, blogging on Miramus didn’t last too long and, after Shaa told me off for having such a pitiful personal site, I finally cracked and spent an entire Sunday asking Al how to do things with a fancy WordPress template.
So now, if you’re looking for my personal blog, it’s over on Katielee.co.uk, where you can also find out about various little projects I’m working on. I’ll save the big news for the Miramus blog – though we seem to be working on an awful lot of TOP SECRET projects at the moment, which makes it quite hard to talk about new things.
Sky Sports HD means I’m watching the Ashes in the past
Having the cricket on in the background is one of the myriad benefits of working from home. But it’s not so great for Al, who works in the room next door. The room without the TV in.
Initially, he resolved this issue by using the Sky Player to stream the Ashes onto his Mac, but it kept buffering at vital moments, and we both got fed up with him stealing all the internet: BT Home Hubs aren’t designed for two web heads on wireless connections.
Instead, he bowed to the inevitable and took the retrograde step of tuning into the radio to listen to the cricket commentary like normal, Skyless people.
This has led to an interesting phenomenon, which I’ve noticed many times over the years and usually moaned about. However, in this case, it’s actually been quite handy.
It turns out, when you watch Sky HD, you are watching everything in the past thanks to the time lag. You’ll have noticed it when you switch from low-def to high def, but the time difference is even more pronounced if you’re listening to the radio.
Back in the World Cup, this time difference took the edge off penalty shoot outs because we could hear the neighbours down the road cheering or groaning a few seconds before we saw the player take the shot. We ended up enduring the stifling heat and watching with the windows shut.
But this time all it means is every time there’s a wicket Al comes running in to watch it and I look up from my monitor to catch the moment “live” for myself. It’s proved a very useful time lag and means that I’ve enjoyed the best bits of the cricket without having to watch the dreary afternoon slouch towards a draw.
So while I’m enjoying the edited highlights of the Ashes, Al’s getting a regular break from his screen with those room-to-room jogs.
What Katie did next
The thought of moving the site I currently use as an online portfolio for PRs or print editors to look at if they need find out more about me over to WordPress is too hideous to contemplate right now. So, instead I’m squatting on the Miramus blog to see if I can make myself a home here. If it gets inappropriate, I’ll make like the Littlest Hobo and move on.
I’m quite rubbish at writing a personal blog. I love my crochet blog (due to be updated with the shocking news that recently I have dabbled in KNITTING) but an actual personal blog about what I’ve been doing and what I’ve been thinking has always proved problematic. I’m just not very good at sharing personal information about my latest brain blahs.
Good news for you, at least. I’m not planning on turning this into a blog that liberally sprinkles around words like “musings”, “ramblings”, “random” or similar (though I read and admire many that do). Instead, I’ll pop up the odd column that I can’t post on the Telegraph any more and try to keep it fairly free from angst.
But, who knows? Maybe I’ll get a taste for over-sharing and you’ll all come back in a month to discover that I’m posting up song lyrics, making liberal use of ellipses and tagging people with memes.
The Sway #2: Featuring Gemma Cartwright!
Following on from the success of the previous Sway event, we are delighted to announce that the next The Sway event has been confirmed for the 21st July. We can also confirm that Gemma Cartwright, creator of Big Girls Browse and editor of The Nod, will be one of the Sway debaters.
To find out a little more about Gemma, click here for our interview
For those who were unable to attend the first Sway event in May, have a listen to the podcasts on The Sway website from the debaters.
To attend the event, you can either request an invite from the Sway website, or from the Sway MeetUp group. For up to date information you can also follow The Sway on Twitter
Looking forward to seeing you all there!
Jobs at Miramus
If you’re looking for writing work, keep an eye on the “Jobs” category on the Miramus blog. That’s where we’ll be posting any job announcements.
Alternatively, a great way to find out about writing work is to follow us on Twitter as we tend to try that before creating a job listing.
If you’re applying for a job, please make sure you read our “how to get the job” page first. You have been warned!
The Sway #2: Back for a second helping!
Miramus helped to organise the (if I do say so myself) excellent Sway event in May, and it’s back for a second helping in July. It was a great night, with some really interesting (and short!) talks from some innovative and inspiring web entrepreneurs and general web heads.
I can’t think of another event that’s aimed solely at bloggers, editors and network owners seeking to make money out of their editorial content. Many of the people at the event were people I’ve only ever spoken to on email, or admired from a distance, and putting faces to names made me realise that we should have been running events like this for years.
So if you think you should have been invited (if you run advertising on your blog or website or are monetising it in other ways then this is the event for you), please do request an invite over on the Sway website, or directly via the Sway MeetUp group. You can also follow The Sway on Twitter.
The reason the event is invite only is to protect those attending from being overrun by PRs, widget creators, and other marketeers and developers. There are already plenty of events out there that (quite rightly) allow access for all. But The Sway is solely for those wishing to talk about their businesses with other content providers.
I hope to see you there!
Running AOL’s latest blog: ParentDish UK
For the past few months Miramus has been working on a new blog for AOL: ParentDish UK. As the name suggests, this is the UK version of the hugely successful ParentDish blog, and working with AOL to launch the new site for a UK audience has been a great experience.
We’ve got some excellent bloggers working on the site, all with a wide range of blogging, journalism and parenting experience, and the site has already been welcomed into the fold, with some active commenters and some lively debates.
It’s a great read, and we’re really proud to be working on it so do check it out!
Want to make money from your website? Come to The Sway!
Making money out of websites is one topic that’s always going to get my interest, which is why Miramus has helped to organise an event, sponsored by Skimlinks, especially for bloggers and new media types. The event is meant to be a fairly casual affair, but one that will hopefully be really useful for helping bloggers and publishers find innovative ways to monetise their sites.
The event itself is running to a tight schedule in order to get the very best out of our panel without taking up the entire evening — which will hopefully be a great opportunity for bloggers from all over to meet up with their fellow entrepreneurial web owners and publishers.
If you haven’t had an invite, sign up here and you’ll be added to the list.
And you can read more about the event itself here: The Sway.org
