As I’ve mentioned previously work gave me the go-ahead to attend Web Directions South conference in Sydney at the end of September.

Babysitting is pretty much finalised. Dogsitting not organised yet. Conference registration paid for, flights and hotel booked.

In an effort to break the ice amongst conference goers Mikons have been created and 35 winners chosen. Mikons are little icons in the form of stickers you can put on your name badges so other conference goers get an immediate idea of what your interests are, eg Mac or Linux, Vegetarian or meat eater, tea or coffee drinker etc etc.

I designed one because I could see a great big glaring hole for the new attendees at the conference like I will be. When I say I designed one, I used one of the cartoons available on the Mikons site and added one word to it. But it was selected and immortalised as one that will go on the sticker sheet for all conference attendees. It’s the one shown in the t-shirt below. I even get a t-shirt out of it.

So this is one sticker that I will be putting on my name badge for the conference and I’ll hopefully see some others using it too.

To meet some other conference goers before the conference I hope to get along to the Port80 meetup the night before. I’ll be the one with the red rose in my buttonhole if I can find the way from my hotel to the meetup place. No I won’t really be wearing a red rose in my buttonhole.

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I have to upgrade my phone. Emphasis is on the ‘have’ because Telstra are closing the CDMA mobile network and replacing it with a whizz-bang faster, more bells and whistles 3G type network.

I have a very plain and hardly any bells and whistles type mobile phone. It does exactly what I want it to do, that is make and receive calls and texts. It doesn’t rule my life but it is definitely convenient to have and I’m annoyed that I HAVE to upgrade it.

So of course I’ve been investigating what phone I might upgrade to. If I stay with Telstra I’ve got a paltry choice of NextG phones if I want the same sort of coverage that CDMA provides. Of course any decent phone is expensive because of all the extra functionality they seem to have these days. Or I could choose another provider – 3G perhaps?

I don’t know. Questions that are floating around in my head:

• If I do choose another provider then it has to be worth my while because I would give up some Telstra rewards I currently get with having my landline and mobile phone with the same provider. I would also have to pay out the few months left on my contract that Telstra make you go on if you want to enjoy these rewards like free texts etc.
• I want some regional coverage because some family and friends live in the country and if I break down en-route to them I don’t want to not be able to call for help.

I also don’t want to be locked into a 24 month contract to get a ‘free’ phone so I’m looking for a at least a few hundred dollars initial outlay.

Do any of you Aussies out there have any recommendations for me? Do any of you have a NextG phone? Are you with a different provider?

If I do go with NextG I’m thinking of getting the Nokia 6120 phone. Anyone have one of those?

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I really don’t know what possessed me to change my domain name from my Typepad one to my own. But now it’s done there’s lots of tidying up to follow.

I went over to Technorati and even though all my old hyperlinks still work and I’ve still essentially got the same blog I’m back to a really crap score on my Technorati profile. See for yourself.

I have other profiles all over the place too, and am changing my URL as I think of them.

I’ve changed my Blogger profile which I only setup so I could comment on some blogs with relative ease. While I’m talking about commenting on Blogger blogs I have to say I don’t like the way they’ve setup the form. I’m a keyboard queen and if I tab around on this form the cursor doesn’t go to the next input box. Also if I start typing before it fully loads all the content disappears when it does finally load. Very annoying.

I’ve also updated my Bumpzee profile. Fortunately it appears as though Bumpzee remembers me, but I’ll see how it goes.

While I’m on the ‘B’ updates, I need to go to BlogHer and change my blog details there too.

This is a work in progress for my benefit and anyone else who might be contemplating moving to their own domain from a hosted one.

Will I regret it, or not? Stay tuned.

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Have you participated in the All Women Blogging Carnival this week? Also I’m offering one person a chance at getting a new webblog banner.

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My relationship with blogging has reached the next level. I talked a while back about this blog being almost the longest relationship I’ve ever had. We had a talk, my blog and I, and we decided that it deserved its own domain name, that it had been far too long living with Typepad’s name.

Off we went to GoDaddy and registered www.semanticallydriven.com.

If you have eagle eyes and you’re visiting my actual blog (not the feed) you might notice this as part of the URL.

Therefore we now prefer not be known as http://www.semanticallydriven.com (although you’ll still find us there). We are now http://www.semanticallydriven.com/.

Everything SHOULD work as normal because my content is still on Typepad but it’s just got a different URL as part of the address now. I’ve done something called mapping my new domain name to my existing blog.

If you do have me in your blogroll you can update the address – that would be great. If you don’t then you’ll still find my blog and any links kicking around will still work.

If you visit me via a feed reader then that’s all still the same – you should notice no difference.

There are others to be told like Technorati and that’s just tipping the edge of the iceberg.

I’m not quite sure what I should do now. Perhaps I should have a party, crack open a bottle of champagne?

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Have you participated in the All Women Blogging Carnival this week? Also I’m offering one person a chance at getting a new webblog banner.

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Since I’ve started using Google Reader to check my favourite blogs I’ve noticed that some blog RSS feeds don’t always update.

A couple of my favourite blogs went off my Google Reader radar over the recent months and I thought to myself that it was a bit odd they hadn’t written anything for a while. Bloggers are usually a pretty polite bunch, especially those who have any audience, so if there’s going to be an absence, they usually let their readers know.

After realising I’d not read anything from them, I checked their actual blog. Seeing recent blog posts made me realise that their RSS feed wasn’t working to notify me of updates.

Resubscribing to the blog seems to do the trick of getting them back into Google Reader with updated posts. I usually only have the ‘updated’ view on, rather than the whole list.

Waiterrant recently had problems with someone hacking into the site which affected the RSS feeds. It wasn’t until I realised that I hadn’t read an update from this site for a while that I checked the actual website and resubscribed to the RSS feed.

I’m not sure what caused other feeds not to update but from memory they were both the standard Typepad .rdf feeds.

I subscribe to my own RSS feed so I can see that it updates in my reader. If it didn’t, I would fairly immediately be alerted to a problem and try to fix it.

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