©Stephen Hanafin

If you’re arriving in Kilkenny on Friday and looking for something to do and a nice way to meet your fellow campers, join a night time photo walk through one of Ireland’s most scenic cities.

Edit: We’ve got a time and a place now!

When: 8 PM
Where: The Lobby at Langton’s Hotel
Who: Look for the people with cameras in hand!
Sign Up: Just add your name to the comments below.

As previously announced, WordCamp Ireland will feature a Genius Bar, running all day both days. However, given the fact that getting 35 fabulous speakers all in the right place on the right weekend at the right times can be slightly reminiscent of herding cats, we have utterly failed to get properly organised ahead of time in terms of volunteer sign-ups.

We are now moving to Plan B: Organised Chaos. There will be a large Genius Bar schedule on the wall at registration, with space for Genius Bar volunteers to choose a convenient 45-minute slot to sit down and man the help desk, two at a time. (If you are familiar with the BarCamp format, it should work very much like that.)

There is a huge crew of people from Automattic coming to WordCamp, most of whom have generously volunteered to take a turn in the hot seat, so we are not overly worried about being able to staff the Genius Bar. Still, if you can offer technical, content or design expertise, we’d very much love to see your name on volunteer sign-up on the day, and will offer you our many, many thanks… and a special little pressie!

We’re delighted to announce that the delightful Chaos Thaoghaire will be at WordCamp, bringing their bewildering combination of parlour games, judge bribing, story telling, and general mayhem to Langton’s on Friday night.

According to the website,

Chaos Thaoghaire is a live event that features personal stories interspersed with team games. Your hosts are The Chaosettes, a duo drunk on their insatiable desire for power and popularity. The stories are all true (or truthy), and the Google-proof games reward cunning, flippancy, wordplay, underhandedness and generally favour the sort of person who would never be allowed on a table quiz team.

Of course it’s confusing. They didn’t call it Organised And Perfectly Straightforward Thaoghaire, did they? They’d have been sued for sure, and while they’re fine when in front of their own crowd, they always break down in front of a judge. All you need to know is that The Chaosettes live by a belief in the earnest pursuit of ludicrous things.

According to the Irish Times, “It’s as if the Golden Girls were running a bingo night in a mental asylum where everybody had the wrong medication.” How could you not want a piece of that?

To join in the fun, just add your name in the comments here. This event is free of charge, and kicks off at 8 PM on Friday, March 5th in the Tea Room at Langtons. Let the hijinx begin!

We recently became aware that the ticket order form was miscalculating some ticket orders, in particular those where the attendee was trying to purchase extra tickets for Saturday’s dinner. Unfortunately, we became aware of this when a grand total of 56 WordCamp emails we had never seen before, many complaining about the broken checkout calculating an absurd cost for dinner tickets, arrived by email yesterday morning.

According to our mail provider, this was due to “an anti-fraud feature implemented by the control panel vendors” and was corrected on Thursday. I believe some mail may also have bounced; we’re very sorry if you tried to reach us and could not. We’re also very sorry if you tried to order extra dinner tickets with your conference pass and could not.

While dinner will be good, it will not be €2,500 worth of good. The form now correctly calculates the extra Saturday dinner ticket prices at €25 each. If you need to “top up” your WordCamp order with extra dinner tickets you were unable to order before, you can now do that online. Again, our profound apologies.

Below are answers to some of the questions we’ve been getting about ticketing:

1. I didn’t order my tickets because I couldn’t check out correctly. What should I do?
The order form has been fixed. You should order your tickets now.

2. I didn’t order my tickets because I couldn’t get the form to load. What do I do?
Load the form directly. Or, you know, turn JavaScript on. It’s not that evil…

3. I ordered my tickets but not (obviously) the extra dinner tickets I need. What should I do?
You can now order extra dinner tickets on their own form.

4. I ordered my tickets but never got confirmation from you. Did you get my order?
If your PayPal records show a payment to Katherine Nolan, than yes we did. Your name is on the list and we will be sending you a confirmation and ticketing email this weekend as well.

If you have ANY PROBLEMS ORDERING from here on out, please let us know. You can send @WordCampIreland a tweet, add a comment here, or use the contact form. We will send you a PayPal invoice directly if online ordering is failing for you – we genuinely want to make this as easy as possible and apologise for the fact that it has been difficult for some people.

One question we’ve been asked a lot is “Will there be a Genius Bar?” Now that we’ve figured out what a WordPress Genius Bar is, the answer is: Yes, there will be a Genius Bar.

A WordPress Genius Bar is basically an opportunity for you to sit down with an expert WP user at a table in the main hall and get your WordPress questions answered. These can be questions like the following:

• How do I install a theme?
• Where is my RSS feed and what do I do with it?
• How do I un-mess-up my header?
• How do I add a poll or survey?
• How do I hack change this search box?
• How do I integrate Twitter with my blog?
• What are tags and how do I use them?

We’re expanding on the basic Genius Bar idea a bit and also including people who can give you quick, one-on-one tips on improving your content, being more search-engine friendly, developing your audience, and general blog voodoo.

So it’s a chance to get both general questions answered and hands-on help with your actual blog. We’ll have a schedule of Genius Bar volunteers on the wall at WordCamp, along with their general areas of usefulness so you know who you should go to; everyone will be adept at basic WP tech questions and fixes but some volunteers will be more geared towards specific areas of expertise for your individual issues. Sessions will be capped at 15 minutes each.

We’ll be recruiting volunteers in February but if there’s something you’d like to see covered at the Genius Bar, let us know in the comments!

UPDATE: If you tried to book extra tickets and could not, you can now order those here. Apologies for a broken checkout that is now fixed.

This will be a three-course sit-down dinner with open seating. The food will be gorgeous but this is not a formal do at all; come in your jeans and your favourite “No I Will Not Fix Your Computer” t-shirt if you like. It’s just a chance to get to chat and break bread with more of the people from WordCamp, plus we’re totally over-organised and the thought of 200 hungry people wandering the streets of Kilkenny gives us hives. Kids are welcome and children under 12 are free.

Optionally, if this is not your thing, people will be gathering in the bar at Langton’s for Pub & Grub that night, and the dinner guests will be decamping to there after dinner, so that’s perfectly convivial eating and drinking option as well.

Time: 7:30 – 10:30 PM

Image ©Kevin Dooley

What’s the best part of hosting WordCamp Ireland at Langton’s? Could it be the gorgeous conference rooms, the lovely setting, the amazing service, the award-winning food? Well there is all of that, but really it’s that we get our own pub!

Kilkenny has a purely silly number of pubs for a city its size, but on Saturday night we’ll be de-camping (ha!) to the bar at Langton’s after the conference for food and drink. Everyone from WordCamp is welcome along with their partners and family, and this is where the people attending the ticketed dinner will be spilling out to when the dinner is done. So if you’re at a loose end and wondering where everyone is, the answer is probably here.

We’ll be welcoming (and thanking) all of our speakers and sponsors who’ve made it down to Kilkenny in time with a private dinner at Langton’s on Friday night. The setting (and the food) will be very nice indeed but this is not a formal do by any means. Wear what you like – if you’re jetlagged, you can stumble downstairs in your PJs and we’ll be happy to see you (and give you coffee.)

We’ll be getting firm numbers for this event as we confirm speakers. You can bring your kids; we’ll be asking you about that as well.  Dinner will kick off at about 7:30 or 8 and we’ll update with details as the schedule firms up. Thanks!