Ok this might seem like an odd request, but "odd" and me tend to follow each other around at the best of times ..

I'll be speaking at several events over the next few months and most event organisers ask for a "bio" - however I'm not exactly sure if the one I have is ideal..

So, working on the basis that you have a $clue who I am and what I do ..

Here's the current version - polite constructive input welcome via the comments:

Michele Neylon is the founder and managing director of the Irish based registrar and hosting provider Blacknight.
Neylon is an active member of the Internet industry, an award winning social media expert/evangelist and blogger. Neylon has spoken at numerous Internet Industry events covering a range of topics including policy, security, ICANN, Nominet, the IGF and Investment/First Tuesday.
A graduate of European Studies from the University of Limerick, Ireland, Neylon focuses primarily on European Internet issues and policy as well as serving on the Eurid registrar advisory board and the ENUM 353 policy advisory board. A film buff who speaks four languages, Neylon prides himself on being an early adopter of new technologies.

There's an "about" me page here as well and my LinkedIn profile is here

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According to HosterStats Blacknight is now market leader in domain hosting in Ireland.

That's pretty cool

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Threw this up on the company blog earlier today, so I'm shamelessly cross-posting it here..

We (Blacknight) have slashed the price on Windows VPS by 50%

More info here

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The .co launch started a few hours ago and seems to be doing very well

We finally setup our own custom URL shortener, though I'm still trying to find a TwitterFeed alternative that will allow us to use our own shortener sanely.

We're working on a bunch of different things over in Blacknight at the moment, so I'm looking forward to being able to talk about some of the final products.

On the negative side .. I seem to be spending a dis-ordinate amount of time dealing with legal threats. Between us being easy to find and lawyers not really understanding the internet, we seem to be an "easy" target.

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I've always been a very strong believer in "eating my own dog food", so when we started offering .tel domain names I got one for myself and started using it. I've had a few .me domains since the launch, but apart from using a couple for work, I hadn't moved any of my personal sites over to .me

That, as you can see in your browser's address bar, has now changed.

Mneylon.com will still resolve, but you'll be moved to mneylon.me

I was half thinking of using micheleneylon.me, but it's a bit long.. What do you think?

In any case this site is now residing under mneylon.me

And if you want to get a .me domain for your own blog or project head over to the only Irish registrar for .me domains - Blacknight and grab one now

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We've just announced yet another vacancy chez Blacknight - this time in sales

You can find the details here and submit your CV if you're interested

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I've just posted this on the company blog, but thought I'd mention it here as well...

You can now grab a .ie domain name for the ultra-low price of EUR2.99 ex-VAT via Blacknight (the domain registrar and hosting company I founded)
Use coupon code: chrimbo
More details here

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July / August are odd months ..

While for many they are associated with holiday and relaxation, for me they're the ramp up to the autumn season, so they're actually busier than other times of the year in many respects.

Over the last few weeks and those to come I've been working on a number of projects that will hopefully bear fruit in the next few weeks and months ..

One that has finally "gone live" is a new blog - New TLD Guide, which has been setup to help people come to grips with the new domain extensions... Hopefully people will engage with us and we'll all be able to learn something new.

I've also been working on more screencasts for the Blacknight video channel, but have been having massive issues with audio - it's probably something simple, but I haven't found a solution as yet ...

And then there's the biggest distraction of them all - my new Xbox 360 (thanks Microsoft!). I've become quite addicted to Call of Duty 4 ! (more on that at a later stage..)

I've also become quite addicted to Lee Child - I picked up one novel when I was down in Cork recently and have become totally hooked!

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A few months ago Stewart mentioned Sweetcron as a "lifestream" solution (You can see his here).

A "lifestream" basically acts as an aggregator of all your online activities, as many of the online services that people use, such as Twitter, Flickr etc., publish your activity via RSS.

I'd already been experimenting with Movable Type's Motion, which is a pretty cool addition to an existing MT powered site, however having a separate, standalone, solution was not without its attractions. I registered michele.ie a few months ago, but apart from using it to test our Exchange mail hosting I hadn't really done anything with it.

So last night (and very early this morning) I decided to setup Sweetcron on one of our shared hosting plans. Our hosting system allows you to split your domain up across multiple hosting plans and platforms, so while the main site is now on a Linux web server the email is still on Microsoft Exchange.

I chose to setup the webspace to use PHP5, since PHP4 is defunct. In terms of the database I opted for MySQL5, since it's also the more recent version.

I'll have to admit that I hadn't used FTP for a long time. I have a habit of just doing things from the command line, but once I'd got over that it was easy enough to setup.

The documentation for Sweetcron is a bit sparse, but the basic install is easy enough. On our system you just need to remember that the MySQL database server is NOT "localhost", as the basic configuration file assumes that you're running everything on a single server.

The one step that isn't documented clearly is how to setup a simple cronjob to automate it for you. Fortunately someone else had done that already, so adding the cronjob via the hosting control panel was fine.
You just need to execute the following command every few minutes (or hours):

curl http://your/true-cron/url

You can find the actual URL in the Sweetcron admin panel. So just set that command to run via the cronjob manager and off you go.

The basic install ships with two themes, but there are several other themes available which range from the very simple to the incredibly complex. I still haven't settled on which one I actually want to use, as they all handle parts of your "stream" differently. In order to avoid duplication issues I think I'll stick with a theme that doesn't pull in the full content from blog posts and just provides a link to the original source.

So if you're bored and want to know what I'm up to you can head over to my new personal space and see!

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