Do-It-Yourself Blogging

Now that blogging has reached even higher exposure with the Google search engine specifically devoted to it, many people out there may be wondering how they too can get into the biggest thing since CB radio. We'd like to use this post to make clear how easy it is. Step 1 is to spend the entire day surfing the web and reading whatever newspaper you can get your hands on, in search of items that can simply be cut and pasted into this window. Step 2 is selection of a witty aperçu to follow the output of the preceding step -- and we'll get you started with the latter.

Example 1. An item from Saturday's Washington Post:

Without leaving the familiar environs of a strip mall, suburbanites in Northern Virginia will soon be able to fancy themselves dancing all night in one of Europe's most famous entertainment districts.

At Ned Devine's Irish Village, scheduled to open this fall, an old movie theater in Sterling is being transformed into the image of the trendy Temple Bar neighborhood in Dublin. The club features faux cobblestone streets, painted reproductions of popular Irish bar fronts and "intelligent lighting" designed to make people feel as if they really are standing in a courtyard under streetlamps and leafy trees.

There's your Step 1. Now for the comment. The missing item from this excellent reproduction of the Temple Bar is
(a) puke
(b) a fight
(c) the queue for taxis.

Any of the above are acceptable. OK, now that we're getting the hang of things, here's another one. Sunday's New York Times Magazine profile of Bono and his work for debt relief:

One night I [the reporter] went out to dinner with Bono and the gang ... Bono had started with a glass of white wine, but when I said I was drinking red, he switched over and ordered a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino ... I was raving about the Brunello, which was many stations above the norm for me. Bono was less impressed, but he didn't want to dampen my enthusiasm. "It is," he said, after some consideration, "a not immodestly great wine."

Appropriate followup comment to this is

(a) it's far from Brunello di Montalcino he was reared
(b) ah, so he's too good for Guinness now
(c) do they have that one at the Harvey-Nichols in Dundrum?

If you picked (c), congratulations, because it also functions as comment on Celtic Tiger Ireland.

With your niche as an Irish blogger now established, you need to broaden the appeal a bit. And what better subject than the World's Favourite Football Team (as long as they are winning) Manchester United. Consider then the revelation in Friday's Times of London that the team's young striker, spud-faced nipper Wayne Rooney, made use of his delayed curfew (due to their match versus Liverpool being on Sunday rather than Saturday) to attend a 50 Cent concert, and not only that:

appeared on stage 24 hours later [after being sent off] with 50 Cent, the controversial American rapper ... [and became] an honorary member of 50 Cent’s notorious "G-Unit" posse

Now while the more ambitious blogger might dispute the Times' description of G-Unit as "notorious," for simplicity let's stick with the method of the previous posts and simply offer an appropriate lyric from a 50 Cent song that might be relevant for young Wayne:

(a) I'm feelin' focused man, my money on my mind
I got a mill out the deal and I'm still on the grind

(b) Hate it or love it the underdog's on top
And I'm gonna shine homie until my heart stop

(c) You said you a gangsta
But you neva pop nuttin
You said you a wanksta
And you need to stop frontin'

Any of these are fine, but we like (c) both because the term wanksta sounds like it means something different in Liverpool and Manchester than it actually means to 50 Cent, and indeed this term was mentioned in one of our earliest posts on this blog. Which brings us to the final lesson about blogging: shamelessly link to your previous posts -- at least until you can get others to do the linking for you.