Pottering Harry's Diary

Well, John of Celtic Ways is also

Pottering Harry McCrory of Carrowcrory with his partner Harping Clarrisa, boy racer brother Roary McCrory, bardic friend William Robinson and other folks as the tales unfold

I am awfully slow at updating my “Following Celtic Ways” blog but good at twice a day updates on Twitter and Facebook, so I thought a daily diary may fill in the gaps for the morning awakening or bedtime snooze accelerators that are demanded by our fans.

When Claire and I travel on tours we spend a lot of time making up stories about Pottering Harry, and laughing a lot, so here comes his diary ….

I’m so slow at configuring this sort of thing, so I’m repeating the launch content here today....

…… so here goes

Sunday?

August 9th?

Where has it gone?

A cloudy day, some gleaming of sun but a day of indoors brooding and plottering while catching up on cottage cleaning and correspondence.

Excitement today has been the exchange of ideas and plans for a group in September, from California, arranged by an Italian company. Found out youngest traveller is 67 years old, but are very fit and active.

..... but really my plot today was to think of some order of how to communicate what we do here.

I've signed up and used all kinds of social sites and services and there is just no way I can nerd my way through all of them, so its been s sort out, but even what's left over is a lot of work.

Twitter is great for rattling the contacts and finding out the news, but for the news I also still use the Yahoo Reader for that, still like that from Yahoo. I still have not got used to Google Reader, may look at that again in 12 months.

Facebook is my favourite, a place of genuine friends and social. I love the way I can feed everything into this one place, but I really have to focus on the fan pages and define them away from my personal profile. That's a plan for another day.

You Tube, I just love video clips, and will keep adding more and more as I have such an archive to share. With more and more people on broadband its so much easier to tell stories with videos and though there are better quality video services out there, this is the one for me right now.

Picasa, staying in the Google family again for my photos. I just could not get the hang of Flickr, especially slow uploading and messy presentations. I love the simple photo to video making features and its close link to YouTube and Facebook.

Blogger, again with Google. I see folks with their Wordpress and am impressed, very impressed, and keep promising myself a go at this, but Blogger has served me well, so its about, "why change what works".

..... but with Blogger I'm a bit slow doing frequent blogs with "Following Celtic Ways", but am good with daily Twitter and Facebook, often twice daily, so I thought this daily "Pottering Harry's Diary" will fill the gap.

ReverbNation, absolutely wonderful for all things music, especially gig promotions. I set this up for my partner Claire Roche but now find this is wonderful for our Celtic Bards School venue too, and I love the way it links tightly into Facebook. I've never been comfortable with MySpace.

Now with music this is where it gets frustrating, so many places to promote and update, but attention away from ReverbNation is with DownloadMusic.ie a wonderful service by local man Johnnie Beirne with a very nifty pay with cell/mobilephone rather than credit cards. Brilliant!

Somehow I have to also find time for the house concert networks of Concerts In Your Home, House Concerts Europe and our own Harps Around Ireland.

I still have to get going with a podcast ???

So after all that is up to date
there's the web sites of Celtic Ways, Celtic Bards School, and Claire Roche.

Oh, how could I forget MeetUp.com, the bridge between the online social and real people social with an online payment collection service added. Fabulous operation!

...... then the Two Worlds Labyrinth to keep nice
...... our theatre/studio to continually improve

plus books to write
and discs to record
and other merchandise our visitors like to share

and be with all of the wonderful people we host on tours and retreats which brings in some loot to pay the bills and makes all this possible.

I love my work so much, I could do it 48 hours a day