Now this is annoying as it is, but if you program a bit on the side (like I do) and you use GitHub, you know that there is a solution for that. Git is a distributed version control system. Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Git is free software and so is GitHub (as long as you don't use more than 5 private repo's).

Originally founded by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett to simplify sharing code, GitHub has grown into the largest code host in the world. But it's not only for coders. You can use plain text, markdown or HTML. Or GitHub's Gist.

Using GitHub for your website's content management needs a little setup but then you're good to go and will get rid of all the pains of collaborating on articles. I'll explain how to use SSH and the HTTPS way, using GitHub's native app (recommended if you have no idea what SSH is).* But first: download a texteditor with syntax highlighting (that will show you the tags in an HTML file for instance, in a different color than your text, making it easier to read through the document and detect missing closing tags. Vim is free and a great tool.

First: The SSH way:

Create a GitHub account.

Then, we need to check for existing ssh keys on your computer. Open up your Terminal and run:
cd ~/.ssh
this checks if there is a directory named ".ssh" in your user directory

If it says 'No such file or directory', we'll have to generate a new SSH key:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@example.com"
this creates a new ssh key using whatever email you provide

Hopefully, you'll see something like this in your terminal:
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa): [Press enter]
... enter your computers password

That should give you something like this:
Your identification has been saved in /Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
01:0f:f4:3b:ca:85:d6:17:a1:7d:f0:68:9d:f0:a2:db your_email@example.com

Run the following code to copy the key to your clipboard:
pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

THEN:

1. Go to GitHub again and go to your Account Settings
2. Click on 'SSH Keys' in the left sidebar
3. Add your SSH key by pasting it into the 'Key' field
4. Click 'Add key'

Confirm the action by entering your GitHub password.

To make sure everything is working we will now SSH (yes, it's a verb) to GitHub. You'll need to enter your password again:
ssh -T git@github.com

You'll see something like this:
The authenticity of host 'github.com (207.97.227.239)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 16:27:ac:a5:76:28:2d:36:63:1b:56:4d:eb:df:a6:48.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?
DON'T PANIC. This is supposed to happen. Just type "yes" and you'll read:
Hi username! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

Done.

The HTTPS way

Create a GitHub account. Really.

Download and install GitHub's native app for Mac.

Open your terminal (only for a bit). First you need to tell git your name, so that it can label the commits you make:
git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"

Git saves your email address into the commits you make. We use the email address to associate your commits with your GitHub account:
git config --global user.email "your_email@example.com"

The last option we need to tell git that you don't want to type your username and password over and over again, whenever you're doing something. For that, we need a helper. I'm guessing you don't have the osxkeychain helper installed, so let's get that over with:
git credential-osxkeychain
curl -s -O \ http://github-media-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/osx/git-credential-osxkeychain
chmod u+x git-credential-osxkeychain


Now you need to install the helper into the same directory where Git itself is installed:
sudo mv git-credential-osxkeychain `dirname \`which git\``
you'll need to confirm your password

To tell git to use osxkeychain, simply set the global git config:
git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

The next time you clone an HTTPS URL that requires a password you will be prompted for your username and password, and to grant access to the OSX keychain. After you've done this, the username and password are stored in your keychain and you won't be required to type them again. Score.

Starting a new repository / connecting your working folder to GitHub

Every time you make a commit with Git, it is stored in a repository (or: repo). To put your project up on GitHub, you'll need to create a repository for it.

1. Click New Repository
2. Fill out the information on this page
3. Create a README
4. When you're done, click 'Create Repository'

While a README isn't a required part of a GitHub repository, it is a very good idea to have one. READMEs are designed to describe your project or add some documentation like how to use your project (like guidelines for document names).

Open your terminal:
mkdir ~/Hello-World
creates (makes) a directory for your project called 'Hello-World' in your user directory

Then type:
cd ~/Hello-World
to change the current working directory to your newly created directory

git init
sets up the necessary Git files

touch README
creates a file called "README" in your Hello-World directory

Open the new README file found in your Hello-World directory in a text editor (vim README) and add the text "Hello World!". Save and close the file. Now that you have your README set up, it's time to make your first commit. A commit is essentially a snapshot of all the files in your project at a particular point in time. In the terminal, type the following code:
git add README
this 'stages' your README file, adding it to the list of files to be committed

git commit -m 'first commit'
commits your files, adding the message "first commit". Later on you'll want to commit regularly, summarizing your changes using that commit message.

So far everything you've done has been in your local repository, meaning you still haven't done anything on GitHub yet. To connect your local repository to your GitHub account, you will need to set a remote for your repository and push your commits to it:
git remote add origin https://github.com/username/Hello-World.git
creates a remote named "origin" pointing at your GitHub repository

git push origin master
sends your commits in the "master" branch to GitHub

Working together using GitHub
Now if you look at your repository on GitHub, you will see your README has been added to it. Awesome. Next you can add collaborators. They will need a GitHub account as well. Once they are all set up they'll simply clone the project folder and it's content:
git clone git@example.com:my_project.git

... and then change to that project typing:
cd my_project

Seeing that this will probably the only thing your collaborators will use GitHub for they'll need to know very few things about the terminal. Don't navigate away just yet, this is some important stuff. The commands they'll need are:

Do a git pull every now and then to pull the changes one of the other team members might have made in the mean time. At the very least pull a git pull just before you're committing your changes.

vim . is a useful little command do open the whole folder in your texteditor. It's great to have that overview. When you're done making your changes, run git status. With git add . you'll then stage all files you'll want to push to GitHub. With git add document.html picture.png, you can be very precise about what you want to add.
Run git status again to see if you have covered it all and then it's all git commit -m "commit message" to commit your changes. Run git push, refresh your repo in the browser and... TADAAA!

* Setup and tips and tricks mentioned in this post are all for Mac. Looking for a guide for your Windows of Linux computer? Off you go!

August last year I started going through the RailsGirls guides with a friend and co-worker. I wasn't stoked immediately but I felt that learning programming was something vital, something bigger than me. It wasn't until I refreshed my knowledge of HTML and CSS until I really started to get the hang of Ruby on Rails. With HTML and CSS every change you make is so incredibly visual, one can not help but play around with the code. That playful attitude - and lack of fear that you'll break something - that comes with being proficient in whatever language, is what makes you an engineer.

Now I never really learned coding before as I thought I was too late. You hear all these stories of guys that have been programming ever since they were potty trained - or something along those lines. Plus: I have never really been good at math. Turns out that not all programmers started that early. There's no such thing as starting too late. And the mathematics you'll have to deal with in web development are as basic as sums and subtractions.

Mashable calls programming the (job) skill of the future. Not any language in particular of course. It's uncertain (or even unlikely) that HTML and CSS in their current form will be on the menu of the next decade. But what we do know is, for the foreseeable future, coding is one of the most important and desirable skills there is. Know a bit of this and that and you can at least read a lot of source code. Which is convenient because I didn't necessarily want to become a programmer. I wanted to understand what the developers at the startup I worked at were talking about. And using that knowledge I wanted to push community features and write better bug reports. Even now, I'm working as a tech reporter for a startup platform and as a communication awesomeness officer at this company (that offers a rather technical product). Notice that none of those (made up) job titles entail me actually coding. And I'm not, really. Sure, I'll optimize a WordPress blog here and there, and I'll mock-up landing pages using HTML5 and CSS, but I don't actually touch the source code. And that's absolutely fine. A job in web development and IT can be a lot of things. I love translating between the users and marketing/communication on the one hand, and the engineering team on the other. I'll leave that Python code base for what it is.

But enough about me. Looking back, I could/should have tackled this thing a bit better. Or more efficient. I don't blame my mentors for that, at all. A lot of stuff is simply too self-evident for them to adapt their vocabulary. I experienced me learning Rails as everything but easy. It seemed that with every step I was slapped in the face with a new gem, exception or a whole new programming language. "You should really use Javascript for that." ... and off I went to Codecademy to follow their Javascript track. Some days just looking at Avdi's Objects on Rails made my stomach cringe. But I survived and I learned a lot about how to learn programming along the way. So, enjoy:

Improve your HTML and CSS skills with Codecademy
Codecademy's Web Fundamentals track is a great way to refresh and improve your HTML and CSS skills. You'll work with a Terminal and Texteditor right in the browser, which is great. However, if you want to continue practicing (offline) you will need to install a Texteditor (Vim is a a free service) and a terminal. You could either use the terminal application on your Mac or download iTerm - which I'm somewhat of a fan of.

Anyway. Codecademy's Web Fundamentals track teaches you the building blocks of HTML and CSS in order to create and style your first web page from scratch. You'll learn how to use tables, divs, and spans to flesh out our pages and make them capable of a wide range of content and style. Plus: with all the CSS selectors you'll get to know, you'll be able to control precisely where and how your HTML elements appear on the page.

Get started with Git and GitHub
Head over to Github.com and register yourself an account. On GitHub you can host your code so you actually always have a virtual backup. You might want to use your real email address (you know, the one you check every other hour) instead of a Hotmail address you use for spam only. GitHub will send you messages - especially when you are working on projects with other people - that you don't want to miss.
GitHub is additionally somewhat of a social network for programmers.

One of the great features on GitHub is the ability to see what other people are working on. When you follow someone, you will get notifications on your dashboard about their GitHub activity. At some point you may want to stay up-to-date with a specific project. Just click on the "watch" button at the top of the project page and you're good to go. Care to contribute to someone else's project? After making changes, you can let the original author know about them by sending a pull request.

When you are collaborating on a project with someone, you sometimes come across problems that need to be fixed. To help you keep track of these problems, each GitHub repository has a section called Issues.

Have you found yourself wishing you could collaborate with multiple developers on one project? You can manage everyone with Organizations. With an organization you can build teams with special permissions, have a public 'organization profile', and keep track of activity within the organization.

At the heart of GitHub is an open source version control system (VCS) called Git (if you don't already know what Git is, take a crash course.). Git is responsible for everything GitHub related that happens locally on your computer. Version control systems let programmers take snapshots of their code at any point in time. Sometimes (/oftentimes) you will write code that causes unexpected problems. When this happens, it’s great to be able to easily revert to the last working version of your code. And: when working together on the same project, you'll need to be able to easily 'merge' your code with theirs. You don't want your uodate to overwrite their vital changes, do you?

So, let's get Git(Hub) running on your laptop. You'll probably want to download GitHub's native app for Mac and follow the installation instructions. To get the hang of this GitHub thing, follow the guides to create a new repository, and to a href="https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo" target="_blank">fork one (copy an open source project in order to work on your own version of it).

Codeschool has a great free course teaching you the basics of git version control and the terminal.

Now get started with Rails and Ruby
To build apps and other things with Ruby on Rails, we need to setup some software and a developer environment for your computer. RailsGirls actually offers the instructions for your operating system:
- Setup for OS X
- Setup for Windows
- Setup for Linux

Then: try Ruby with TryRuby. This fun course by code school allows you to try out Ruby code in the prompt (terminal) on the right. TryRuby is based on Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. If you like the style of TryRuby, you might want to learn all about the language reading through his book. Giggles guaranteed, Why is a bit of a nut.

Then it makes sense to run through the RailsGirls guide (again - this post was originally for RailsGirls alumni only). The commands and code described will start to make a lot more sense. You might want to start over, set up a new Rails project, follow the guide and then jump into the follow up guides:
Guide 1: Add commenting by Janika Liiv
Guide 2: Put your app online with Heroku by Terence Lee
Guide 3: Create thumbnail images for the uploads by Miha Filej
Guide 4: Add design using HTML & CSS by Alex Liao
Guide 5t: Add Authentication (user accounts) with Devise by Piotr Steininger

Did that work out for you? Awesome. You know what's also fun? Rails for Zombies (another course by the guys from Codeschool). Yes, you will be repeating a lot, but repetition is good. That's why you should turn to Codecademy next. Remember? You followed their Web Fundamentals course a little while ago. Now we'll turn to their Ruby course. You'll learn how to change your Ruby programs' behavior based on user input. You'll get familiar with loops, arrays, hashes, blocks, procs, and lambdas and you'll learn how to sort large amounts of information. Codecademy also introduces you to refactoring. That's the process of making our code even better.

Yay for JavaScript
JavaScript is the language that determines how the elements on a page should behave (when you for instance click on a button). There’s an awesome JavaScript framework out there called jQuery, which basically everyone uses. It’s fun to learn. That is, compared to JavaScript. These mini-tutorials should get you started: http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials.

When you’re feeling ready, Heroku makes it really easy to deploy your code (Hartl explains how to do this). Here’s the info on setting up Heroku with Rails 3: devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails3. If you want to set up a custom domain name, Heroku provides a tutorial on this too: devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains.

Now you are 'out there', you might as well physically leave the house. Look for a user group in your city and meet your new programmer friends. I've experienced the Ruby and Rails community to be very friendly and welcomy.

Keep learning
Subscribe for the Ruby Weekly newsletter. Start reading Avdi's Objects on Rails. Listen to his RubyTapas episodes. You might understand very little in the beginning but remember, it's about learning a new language here. It's a lot about learning the vocabulary. Just look up what you don't understand and the next time you'll hear it, you'll be all like 'I KNOW THAT STUFF'.

ERROR!
With time, error messages will scare you less. Encountering an error? Write or talk out loud, what you think the matter might be. Don’t just sit there hoping for an epiphany.

You'll be fine.

Ninh shared how he thinks that so-called startup conferences that charge 1500 pp are a farce. And how he dislikes seeing cool startups leave the Netherlands, to try and make it in the States, or by means of an acquihire. "It's a loss for the Dutch tech industry really. With Bubblyconf we want to support the startup culture."

This year the organizing team of Bubbleconf has decided to run a kind of startup bootcamp alongside of the conference. Ninh, who's a lecturer on programming for the University of Amsterdam, called me to discuss a Rails Girls like program. But then a little more broad. And open for men. "I'm not white-knighting here, I just want to take away obstacles for all beginners." We talked about teaching developers basic marketing skills and marketeers basic programming skills. Bubbleconf wants to bring the people within the startup ecosystem closer together and making them understand a bit of what their conversation partners do on a daily basis might just be the key there.

This year BubbleConf will take place in the stunning Beurs van Berlage, located in the heart of the Amsterdam city centre. Follow updates on the event and it's program via Twitter. See you there.

For those of you only tuning in now: the hunTU a kind of scavenger hunt, organized by a few cool guys from the Technical University in Vienna. The idea is simple. You form a team and from the moment you (and all the other participating clans) get the item list, you have 3,141 days to collect/make/do as many things as possibly possible. For every item you earn a certain amount of points. The team with the most points – you got it! – wins.

The list
Some of my favorite items this year were:
- Schloss Schönbrunn made out of cookies;
- Chuck Norris facts written down on 30 empty toilet rolls;
- the re-enacted children's picture;
- the Gummy bear taste test;
- photobomb level UFO
- the Polaroid picture of a Polaroid picture of a Polaroid camera;
- the raspberry pi pie and
- the Lego tower (2 meters high)

The list contained a few surprises. The action tasks involved engaging in the 'Ententanz' with the whole team, as well as a 'Lokalsuche', where the hunTU organizers would give hints where in the city they were hiding. Finding them meant points. Finding them first, extra points. My favorite action task this year was the 'Sowjetische Marine', where the whole team needed to board an inflatable boat in the pond at Karlsplatz and wave the USSR flag.

The organizers
Bernhard Bichler, Mihai Ghete, Jens Kager, Lena Reiser, Paul Staroch, Andreas Tiefenthaler, Emre Izgöl, Paul Leitner, Thomas Schranz, Alexander Tauner, Valentin Wadl, Lisa Wagenknecht and myself were the organizers behind this year's scavenger hunt. We rated 1.475 items, all together worth 24.925 points (the average item would gain you 15,66 points). We made a bunch of pictures and we tweeted here and there.

The teams
This year's teams were as crazy as ever. In order to get the mono-brow item a Big Bang team member simple shaved off one of his eyebrows. We saw men and women in morphsuits, self-made wingsuits and mankini's. And a lot of semi-attractive catwomen (is that the plural of Catwoman?), Jokers and team members with pink-dyed hair.

The items
Some of the items which would bring in the most points were:
- a video of the ISS where Chris Hadfield would send his greetings to hunTU (155 points)
- a Harlem Shake video (60 points)
- a cooking video of max 60 minutes, preferably in a foreign language (60 points)
- a tooth-pick marionette (61 points)

Evidently (and sadly) nobody brought in the first item. Nor the did anyone
bring a vacuum cleaner with a radio attached. One team managed to get a quote from a guy running a vacuum cleaner museum though, saying the had never heard of such a thing and claimed that the sound the vacuum cleaner makes would interfere heavily with the tunes from the radio. Making the device far from desirable.

Then there were the so-called achievements, which basically combined items and - when they were all brought in - added some bonus points. Example was the achievement 'Früher war alles besser' where one had to collect a 'Konsum' bag, old McDonald's coupons, a Tschisi ice cream, a Super 8 film and a Phone card from the Schilling era.

Some items brought minus points, such as 'Nasses Brot' (wet bread), a milk tooth and a Microsoft-T-Shirt. All together however, they'd make for quite a few extra points.

The memes
hunTU wouldn't be hunTU if the walls (and windows) of the HQ weren't plastered with memes. Creating a hunTU meme was on the list. AND the participants made for some great meme-material as well, with the overly attached hunTU participant and grumpy pug:

Next year
I'm planning to pull a reverse-Valentin next year. Valentin Wadl joined the organizing team, freshly recruited from one of last year(s) participating teams operating under code name T.A.R.D.I.S. I'd love to participate with a bunch of equally crazy people and nail that thing. It's a prestige thing, you know...

I've been 'involved' with the WordPress user group meetup for some time now and I'm excited to share that we've set up a little something for WordPress' 10th anniversary party! May 27th we'll celebrate WordPress at the Flanagans Irish Pub, Schwarzenbergstasse 1, in Vienna. Be there or be square!

Don’t forget to RSVP here AND here. Entrance is free, of course, and the first 100 people to RSVP on both pages will get a free drink!

The official part of yesterdays get-together started with a small sponsor talk from Runtastic. David Österreicher (part of the Viennese chapter of Runtastic) told us how one of Austria's most successful startups uses Ruby for virtually everything. And casually mentioned that Runtastic is hiring.

Next up was Andreas Kopecky, on Sequel. 'Bndy' is working as a backend developer at RadarServices. Sequel is an ORM, maintained (to extremes) by Jeremy Evans with monthly releases.

Sequel...

• ... loads all table data from database meta-information
• ... provides getter/setter for all columns in the table
• ... for all intends and purposes pretty much what ActiveRecord
  does in it's most basic form

Andreas recommends using Sequel when "you want control over your database, you want to unleash the benefits of using relational databases, you want to use all available database types and you want a really powerful tool that is well maintained." Better leave it be whenever you actually don't want to bother with what your database does. Or when you are not comfortable with getting into SQL.

For Andreas' slides with code snippets, head over to our slides repo.

Sarah Howorka is in the 2nd year of her studies. That means: working together with web design students. "It's really a very valuable experience, as you work together on real world problems." Sarah is into photography, what results in the serendipity app she's building. The application replicates the double exposure effect of analogue photography, Instagram style. "We additionally use this project to try and work with scrum, and TDD."

On the Rails Girls project (Sarah frequently coaches during these international, 1-day workshops): "Explaining something in a way that makes you come across as really smart is easy, explaining something in a way someone else actually understands it is an entirely different story. What I want to teach beginners to programming is that coding is not boring, it's not lonely. Code is literacy. It's very much like learning a new language, you won't master it overnight but it comes in extremely handy."

Clemens Helm was next up, with his talk on 'The Ruby Workflow'. Or actually: the Codeship workflow. The hobbyist screencaster is excited about the web and Rails and is currently the only one of the team that holds office in Vienna. The rest is in Boston for the TechStars program.

Clemens on their workflow: "It's really quite simple: develop, file a pull request and go live!" The Codeshippers are big fans of using feature branches, behavior-driven development, continuous integration (with tests on every push to GitHub) and continuous deployment. With the last two being THE example of a company that 'eats their own dogfood'.

"There are a quite a few advantages to the way we work":

• + Only hours from idea to shipping
• + Everybody can contribute
• + Code quality
• + Shared knowledge
• + Deployment just happens
• – Pull request cycle (... is rather lengthy)

With that, and a small discussion with the attendees on how Codeship could improve their pull request cycle, Clemens closed of the official part of the evening. Everyone went on mingling and drinking their drinks. Contacts and gems got exchanged and I even needed to list talk proposals for next month's meetup. About that: The next vienna.rb meetup takes place June 4 at Sektor5 (Siebenbrunnengasse 44, 1050). Follow us on Twitter or take a look at our website for more information about the upcoming event.

As most talks were in Czech or Slovak, one of the organizers had arranged an interpreter for me. Even though I had still to organize the first event for vienna.rb - I went to Bratislava for inspirational reasons - I was welcomed like a rockstar. After this meeting all these guys actually followed up on whatever we talked about during the networking-part of the meetup. And they returned 'the favor', showing up with a van for every vienna.rb meetup. It was a humbling experience.

Austrian's tend to see their country as the navel of the (startup) world. I'm not pointing fingers here. Coming from the Netherlands I think the Austrians are usually 2 years behind when it comes to technology. Meeting all this friendly and incredibly smart and hard working people from Slovakia really put me back in my place. Since then I try to visit every cross-border event and encourage people to get their asses on that train to Bratislava to attend a meetup in whatever field of interest. After all Bratislava and Vienna are the closest capital cities of Europe.

Learning how people from different nationalities approach a problem or figuring the different challenges you face when it comes to open data for instance is incredibly valuable. You'll go about your code/job/life differently after that. And for the better.

Milan Steskal (CEO at mosaicmedia.eu) and Andrej joined us from Bratislava to both do a little talk. Milan started with his, on Facebook integration. "Promoting your blog, brand or business on Facebook is like sex, everyone thinks that they know how to do it (right)." Milan challenged the attendees to describe what Facebook is and try to not use the words 'social' or 'network'. "What's the Facebook platform for? For users it's apps like Foursquare and Instagram that help them tell their story. For bloggers it's an opportunity to grow their audience."

Milan explained how to integrate social elements like the like button or Facebook comments on your blog and then went on to explain the workings of Open Graph. "Open Graph lets you connect real world actions with objects in your apps. For example: let your readers tell their friends that they've read your article using social reader." For a technical guide to Open Graph Milan suggested the attendees check out facebook.com/docs/opengraph. And he guides the developer in the room to the Graph API explorer, a tool that helps you test your API calls and permissions.

Find Milan's slides online.

Andrej Mikula then went on to share how blogging and WordPress determined his future. "When I got started, using WordPress was like using Windows the 90'ies, there wasn't a decent alternative." Andrej quoted Ogilvy - if you want to become a (copy)writer, write! - to explain why he started blogging in 2008. He quit his job as a marketing director last summer, thinking it to be not immoral to some make money from blogging. "I was blogging about time management for years, but never thought I could do talks and workshops on it."

For a bit of advice:
- "Google is closing its RSS Reader, for most people it's too much of a pain to change products, make sure to collect email subscribers instead."
- "You don't have to be an expert, call yourself an enthusiast instead!"

After a short break Paolo Belcastro talked (quite) a bit about 'why, when and how to make a site multilingual'. "Switching to another language for your dashboard and website it easy, just download the same exact WordPress package, just in a different language. But what if you want more than one language at once? Switzerland has 4 languages for 7 million people... you need a multilingual site there." Paolo advised the attendees to really think through if they are serving a global or a local audience. "Do people need the exact same content, just in another language?" There is a difference between local and global presence. Local can be as big as a whole contintent, for instance when it come to baseball. "Who outside of the US cares about baseball anyway?"

"Take Apple. Apple has a global presence and a global audience, but different prices and regulations for every country. They need flexibility. Tourism is a good example of local presence but global audience. Russians and Italians don't like they same way of addressing, they are looking for different things on their holiday. If that isn't enough, colors don't mean the same thing in every country. Orange has this political connotation in India." How do you go about translations when your site is extremely rich in content? Is it doable to translate a news site in different languages? Making a site multilingual is not so hard, filling the website with multilingual content however, THAT is (time) costy.

Paolo went on to introduce qTranslate and WPML. Paolo: "The 50 dollars you pay for WPML are worth it, as you can also adjust the CSS for every language. It doesn't necessarily work out of the box with other plugins though." Multisite Language Switcher (MLS) is the newest kid in town. It allows you to create three sites, in different languages, using sub-domains.

But really Paolo suggested to build 3 separate websites, managed by local experts. If you're at that (professional) level.

At that point Franz Josef Kaiser hijacked the meeting a bit and introduced the WCM User Language Switcher plugin he co-created: "It allows you to switch your whole dashboard, including the plugins, to virtually every language you'd like. Including Klingon."

Jakob Hager, the guy behind Pitch your Passion, on the event: "Between pitches from people that try and change the world for the better on a small scale, we have some 'different' stuff as well. Last year a singer-songwriter sang a song to the audience."

Whoever wants to present just gets up and starts. 3 minute presentations (in English!) are followed by 2 minutes of Q&A by the audience. You can't use media other than what you bring along. That means: no slides unless you bring the beamer! In between clusters of pitches the PYP team throws in some games like vis-a-vis pitching and networking exercises.

Nothing to present? You can also just join in and listen.

Matthew from The Spot and Kathrin from Sektor5 made sure everyone was aware of the house rules and the free food and drinks in a short introduction speech and the people from TwinEntrepreneurs, an initiative for empowering startups in the area of Vienna and Bratislava, introduced their workshops.

Around two in the morning we made our way back home. There was some singing along in the back of the bus and jokes that Angelo should take care of ordering food for the after party seeing as he is the frontman of Mjam.

Yesterday evening was the first event of a series of initiatives planned to bring together entrepreneurs from different countries to support networking and cooperation across borders. So stay tuned for the next session!