As you know, we get together on the third Wednesday of every month.  However, in March, the third Wednesday happens to also be St. Patty’s Day.  The consensus seemed to be that there’s no point having a tweetup on the biggest drinking day of the year, since we’ll all probably run into each other anyway.

So March’s Harrisburg Tweetup will be on Wednesday, 3/24 at 7pm.  The Abbey Bar is located on the second floor of Appalachian Brewing Company in Harrisburg.  They’ve been great about accommodating us over the years (yes, it’s been years) and have free wifi with a smoke-free environment.  There’s also some beer there, I think.

If you’re going to tweet about the event, use the #hbgtweetup tag so we can get a feel for who’s coming.  See you there!

Everyone with a blog or active social media account living in or around Central PA is welcome to attend!  Our wintertime Tweetups usually have a much smaller crowd than the warm-weather tweetups, so if you’ve wanted to come but have been overwhelmed at the prospect of meeting 30+ new faces at once, now is the perfect time to come out.  ABC is a smoke-free environment with free WiFi, good food, and great drafts, so now you’ve REALLY got no excuse not to show.

See you there!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but our Twitter hashtag is #hbgtweetup.  Please use it any time you tweet about the event so we can get a decent idea of how many are coming.

See you there!

This month we’re bumping things back one day.  Instead of meeting on the third Wednesday like we normally do, we’re going to be having our July Tweetup on Thursday, July 16th.  We’ll still be meeting at 7pm, and we’ll still be getting together on the deck, and I’ll still be raving over how incredibly awesome the Dom Blonde is.  ABC has a private function that will consume the entire deck on Wednesday, and Thursday is supposed to be sunnier, so I figured we’ll be best served by stepping back one day.  Come on out, soak up some sun & suds, and meet your fellow Tweeps & bloggers.

People always ask what happens at these things.  Put simply, we drink and BS.   They’re a chance to get together and hang out with the faces behind the domain names or Twitter accounts.  Hot topics are always local politics, regional tech advocacy, local entertainment and events, and why Sara stood us up this month (I kid, Sara!).  But more than anything, it’s a bulletproof excuse to soak up some fine craft beer.

Because our group swells to several dozen people during the summer months, we’re pretty easy to spot.  We do our best to keep an eye out for new faces, but if you show up and don’t know anyone, just say hi — we’re a very friendly, casual group.  Just follow the signs or ask a bartender where the Tweetup is.

See you there!

The next Harrisburg Tweetup is going down on Wednesday, June 17th.  7pm on the deck (weather permitting) at Appalachian Brewing Company in Harrisburg.  If we get rained out, we’ll be inside the Abbey Bar (second floor).  If you have a blog, post on Fark, or have a Twitter account, you’re officially invited!  Added bonus:  Bottles are $2 off, so if the seasonal ABC brews on tap aren’t to your liking, that bottle of Framboise will only set you back $8.

Our Tweetups are 99.75% social gatherings.  Basically, they’re a chance for us to all get together, put a face to the screen name, and share a few brews.  Conversation has often run full-bore up to closing time and a good time is always had by all.  The summer Tweetups are especially great, if for no reason other than there’s something awesome about hanging out on a deck in the industrial part of town, overlooking the capitol and downtown while the sun sets, all while the temperature refuses to dip below 73.  After this month we’re halfway through the Summer Sessions, so make sure to be there.

If you’ve never been to ABC before, it’s located at 50 N Cameron St in Harrisburg.  Plenty of free parking is available in the large, fenced-in lot behind the building, or you can try your luck at one of the six parking spaces next to the huge hopper.  Or vat.  Whatever that thing is.  Although we usually stay until around 9-ish, the summer tweetups tend to go longer and bring more people (a typical crowd in the summer is around 20-30 people).  Draft beers (their own brews) are $4.50, as I recall.  The food prices are a little on the high side, but aside from the Grizzly Bear Chili (which DOES NOT contain actual grizzly bear, an omission that disappoints me greatly), I’ve never had a bad meal there.

As an added bonus, I’m inviting local users from Fark.com to this gathering.  There’s already quite a bit of crossover between Fark and the Twitter / blogger community, so why not open the doors all the way?

Finally, the best comment out of last month’s tweetup:  “This isn’t the Star Trek convention I was expecting it to be”.  Awesome.

LAST-SECOND UPDATE:  Tonight’s Tweetup has been moved to the ground floor of ABC due to the concerts going on upstairs.  We should be somewhere back in the area of the kitchen; if you enter through the side door, bang a left and you should spot the conspicuous-looking blogger & Twitter types in abundance.

On the third Wednesday of every month, a bunch of us get together at ABC on Cameron Street for food, brew, and general socialization-driven mayhem.  We’re a casual bunch, and these events are anything but formal.  Our get-togethers are a chance to come out and put a face behind the follower — or the followed.  We’re open to anyone in the region with a blog or a Twitter account, so if you meet either of those criteria, you have no excuse for not stopping by!

We don’t necessarily have any signs — or if we do, they’re buried under an ever-growing mountain of plates, beer bottles, and assorted liquid-containing apparatus — but we’re pretty easy to spot.  We’re typically the biggest group there, and we’re usually clustered around a few tables put together.  Just look for all the suspicious blogger-looking types; I assure you we will be the only group with a measurable laptop-to-person ratio.  If you can’t find us, just ask the bartender where the bloggers are.

See you there!

It’s hard to explain exactly what the Tweetups are all about.  Sara gave us an excellent writeup over the summer, so you might want to start there.  Reduced to the simplest possible definition, a Tweetup is a chance for the local online community to come together and meet face to face.  We always have fun, we always meet at least one or two new people, and sometimes — if we’re lucky — we even have working WiFi!

Since we don’t exactly have nametags or t-shirts, we’re not always easy to find.  But odds are good that we’ll be the biggest group of people there, and we’ll probably have the highest laptop-to-person ratio within a ten-block radius.  Our size varies every month from “a handful” to “several dozen”.  I believe our August Tweetup was the largest yet, while October’s was the smallest.

Regardless of size, we’re always a very friendly and unstructured group.  If you don’t know anybody, just walk up, say hi, and introduce yourself.  We usually go by our Twitter handles, for no reason other than simplicity.  If we don’t, there’s a lot of “Hi, I’m Dave” “Dave …  Dave who?” “Dave Sheppard” “I’m sorry, I … I don’t know who you are” “I’m floor9″ “Oh THAT Dave!  Oh ok, your website is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life etc etc” and so on and so forth.

Conversational topics runs the gamut from local politics to sports to web technologies to making fun of my drink order for not being manly enough.  Don’t think that because you just found out what a “blog” is you’re unqualified to hang out; all skill and experience levels are welcomed!  And although there’s no real age requirement (the bar is open to all ages until around 10 or 11), some of our topics may be inappropriate and/or excruciatingly boring for children.

Hope to see you there!

If you’ve never been to a Tweetup, then make this your first!  The Harrisburg Tweetups are open to anyone from the area with a blog or a Twitter account.  It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out, an A-list blogger with a seven-digit Tweet count, or anywhere in-between; people of all skill levels are welcome!

As others have pointed out, we’re just a bunch of regular folks talking about everything from local politics to web advertising.  The Tweetups are about 80% social gathering and 20% business, so don’t feel that you need to be an expert on anything.  No stuffy presentations, no attendance requirements, just a chance to hang out, meet the faces behind the accounts, and — of course — enjoy some of ABC’s seasonal brews.  Free WiFi is available (really!), and remember that ABC is a non-smoking facility.

See you there!

I’ve been pretty much absent from the social media / blogging scene for the past few weeks, so I really didn’t get the chance to hype up this month’s tweetup as much as usual.  I’m working a ridiculous amount of overtime (almost 80 hours per week in total).  What little time I have left is dedicated to sleeping, grocery shopping, and not having a social life (in that order).  On the plus side I’ll have my student / flight training loans paid in full by early next year ( saving me 9 years of monthly payments and compounding interest), but the downside is not having enough time to do much of anything at all.

Nonetheless, tonight’s Tweetup was fun!  I was a little disappointed in my Bear Chili (“made from ground beef (not bear)”, the menu says), officially making this the first time I’ve had un-awesome food at ABC.  Also, the ever-flaky WiFi was completely out, so we were relegated to using cell phones for Twitter access (the horror!).

The fall weather was perfectly crisp for our final deck Tweetup of the year.  Just enough chill to let you know we’re in mid-September, but not unbearably cold (though we did move inside mid-way through).  That’s my kind of weather!  Next month we’ll be indoors (just look for the pile of laptops), and I promise to let everybody know about it further in advance.  See you then!