So while I continue to take a break from blogging here, I’ve started a new project: ‘Manchester Wire is a website that hopes to keep you informed about the best things Manchester and the surrounding area has to offer.’ It’s edited by Ruth Allan and myself, with writing by us and a crack team of contributors, and we’re aiming to build it up in to a practical and pretty comprehensive resource for events and developments in the city.

Since soft-launching last Friday, we’ve featured gig and club previews, theatre reviews, art festivals, exhibition and venue openings – plus some of the more underground happenings in Manchesters, such as a Subbuteo club and a zine library.

Take a look at manchesterwire.co.uk – we’re keen to hear what you think, and about what you think we should be covering. We’re also on Twitter (@mcrwire) and Facebook.

We’re little over a week away from the debut outing of the Manchester Weekender, a collection of ‘the best of Manchester’s art and culture’. From 1-3 October, for 48 hours, the city showcases itself through an unmanageably large number of events. I thought, therefore, it might be helpful to pick some personal highlights direct from the programme:

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at Manchester Art Gallery. A major new exhibition of interactive digital artworks by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, including the world premiere of a large-scale installation People on People, a co-commission with AND festival. The Gallery hosts an evening of live electronica by Marconi Union alongside what’s being billed as ‘interactive activity’ from Lewis Sykes in its glass-roofed atrium.

Un-convention is one of the UK’s most eclectic independent music industry events containing much for those who just love (rather than work in) new music. Employing such unconventional spaces as a barge, Salford Lads’ Club and a church, featuring Bill Drummond, Jarvis Cocker, Jon McClure, Brian Travers and Kevin Cummins – all doing ‘interesting things in the most unexplored places in the city’ – with a travelling circus, music photography projected onto buildings, Colombian Hip Hop, Jah Wobble, the BBC Philharmonic and a brass band as well.

Contemporary Cartography //01 is a pocket map that provides an overview of what makes up the creative ecology of the city (via its contemporary galleries and underground art spaces) and, to celebrate its launch, there are a number of Contemporary Cartography Tours. The map coincides with the launch of Creative Tourist’s new iPhone app. – a guide to the art and culture of Manchester.

See Manchester by water where a family boat party connects the Manchester Ship Canal with the River Irwell and puts food by one of the Northwest’s top chefs, Robert Owen Brown, on the menu.

Hidden Manchester is a very special, secret tour to one of the city’s most spectacular, but rarely seen by the public, buildings created and led by the city’s most popular guide, the broadcaster and historian Jonathan Schofield, especially for the Manchester Weekender.

You can pick your own highlights, or read more about the above events, in Creative Tourist’s Weekender guide. There’s also a pdf guide to the Manchester Weekender.

Happy 2010 readers! I hope you had a good break, and are enjoying slipping and sliding all over Manchester. Best snow-based construction this week? Easy: the king-sized throne outside Ridelow on Dale Street.

I’m getting back into the swing of Mancubisting – and one thing that has drawn my attention lately is this:

Stuart Maconie, co-host of the Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC Radio 2 and host of The Freak Zone on 6Music, will give a reading from his latest book, Adventures on the High Teas, and talk about the quirks and delights of his travels in the pursuit of Middle England … via Manchester.

High Tea with Stuart Maconie takes place at Mosi on Liverpool Road this coming Sunday. It’s £8 for a ticket – and with that you get a traditional English cream tea. Click here to book online, or call 0844 847 2261.

[I spotted this event via the increasingly useful Visit Manchester Blog.]

Urbis’ Videogame Nation ended yesterday – surely one of the Urbis exhibition centre’s most successful outings to date – but another great-looking show is little over a week away:

Show & Tell is an exhibition by the Urbis Creatives art collective; a collective comprised of Urbis staff. The exhibition will give the Urbis team a chance to show their work and tell the visitors about what they do outside of the creative environment of Urbis. It will comprise of many different disciplines from photography to illustration, painting and also projects the members are involved in such as community work and music events.

You can get a sneak peak of the kind of talent on show by reading more about Urbis Creatives artists. Show & Tell opens on Tuesday 29 September and runs until 12 October.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t write about Urbis without mentioning the potential transfer of one of Preston’s star attractions, the National Football Museum, over here in 2010. I’m sure it would be a great addition to this football-rich city – although Kate over at the Manchizzle expressed the other side of the argument concisely: ‘Art 0, Football 1′.