John Cade

That’s right - we are now on Twitter!  Follow us!

You’ll have to forgive me - I broke my blog at some point over the last two weeks while trying to updgrade Wordpress, and I left my readers with the dreaded “php errors” for viewing.  Maybe after reading the list of what has been going on over the past few weeks, you’ll understand why I neglected to fix it.

• I moved into my new place in Green Hills two weeks ago.  Other than listening to extremely loud traffic while in bed at night (clarification:  the traffic is normal.  the windows are super thin), I absolutely love the place.  The lady who owns the house, and lives downstairs, is a great neighbor.  Thank God for that.  Also, it only takes me 10 minutes to get downtown during rush hour.  Couldn’t have selected a better location.
• During GMA Week, I attended a preview of the Music Builds Tour with Switchfoot at the Wildhorse Saloon.  For anyone who has never been to the Wildhorse, Jon Foreman said it best:  “This is a nice country bar.  That’s what this is.”   As always, Switchfoot was incredible.  I never miss an opportunity to see them live, and neither should you.
• Meredith and I also attended the Dove Awards at the Grand Ole Opry.  It was my first time in the Grand Ole Opry House, and it was definitely a unique experience.  Sitting through a live taping of that magnitude is a very surreal experience.  Even though I was actually present at the awards show, it felt as if I was watching it all through a monitor.  Everything ran like clockwork.  I was able to see Switchfoot play for the second time in one week.  They played “This is Home” which is going to be featured on the Prince Caspian soundtrack.   Do yourself a favor, and listen to it on their myspace page.
• May 1 and 2 were my first two days as an employee of LifeWay (actually, it was just orientation).  My official title is Internet Producer, and I will be working in Digital Media Publishing.  I was able to meet a lot of great people and get familiar with the 22 acres or so of land that the campus sits on.  Second only to the Tennessee state government, LifeWay is the largest property owner in downtown Nashville.  If you need any advice on surviving the hiring process with a large organization, feel free to shoot me a message.  After three entire months of conversations with one, I know a thing or two.
• Meredith and I will be married in exactly two weeks.  I can’t believe how close it is!

Please excuse the missing images and sound files throughout my older posts.  I’ll work on getting those back up withing the next few days.

Disclaimer:  I’m definitely not the first person to post about this topic.  However, many of the posts you will find are aimed at web and marketing professionals.  My goal is to inform the general population about a few basic, useful things Twitter can accomplish.

I thought the social networking revolution hit an all-time low when I heard about Twitter. I don’t care what your dog ate for breakfast. So why would I bother following you and your too frequent and unimportant life updates on Twitter? What a terrible idea. However, I became increasingly intrigued after seeing people use it effectively as an outlet for self-promotion and marketing. Thus, I joined the fray and created my own Twitter profile. And the updates began.

From my limited experiences, I compiled a list of things Twitter can accomplish for anyone.

1. Keep you informed - Believe it or not, I find myself looking to Twitter for breaking news. After all, you can follow the major news networks, who automatically post to Twitter when they update their headlines.
2. Make you and your content known - I can’t tell you how many people I have discovered on Twitter that actually have something interesting or important to say. People that I would have never been interested in otherwise. They are effectively gaining an audience through the use of simple, one-line updates.  Twitter helps bloggers and site owners drive traffic to their sites, which is great for increased paged views and therefore higher advertising income.
3. Act as a lightweight RSS reader - Many of the feeds I am pulling into my desktop RSS reader actively ‘tweet’ when the site it originates from has updated content. With the integration of Twitterrific and Growl on my Mac, I can get updates without opening my reader and losing real estate on my screen (although it would be even more beneficial if Growl displayed clickable links).
4. Provide a forum for feedback - This point is two fold. By using the @username syntax, twitter users can reply to what others have said. When you’re following major corporations, this is a great way to give them feedback or let them know of any problems or concerns you may have. Believe it or not, it can quickly grab their attention; especially if your tweet puts them at risk of being exposed in some way. Secondly, it gives others an easy, quick way of responding to you and providing you with feedback on any new content you have informed them about.
5. Help you find answers - Got a question?  About anything?  There’s a good chance you’ll get a pretty hasty response from your followers.

Attempt #2 at the post I was trying to make yesterday.

1.  I’m starting to collect posters from Nashville’s own Hatch Show Print, one of the oldest letterpress shops in the U.S.  A great gallery of the shop here and of some of their work here.   Currently seeking: poster from Ben Harper and The Innocent Criminals’ August 2007 show at the Ryman Auditorium.

2.  If you’re on the GTD bandwagon, one way to save some time and do things faster (at least for Mac users out there) is to use one of these great productivity tools: Butler, Quicksilver, or LaunchBar.  Each of these programs (opened by pressing only two keys on your keyboard) allows you to launch applications, control iTunes, open files or folders, and complete several other tasks that would otherwise take longer, all from one window and by making only a few keystrokes.  My current choice is Butler.  I’ve heard LaunchBar is great, but it isn’t free.  Which brings me to my next point.

3.  I’m getting Married in less than 2 months!  I can’t believe how close it is.  I apologize that we have not yet sent out invites.

4.  Meredith and I signed the lease for our new home yesterday.  The place is the upstairs of a really neat, older house in the Green Hills area of Nashville.  I move in on the 20th of April.  Meredith will start living there the day we get back from our honeymoon!

5.  I was fortunate enough to attend the first showing of the inspiring documentary Sons of Lwala.  It was directed, produced, and written by Barry Simmons, a former Nashville news anchor.  The documentary follows two Vanderbilt medical students from Africa who fulfill their late fathers dream of opening a medical clinic in their small village in Kenya.   The clinic still needs a lot of support.  I bought my first hatch print at the benefit.

6.  I’m really starting to understand Twitter and some great uses for it.  Check back for an entire post about it.  Yes, it can be that useful.  And I don’t mean for telling me what you had for lunch.  While I’m on the topic, Twitterrific is a great program for Mac users to get “tweets” on their desktop.

7.  Growl may be one of the best Mac programs ever created.  Want to see a summary of that last email you got without opening your mail client?  Downloaded a new album on Amazon last week and aren’t familiar with what songs you are currently listening to?  Growl gives you system-wide notifications on your desktop.  The appear only for as long as you want them to, as a sticky note of sorts.  Still confused?  Check out their about page.

8.  This is very old news, but poster lovers and Katrina survivors alike will certainly enjoy this site:   Hurricane Poster Project.  There is some really stunning artwork to see here.  Too bad I didn’t have any money when they were for sale.

Hate is a strong word.  But I’m near using it.  Let’s face it.  When you write an entire blog post, like that one that isn’t posted here right now because of what I am about to say, and it is not formatted properly (even though the Wordpress WYSIWYG editor shows it correctly), and then you go and edit each and every line putting the appropriate <p> tags in the correct places to fix the problem, and then Wordpress decides that it’s going to duplicate every paragraph you’ve written, strip the hyperlinks out of your post, and then re-format everything however it wants, you don’t really feel like typing it all again.  And you want to say hate.  But something inside of you tells you that you may need Wordpress one day, and you don’t want to offend it.  The moral of the story:  I had something useful to say and I’m too frustrated to post it again because Wordpress messed it up.  Bad.  I’ll try again tonight.  Oh, and just a word of advice - this is probably a problem linked to Safari.  Use Firefox!