It was a really tough decision to leave a job I truly loved and a city that had starting feeling more and more like home but nearly two weeks into my new job I am confident it was the right decision to make. I’m surrounded by an incredible group of people at the college and well, our new town has a Trader Joe’s.

Sara’s last day at her job was today so we’re going to officially move all of our furniture (no more air mattress!) on Saturday and start to build a new life for ourselves in Delaware County. I’m now almost as close as it gets to being back in South Jersey without having to pay the $5 bridge toll to go to Philadelphia so that and the fact that there’s a Major League Soccer stadium 15 minutes from here is exciting.

Moving forward with this blog I will probably be posting more about communications as it relates to the community college world I’m in now but I hope to still be involved on a voluntary basis at whatever church we end up attending here so I still hope to be an active member of the church communications community.

That’s all for now.

When I look back over 2011, one of the biggest highlights of the year for me was the opportunity I had to spend a week in the capital region of New York working with churches as part of the Alpha team of Creative Missions.

I’ve been on a few short-term mission trips before but none enabled me to use my skills quite the way this trip did. Working alongside a couple of amazingly talented communications pros (Danielle and Brad) we spent a week aiding churches in their communications efforts. Like other short-term mission trips I left grateful for the opportunity and humbled by the way God had moved through me. But I also came back to work with a renewed sense of purpose and a week of professional development on which you couldn’t even put a price tag.

Creative Missions is organizing a trip this summer to the Joplin, Missouri, northwest Arkansas area. If you are a communications pro with a passion for helping the local church you should seriously consider signing up.

Click HERE for more information.

The always hilarious Tripp and Tyler take on PowerPoint presentation clichés in this video and pretty much nail it. The video is being used to promote the new book Habitudes For Communicators.

I don’t always read the comments that slip through the Akismet spam filter and find their way into my email inbox for moderation, but one that came through today caught my eye and was too good not to share.

certainly like your web-site but you have to check the spelling on several of your posts. Several of them are rife with spelling problems and I find it very bothersome to tell the truth nevertheless I will certainly come back again.

Incredible.

Think Catvertising doesn’t work? Check out how much attention the Toronto-based agency John St. is getting from this hilarious video blowing up the interwebs. Last I looked, it was approaching 1.4 million views on YouTube.

I recently had the incredible opportunity to be interviewed by Travis Allison for the Camp Hacker podcast about my summer camp blog, Summer Camp Culture.

I’ve been a regular listener of the podcast since I discovered it last year – the episodes are filled with great content for summer camp leaders – and felt extremely honored when Travis emailed me.

We talked for a half hour about my own camp experiences and why I started a blog devoted to summer camp and pop culture.

Click HERE to listen to the show and check out Camp Hacker for more great content.

The Comic Sans Project as a collection of famous brand logos destroyed by every designer’s favorite font.

via Copyranter

While the Google Plus is dead choruses continue to ring out from around the web, I’ve lately been discovering more and more reasons why I hope Google’s latest foray into social media doesn’t go the way of Friendster.

I accepted an invite to sign up early on, but quickly deleted my account when I discovered that there was no way to unlink my Picasa account (I really don’t like automated status updates). But then when the business pages were finally rolled out by Google I decided to test the waters again. Whether Google Plus succeeds in the long run, it’s probably a wise idea if you have a business, camp or nonprofit to create a page (it never hurts to patronize a company that has a lot of pull when it comes to people discovering your business or organization online).

In addition to a cleaner layout, glorious ad-free white space and the absence of all the nonsense that has junked Facebook up to the point of being barely usable, Google Plus allows you to edit your status updates after you’ve posted them.

Clearly, Google Plus loves copy editors because this really beats having to delete a post and re-post after discovering a typo.

Google Plus, you’ve won my heart. I just hope I won’t have to be like my dad, who still talks about how great Beta Max was, for years to come if and when Google Plus does die the death that so far has been largely exaggerated.

As I imagine it is for anyone who has a blog, helps maintain a website or spends a lot of time on social media, unsolicited SEO spam is a fact of life. Dozens of phone calls, emails and forwards from coworkers and colleagues (who are trying to be helpful) come my way almost every day with the promise of magically making my website or blog rise to the top of search engine listings.

My response is usually to hit delete or hit reply to the friend to say something to the effect of “for future reference, please forward messages like this directly to your email trash can” but because I work constantly to try and improve the standing of the sites I work on with search engines I can’t help but be offended with the way many of these emails and sometimes phone calls come across. I realize that’s the nature of spam, but it’s still kind of insulting to be constantly told that:

1. Despite the fact that I know nothing about your website or organization and haven’t even taken the time to research your real name, I’m going to tell you all of the things wrong with your site.

2. You don’t know me, but trust me, I’m way more awesome than you. 

3. Here’s a bunch of jargon and statistics that prove I’m more intelligent than you.

4. If you don’t hire me, you might as well just shut down the whole operation now.

Does this sound familiar? The more I think about it, the more I realize that SEO spam angers me as much as it does because I have a tendency to do those same things – even if I’m not committing them to a mass unsolicited email. I’m judgmental. I think I know it all. I judge people and organizations based on split-second research. In my good moments, I think I’m way more awesome than I really am.

Whether or not SEO is a scam (the volume of spam certainly doesn’t help its cause), there’s a lesson in there somewhere. Terms like relationship-building and engagement have become cliche by this point in our social media-dominated landscape, but they are as applicable as ever.

I have another guest post over at the MediaSalt blog today in which I share some tips on how to frustrate a copy editor.

Even though I wrote the post last week, the timing of its appearance is a little awkward considering a blog I follow – For Bloggers, By Bloggers – had a similar post yesterday.

Click HERE to read my post.