Update: Have you received your T-shirt and would like to add it to our map? You can find the Our T-shirt World Map at this address: Hammock.com/tshirt.
This year, our annual tradition of giving friends a Hammock T-shirt is going global. For the past 16 years, we’ve shared an annual edition T-shirt with lots of people we work with throughout the year. They’re often packaged in fun, creative ways. As we began to consider a new T-shirt (to go along with a new website and some new spin on our logo and graphics), we decided to make our T-shirt sharing a little more interactive.
So this year, there’s a little string attached to our T-shirt sharing. We’re asking the recipients to email or upload (or send us a snapshot via snail mail) a photo of themselves wearing the T-shirt, wherever they happen to be. With those photos, we will create a world map that shows how our T-shirts pop up around the world.
More importantly, we want this year’s T-shirt to help encourage another type of global connection. Since we’re all about sharing stories here at Hammock, we decided to use our T-shirt tradition to support some children who are ready to tell their own. For every five photos added to the map, we’re donating one laptop to the educational efforts of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation in developing countries. (Up to 20 laptops!)
No, we didn’t play “Pin the Tail on Rudolph” this morning at the Hammock headquarters overlooking West End Avenue — even though Ben really wanted to — just a simple game of Word Association. I decided it might be fun if I grabbed my Big Chief tablet and No. 2 pencil to make my way around the office for some fun with words. When I simply said “holiday tradition” to my fellow Hammoratians (or are we Hammockites?), this is what I heard in return:
Laura Creekmore: Baking. Just like every other holiday, Christmas is about food at my house. Last night, my daughter and I made cookies for her teachers. Before the year is out, we’ll have made more cookies, fudge, caramel and any number of other treats. We have a number of recipes we only make during the holidays — many of them a carryover from my own childhood — and it wouldn’t be Christmas without them!
Jamie Roberts: Watching “Christmas Vacation” or “A Christmas Story” together. Attending Christmas Eve services in my hometown. Being jumped awake by my niece and nephew on Christmas morning.
Bill Hudgins: For a number of years, we have been part of the local Rotary Club’s shopping for kids — about 120 kids plus Rotarians and spouses, Interact members (high school Rotary) and others invade Wal-Mart at 6 a.m. My wife, who is the Rotarian, takes photos and I wrap presents. Christmas Eve church service. Hanging icicle lights on the fence in front of our house. Fruitcake.
Lena Basha: My mom and I would ride around the night before Christmas and look at all of the lights, and when we’d see some, I would exclaim “Shine on! I saw it first!” I’m not sure what that meant. Still don’t. But I still say it!
Barbara Mathieson: John and I watch “Christmas Vacation” every year. It’s one movie that always cracks me up. We don’t do the gift-thing anymore. On Christmas Eve, we go out for a nice dinner. On Christmas Day, we have a midday meal with his parents.
Ben Stewart: On Christmas Eve, my father’s side of the family gets together to exchange gifts, joke around and play games. It’s the one time of the year where everyone is present for the party. Usually new-comers to the family get broken into the “craziness.”
Megan Goodchild: For the last 10 years I’ve lived 500 miles away from my family and have rarely made it back home for the holidays, so I’ve been adopted by my friends’ families around the holidays. For the last several years I’ve spent Christmas with my boyfriend’s family, who have always welcomed me as one of their own. They do it up right, too — lots of ham, turkey and adult beverages! Then after dinner we get together with friends and usually watch a movie or go bowling.
Patrick Ragsdale: Eating Christmas dinner at a gas station. We did this for over 10 years since we always drove back to Nashville from Indianapolis on Christmas day.
Lynne Boyer: Christmas Eve, one of the youngest in our family reads “Twas the Night Before Christmas” for the family. We’ll see if my son, 6 years old, is up for the challenge this year. Christmas brunch with my family, of course followed a few hours later by Christmas dinner.
Lisa Ask: Golden Rod Eggs. My great-grandmother invented this brunch item. She was a great storyteller who lived during the depression. She made a cream sauce out of the egg whites and poured the whites over an English muffin. Then she’d crumble the egg yolks (the Golden Rod) over the top. She made this very inexpensive meal for Easter and Christmas, but told the family that it was food that royalty ate to make it more special. Golden Rod Eggs are still a staple at Christmas. Now, however, we have ham, tomatoes and other delicious fixin’s.
Rex Hammock: Each year, my family has breakfast on Christmas Eve at Nashville’s Pancake Pantry restaurant. This got started back when our children were very young and Christmas Eve meant lots of stressful last-minute errands and massive projects related to those three words parents of young children always dread: “Some assembly necessary.” We discovered it was good to attack the day fortified with a hearty breakfast. And the tradition was established. Somehow, our Christmas Eves have mellowed a bit (teenage recipients of gifts can assemble things themselves) as post-breakfast activities now usually include naps. (Bonus tradition: Blogging about Christmas Eve breakfast at the Pancake Pantry: 2004, 2006.
For me, it’s all about the pajamas. I participate in adopting a family every year and there is always good food. But for as long as I can remember — it’s got to be the longest-standing tradition for our family — my sweet Gran would give us a single present to unwrap on Christmas Eve. It was and is always pajamas. A couple of years ago, mine had monkeys on them. In the past they’ve been spotted like a leopard, plaid like Christmas wrapping paper, or solid blue in a shade she thought brought out the color of my eyes. No matter what the pajamas looked like, we all hit the tree Christmas morning dressed in our finest newest pajamas, ready for whatever the day would bring.
What about you? Are there movies, food or fuzzy slippers that the holiday season just wouldn’t be the same without?
(“How’d we do that?” is a continuing series that examines the creative ways we do things at Hammock. Sometimes, it’s hard to make things look easy. Warning: Don’t try these at home — call us.)
By Rex Hammock & Patrick Ragsdale
Back in early 2007, when we started talking about creating a new Hammock.com, we determined that it should be a laboratory in which we would test various approaches and technologies and demonstrate the results — especially approaches to web development about which we are enthusiastic, but maybe not quite ready to recommend to our clients. That’s one of the reasons you will — if you look closely — see us constantly adding and removing things from the site.
As part of our laboratory approach, we decided to do two things:
We’ll be sharing several examples of such approaches in future “How’d we do that?” pieces, but it seemed obvious to us that this first look behind the curtain should be at how we’re using the photo sharing service Flickr on Hammock.com — and on Flickr.com/hammock — in a wide variety of ways that help us tell our story in a creative, efficient and, excuse our boasting, extremely cool way.
First, it might help to explain Flickr and why we chose that service to use in our experimentation. Now owned by Yahoo!, Flickr started out as features that were part of a multi-player online game. It may look like a place simply to post photos, but the service’s DNA is all about community and sharing and story-telling and discovery. We started using Flickr early-on. Blogging pioneer Rex was enthusiastic about the blog-like approach the service used to re-think how a photo-sharing service can work (reverse chronological display, commenting and RSS feeds were conventions Flickr launched with). The photos Rex hosted on his Flickr account — like, for instance, his photos of Nashville Greenways — have been viewed over 200,000 times.
At the same time, Patrick became a student of the way in which Flickr allows its data to be accessed and displayed in a wide variety of ways utilizing RSS feeds and (sorry for the geeky acronym) third-party developers who use Flickr’s API. For those not schooled in web-tech alphabet soup, that simply means Flickr allows its users to pull data (i.e., the photos stored there) and to display that data on other websites. The more open a service’s API, the more creative a web developer can be with data from that service. And Flickr is a good service when it comes to allowing a developer to build on its API.
Here are just some of the ways we’re using Flickr:
We’re hosting many of the photos seen on Hammock.com at Flickr.com/hammock. Typically, a web developer places images in a file, hidden away on a server somewhere. We decided that we wanted to use Flickr.com as another platform to show off our work and people and so, when you visit Flickr.com, you can browse around and get a good look at hundreds — and soon to be thousands — of images. In almost every instance, those images are also used here as part of our galleries or, well, almost anywhere you click.
We not only pull photos from Flickr, we pull text: We decided to use Flickr.com as a content management system (CMS) to handle the names and captions that accompany photos on Hammock.com. In other words, rather than entering text twice — on Flickr.com/hammock and on Hammock.com — any person on our staff can name and describe a digital photo, then upload it to Flickr. By utilizing Flickr’s APIs, we then display all of that information whenever a user clicks on a photo. Also, by thinking of Flickr as an easy-to-use content management system, we’ve now got a way that everyone — and we mean everyone — who works at Hammock can manage photos that appear on their people page. No one has to give any photos to a webmaster (what’s that, anyway?) to post or know anything about posting to their page. By just dropping a photo in a set on Flickr, their photo automagically appears on Hammock.com.
We decided not to reinvent the slideshow wheel. On the last iteration of Hammock.com, we had areas where a user could view our work as a Flash slideshow. We’re not big fans of having Flash all over a website, but we know, used correctly, it is a great story-telling tool. Because we were in the mindset of utilizing the tools already baked into Flickr, when the topic turned to displaying our work in Flash, we decided immediately to skip building out that feature ourselves.
There are a few other Flickr tricks sprinkled throughout Hammock.com — and we’re adding more all the time. In the future, we’ll use another “How’d they do that?” to review them.
For now, just smile and say cheese.
The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution has published a member magazine in several different forms since July 1892. At that time, DAR had only recently started its work as a patriotic women’s organization, dedicated to its three guiding tenets of education, historic preservation and patriotism. As an internal publication, the magazine was sufficient for the membership, but generally did not reach out to communities not yet touched by the DAR.
In 2001, some 109 years after its inception, the DAR magazine underwent a radical transformation. The magazine was split into two separate publications: Daughters newsletter, which focused on NSDAR news and notices; and American Spirit, a 52-page glossy, bimonthly full-color publication.
Hammock Inc. was hired to produce American Spirit in July 2002. One of the first things Hammock’s editorial and design team did was try to define the audience and the mission for the magazine. One thing we all agreed on—American Spirit should be the kind of magazine you’d want to leave out on your coffee table. The design should rival any commercial magazine, the articles should be intriguing and informative, and the writing should be fresh and vibrant.
Since the revamped American Spirit was intended to reach out to potential new members, we had to make some assumptions there—concluding that this group would likely be younger, with careers or families or both, and were probably accustomed to brightly designed magazines with a variety of topics.
Originally, American Spirit’s editorial lineup called for articles on women’s health and financial affairs. The more we talked with members, the more we felt readers could, and should, go elsewhere for that information, to magazines that exist to focus on those topics. American Spirit should focus instead on the National Society’s core concerns: history—especially women in history—genealogy, education, patriotism and preservation.
More than focusing on the details of long-ago battles, the magazine strives to tell the American story through the women and men who lived this history. Beyond Revolutionary history, American Spirit shows the human side of American life from Colonial times to the present, with articles ranging from features on historic homes, collectibles and Americana to regular articles on historic travel, timeless crafts and preserving family history.
In the past few years, we have changed the editorial mix in response to reader feedback. Under the current DAR National Magazine Chair, Denise Doring VanBuren, we have increased the focus on DAR goals of education, patriotism and preservation. We have also added more articles about individual members and the DAR itself, including departments such as:
And Hammock is always searching for even more creative ways to reach the dedicated members of the DAR, and spotlight the myriad ways they enhance their communities and their country.
Lena came to Hammock in 2003 from, well, right down the street at Vanderbilt University, where she graduated with a degree in Human and Organizational Development. We don’t really know what that means, but it probably taught her how to juggle multiple tasks and different kinds of assignments, because that’s one of her strengths.
On a typical day, Lena’s managing MyBusiness, proofing an NFIB state publication for the umpteenth time and figuring out what historically significant dates to highlight in the next issue of American Spirit. She also manages the production process for Pharmaceutical Commerce, a monthly newsletter that covers the commercial side of the pharmaceutical industry.
Lena hails from the small eastern Kentucky town of Paintsville (the birthplace of country greats Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gayle!), so it’s no wonder that she ended up in Music City USA. When she’s not at her desk, Lena enjoys honky-tonkying, training for half-marathons, reading People magazine and watching reality TV (what writer’s strike?).
She also aspires to be a hip-hop dancer, but let’s face it: Hip-hop dancing is inconsistent with writing about small business and early American history.
Editor Bill Hudgins never met a pun he didn’t like—or try to top. We long since gave up trying to fight his wordplay and instead have channeled it into headline and caption writing. Besides double-entendres, his brain is crammed with arcane facts, aphorisms, song lyrics and anecdotes, bolstered by a reporter’s and avid crossword addict’s skills in using online search engines to supplement the gaps.
Bill graduated from Columbia University with an English degree in 1972, a tumultuous time to be in college (that he now ruefully admits is studied as “history”). He attended The College of Communications Graduate School at UT-Knoxville and reported and edited on newspapers in Alabama and Tennessee until 1987, when he jumped to public relations at a firm then headed by Hammock Inc.’s founder, Rex Hammock.
The PR firm offered what is now known as custom publishing, and Bill worked on several projects there, including magazines about hunting and fishing, trucking and senior citizens. He segued from there to Hammock in late 1993, he has edited magazines about long-haul trucking, American history, personal watercraft and the Marine Corps. He also serves as the office curmudgeon, figuring Andy Rooney’s job will open up someday, and part-time Luddite, preferring power tools over PowerBooks.
When not juggling magazine projects, Bill “relaxes” by writing columns for several trucking magazines—his experience at Hammock left a lifelong passion for chrome, steel and diesel. At the other end of the spectrum, he anticipated the craze over “Dancing With the Stars” by taking up ballroom dancing just before the show began airing in the United States. He’s been on the DL list after some foot surgery, but considering a comeback
He and his wife Wilda like to travel, and not having kids, it’s easy for them to do so. After a trip to the Soviet Union in 1987, he learned to speak Russian so they could get around better on two later trips. They live on what he calls a micro-mini-farm in Gallatin, a town near Nashville, where they board abused horses and donkeys rescued by a local organization. He also is one of three members of the town’s Beer Licensing Board, and was involved in a successful effort to raise funds to build a new library in Gallatin.
Jamie Roberts is a member of Hammock’s powerful Alabama mafia, and she still loyally cheers for the Crimson Tide. She loves planes, trains and automobiles—actually any mode of transportation (including fire trucks, but that’s another story) that gets her somewhere fun and exotic. If she weren’t Hammock’s editorial director, she’d want to be a professional travel and tour operator based somewhere like London or Paris or a Greek island … the future locations of Hammock International.
Until those locations open, however, she has a great time in Nashville editing American Spirit for the DAR, MyBusiness for NFIB and special
publications for the National Guard. She previously served as executive editor for the Professional Convention Management Association and Convene, a magazine for the hospitality and meetings industry.
She earned her bachelor’s degree from Birmingham-Southern College and her master’s from Florida State University (Go Seminoles!), where she taught writing and English literature at campuses in Tallahassee and London. She lived in New York for three years, enough time to grow addicted to Zabar’s coffee and pizza from Grimaldi’s.
In her free time, she enjoys talking snobbishly about film and making her way through the AFI Top 100, reading the latest fiction for her book club and volunteering with St. Luke’s Community House and Hands on Nashville. Oh, and either dreaming about a trip, stamping her passport or obnoxiously dropping names of her favorite travel destinations.
Megan’s dreams of being a professional video-game tester were dashed after developing a severe case of Nintendo Thumb at age 12, leaving her no choice but to focus on another talent: writing. She likes to believe that besides a way with words, her passion for technology (and an obsession with Apple computers) helped her land her gig at Hammock Inc., where she focuses primarily on digital media endeavors.
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Megan’s way of rebelling was listening to country music, though this came to a quick halt once she actually moved to the Nashville area for college. Never one to put all her eggs in one basket, Megan received a bachelor’s degree in both Journalism and Spanish from Middle Tennessee State University. After working in health-care marketing and as a Spanish interpreter, Megan joined the Hammock team as a writer in December 2005.
When she’s not getting her colleagues hopped up on candy, Megan can be found keeping her inner geek alive by challenging friends to a game of Trivial Pursuit, researching the latest Apple rumors or playing video games on one of her six gaming systems. And no, she has never called in sick because of a Super Mario-related injury.
Until 2003, the American Watercraft Association published a magazine known as Jet Sports. Professional watercraft racing enjoyed a boom in the early 1990s, and racing provided much of the content. By the end of the 1990s and early into the 21st century, racing had considerably diminished. PWC had come under attack from environmentalists, and the downturn in the national economy exacerbated a drop in sales.
AWA asked Hammock Inc. to redesign and relaunch the magazine from stem to stern. The design was dated, the photography and production values mediocre, and the magazine said little about recreational riding.
This sport is about fun, Hammock’s writers and designers said, so let’s make it look like that. Also, PWC can be used for touring, fishing, snorkeling and diving, even scientific research (and delivering pizzas, we learned later), so let’s talk about that. And let’s give it a new name that embraces all these things—why not just call it Ride PWC Magazine? It’s a noun and a verb, and a command as well—go out and Ride!
Drawing upon surfing and boating magazines for inspiration, yet recognizing that our readers ranged from 20-somethings to 80-plus, we designed a publication that looks like it’s at full throttle there on the coffee table, with clean lines and a shipshape distinction between departments, features and association news.
We applied nautical terms, such as “Waterfront,” “ShipShape” and “Wavelength,” to departments and gave them a distinctive black frame to set them off from features. Editorially, we mapped out five primary uses for PWC—family togetherness, performance, racing, escape and utility—and through the course of a year, we plot coverage of each of those areas.
Since relaunching the magazine, we have added a section for first responders who use PWC in rescues. We’ve also added profiles of corporate and dealer sponsors of AWA, whose support enables the association to continue its mission.
Summertime just isnﾕt complete without a road trip. Nothing spells freedom like driving down a winding country road on a sunny afternoon with your windows rolled down, your radio cranked up and a cool breeze and clear sky ahead. In the July/August issue of American Spirit, the magazine we publish for the Daughters of the American Revolution, our resident road warrior Bill Hudgins reveals that early Americans, too, shared this fascination with the open road. Our story, ﾒAmericaﾕs Main Street: The Historic National Road,ﾓ explores the history behind the nationﾕs first federally funded Interstate highway and explains how its construction paved the way for the America that we know today.
We hit the road to Indianapolis in our Spirited Adventures feature for a stop at Conner Prairie, a living history museum where interpreters make it their mission to transport visitors back to Indiana pioneer life, circa 1836. If youﾕre hankering for historical travel with dose of authenticity, youﾕll want to visit. We also check out a series of upcoming cross-country events celebrating the 250th birthday of the Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman who endeared himself to early Americans during the Revolution by helping them secure their independence.
On an adventure of another kind, we track advances in online genealogy, which allow you to trace your roots from the comfort of your computerﾑwithout traveling to out-of-the-way courthouses and digging through musty stacks of documents. Discover how these sites make it easy to research your lineage and connect with long-lost relatives without ever leaving home.
Wherever the road takes you this summerﾑwhether it be one of the beaches along our nationﾕs coasts, a historic hideaway or a spot for family funﾑhappy travels!