Christmas won. Turn the lights on.

Someone complained the other day that the upcoming Freeman Holiday Lights tour something something War on Christmas, and as much as I would like to engage in this Christmas tradition and/or debate in futility, I simply don't have the time this year. Because I'm making a holiday lights map!
Did you know that I've been adding Easter Eggs to it for at least five years? Yes, there have been cats.

Short hot take: The War on Christmas was over before it ever began, and Christmas won, by a landslide. Look around you. You can't escape it even if you wanted to.

WAR OVER.

this just ended every war forever https://t.co/QPeslZ6zse

— Mezrahi, Samir (@samir) December 7, 2015

So let's skip the unnecessary outrage, at least for a bit, and enjoy the holidays. And because you're nice you get to see the map as I work on it. Don't tell my boss.

DFM chat on engagement projects for the holidays

Journalists, Digital First Media peeps, at least one twitter cat and  anyone who wants to are going to be taking part on our Twitter chat Wednesday at noon, Eastern Time, to talk about all things journalism.

Today with are talking about engagement projects for the holidays! Sure, you've got your holiday lights tours, but how are you doing it? What are you using? What other things are you doing to engage with your communities? What tools make things easier to accomplish this?

If you want to chime in, post a comment in the container or a tweet with the hashtag "#dfmchat" so it can automatically appear below.

Thanks for coming!

How to make QR codes work, really

What happened to the QR codes in the Freeman?

Late last year, I began experimenting with quick response (QR) codes in the print edition of the Daily Freeman.


I created a Likify code and placed it at the bottom of the front page. I stayed there for a month. After gathering eight 'Likes' for our Facebook page, I decided to discontinue its run, at least on the front page, as it was using too much coveted 'real estate,' as we say in the biz (because, apparently, we want to be Realtors or something).

That was strike one for the code. I believe that if it was placed somewhere more permanently - like a flier or at distribution boxes around town, it couldn't hurt to have them (since it doesn't cost anything to maintain them, so there's no loss).

What worked against it was the fact that, most likely, you had to download a QR reader and then scan the thing to be send to a page to click the like button and then have to login to your Facebook account on your phone's browser, which probably looks like crap, because it doesn't work with Facebook apps. So instead of making it easier, it seemed to make it even more complicated for early users. My hat's off to those eight we went through it.

If you want to go through this yourself, here's a quick way of doing this.