GMC in Europe 2008

This is the tour Weblog (”blog”) for the Greater Middletown Chorale’s 2008 concert tour of Vienna, Salzburg, and Prague. Oh, my!

I’m your host, Matt McCaffrey. Most of you will recognize me as that quiet guy who sits in the back of the tenor section along with Steve, Rich, Colin, Jim, Margie, the two Johns, and other fine singers.

Okay, I’m not quiet. But I do like to sing, and I’m very excited about our upcoming tour.

This blog is for all of us—not just the people on tour, but the whole Chorale. As friends and fellow singers, the touring group very much wants to share the experience with the rest of us. We hope for a lot of comments and posts from both sides of the Atlantic over the life of the tour.

What you can do here

A blog is a living Web site. There will be a few “set” pages with background information here, but the heart of a blog is community participation.On this site, as a registered user, you can:

• Make journal entries Each entry, called a “post,” is like a short dispatch from you. When you have finished the entry, you Publish it. That makes it visible to the other readers of our blog. Like this story, it will have a headline, the time and date it was published, who wrote it, and offer an opportunity for people to leave comments on it.
• Post photos If you have a favorite photo from your day that you want to share with the readers, it is possible to upload that and make it part of your story.
• Leave comments Any Chorale member who is a registered user can leave comments on a story. This is a great way to encourage your fellow Chorale members to keep on posting!

Ground rules for blogging

There are a very few ground rules and tips for this blog.

1. Please be civil and polite We know each other, so this should go without saying…but the Web has a way of putting some distance between ourselves and our comments.
2. Keep your posts a reasonable length That’s more for the sake of your readers. It’s better to mention one or two sights than to offer a minute-by-minute account of your day!
3. Keep it conversational Imagine if you had your friend on a cell phone for just ten minutes while you described the highlight of your afternoon. How would you tell her what you were seeing?

We’re all going to grow through this tour, and I’m very happy that this blog will be part of the adventure for us. Please write to me if you need some help with getting started. I’m here to help!

—Matt McCaffrey

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Welcome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.