Spam, Spam, Who Loves Spam? Johnny Northside Blog Loves Spam In A Very Limited Way, And Other Geeky Technical Revelations After Some Of The Wildest Weeks In This Blog's History...

Facebook photo depicting a scene in North Minneapolis, historical
artifacts uncovered at a big, roomy hundred-year-old mansion bought
for a song, technical reasons for using this photo previously explained,
blog post by John Hoff

This blog posting discusses very geeky things that I'm posting mostly to document the technical evolution of this blog. If that bores you, then I (the very author of this posting) will urge you not to read something boring. I'll have some "baby dad got mad" drama for you in the very next blog post, I promise!  

Now then, this has been a wild couple of weeks. Let's start with viewership numbers...

The previous all-time page view record, which was set on January 6, 2014, was 6,892. Keep in mind those are page views, not individual readers. So if one person came to this blog and clicked on three pages, that's three page views. The January 6 record happened because JNS blog had the name "Devonte Coppage" before any other media entity, which drew a lot of traffic.

January 6 shattered a previous record set over Labor Day Weekend in 2013. Once again, this blog had the name of a murder victim before anybody else; Chukwumah "Terry" Okolie.

But that January 6 record sure didn't stand long. It was shattered on January 27 by viewers interested in a red hot discussion about the "Kobe Diss" music video which allegedly references the shooting death of Tyrone "Ty Crack" Washington at Epic Nightclub. Viewers checking out that blog post on January 27 set a new record of 7,534.

That record stood for no longer than a single day. The very next day, January 28, 2014, discussion on the very same topic and swirling around the very same blog post set a record of 21,075.

Yes. That's roughly three times the previous all time record. Furthermore, with some 249 comments on that thread, these readers not only blew off the top, they blew out the bottom. I didn't even know that after a certain number of comments you have to click on something to see even MORE comments.

January 28 also set a record for most advertising revenue collected in a single day. I won't say how much that is and I'm sure not getting rich off it. But it was another record.

Viewership numbers didn't settle down after that. Numbers that WOULD HAVE BEEN all time records in the old days continued after the astonishing events of January 28.

January 29, page views were 13,085

January 30....9,192

January 31....8,018

February 1...7,531

February 2....7,179

The numbers do seem to be settling toward their old pattern. But even as of yesterday it was 4,601. Normally this blog gets "three thousand and something" page views daily.

Because of those numbers, another record was shattered: Monthly page views. In January of 2014, this blog had 137,114 page views.

There are some "tricks" this blog has to driving traffic. Publishing the monthly jail roster drives traffic. Every new meta-tag with a name or address pulls traffic from search engines. But all the time I'm asking myself: How can I have a bigger impact? How can I attract more viewers? I mean, BESIDES digging up fresh and exclusive dirt on Justin Bieber, which I'm not in a position to do.

Not YET.

Well, I'm going to keep throwing spaghetti-for-Google-bots at the wall and seeing what they like to eat. Today I was in my spam folder (I delete about 80 spam comments a day, most of which thankfully end up in the spam folder so I can just mass delete) and I was looking at some Chinese spam and I thought...

What a shame I have to delete those Chinese characters. There are no Chinese characters anywhere on my blog. If I published that spam, would I start to get more traffic from China? But hell if I'm going to publish SPAM because it will drag down conversations on the threads...

(Those italics are me talking to myself, as opposed to me writing about myself talking about myself)

What if this is actually some Chinese dissident trying to say something important? I have no idea because it's in CHINESE and I'm just going to delete it. What a shame I can't somehow get the benefit those Chinese characters would give my blog in the search engines.

How do the spammers pick the blog posts they comment upon anyway? Nobody else has commented upon this particular blog post in YEARS and yet here's a spammer trying to say something about, what? Electricity theft in the EcoVillage in 2008! Hell, I was there and *I* almost forgot about it.

What a shame I can't get the benefits of publishing Chinese, Russian, Hungarian and (oh, yes!) Viagraian spam without the associated drag upon blog commentary. Geez, if I could just keep all the spammers on ONE blog post and somehow BUILD A WALL AROUND IT.

(A thoughtful silence in my head)

Wait a second...!!!!

OK, so here's the deal. Spammers are allowed to post their spam on this thread. This ONE THREAD. I'll even make it easy for you to find by putting something on my sidebar. Tell all your spammy friends, why don't you?

Except for adult content. Your icky spam is still forbidden.

And, by the way, is "midget" even a politically correct term? Isn't it "little people" or something like that? I'm just saying.

I reserve the right to utterly go back upon this new policy any time I feel like it, and not even bother to make an announcement, if this experiment does weird stuff to my search engine results or...well, FOR ANY REASON.

Now, if you'll excuse me...

I have some "baby dad got mad" drama to write about.

Spam amongst yourselves!

Oh, P.S. In the past JNS blog has stated I have no ability to track the ISP's of people leaving comments. I now make no statement one way or another about whether I can track ISP's.