The power of friendship: In four days, Stella review becomes my most read blog post of all time

    People who love Oxford love good restaurants. My favorable review of Oxford’s newest restaurant, Stella, was published Wednesday morning. By midnight Saturday it had been directly accessed 7,160 times, making it the most read blog post I’ve ever written over the course of almost 10 years.
    I’m able to see how many people view my blog and I couldn’t figure out how or why so many people were reading the Stella review. Then I visited restaurant owner Johnny Kirk’s Facebook page and saw where he had not only posted it, but that it had been shared more than 40 times. It pays to have friends!
    Coming in second, with 7,102 direct page views, is a post I wrote several years ago about PSAT National Merit estimated cutoff scores. There is intense national interest in this, so I got a lot of hits from Google.
    My third most-read blog post of all time tells about Wild Bill Schneller thumbing nose, starting fight at 1938 Arkansas game. I wrote this post a number of years ago about the father of a friend, and each year before the Arkansas game it starts to get hits on its own. I made a point of posting it on Facebook this year, as did several others. It has 4,826 lifetime hits, but more than 3,000 of those are in the past month, again due to the fact that a number of young Bill Schneller's friends shared the blog post.
    Some of these “hits” may be from web “bots,” of course. On the other hand, quite a number of people access my blog directly. I still get one or two visits a day from people who click on the link on the late Tom Freeland’s old blog, NMissCommentor.com. At one time I got 15 or 20 visits a day from Tom’s blog.
    To put all of this in perspective, I sometimes write blog posts that get fewer than 100 direct hits (sometimes I don't post them on Facebook). But the hit numbers are really all over the place, from a few hundred to just over a thousand. Only a few posts have gotten over 2,000 direct page views.
    It’s interesting to see the power of social media. But it’s also interesting to see the power of friendship and the desire of people to share good news. Friendship is powerful stuff!

Commercial Appeal, Apple iPhone conspire to stick it to the customer

    The Commercial Appeal has erected a paywall for those wishing to access its website from mobile phones; and they've gone about it in a particularly nasty way.
    Visit the CA website from your iPhone and you'll encounter a log-in screen with an option to register. If you aren't registered, you'll be prompted to give them a log-in name, password, and lots of personal information, such as your PHONE NUMBER. Then they send you an email to make sure they have a live one.
    Only when you click on the link in your email to activate your account do you learn that you will be expected to pay a substantial fee, either 99 cents a day or so much a month.
    Now I have no objection with the Commercial Appeal charging for its services. It's their product and they can do with it what they will. But I do have a problem with them deceiving me into providing all sorts of personal information and then telling me that I can only get access if I pay. "Oh, and if you don't pay, one of our pesky operators is now going to start calling you regularly on the phone in an attempt to brow-beat you into subscribing to our left-wing rag."
    Obviously I'm peeved with the CA, but I'm also peeved with our dear friends at Apple. The Commercial Appeal site remains free when I access it from my desktop. But my iPhone insists on sending code that tells the CA to please format its site as a mobile site. And so I'm expected to pay.
    In fact, the Safari browser does this with every site. I have never once seen a website that I liked better in the "mobile" format. I end up searching around for the button that allows me to view the full website. This is often time consuming, and I often press the wrong button because many mobile sites won't let me zoom in to make the button large enough to press accurately. The iPhone screen is plenty big enough to see a webpage; all you have to do is zoom in and out.
    Some web pages have no "button" giving access to the full site. For those situations I paid 99 cents and downloaded the Atomic Web Browser, which allows me to specify what code it will send out to the website I'm accessing. Usually this allows me to get the full webpage, but not in the case of the CA. With the Atomic web browser I'm still hitting the mobile phone pay wall even though I've got it set to emulate Internet Explorer 6.
    I'm probably going to be switching away from my iPhone in the near future. But what really annoys me is that iPhone refuses to give us what we want. They know many of us hate web pages formatted for mobile devices, yet they give us no choice in the matter. They know we want to read laying down, but they cause the screen to rotate so we can't. It's an anal-retentive control thing that just drives me nuts.
    I really didn't visit the CA site all that often; perhaps three times a week just after waking up. I certainly don't need to get their news on my iPhone.
    But it annoys me that my iPhone tells strangers that I am using a mobile device. That's my business. If I want the world to believe I'm sitting at a desk, that's the message my iPhone ought to send out. It's my iPhone, I want it to do what I tell it to do.
    Whether it's the Commercial Appeal or whether it's our cell phones, we want products that will serve us. Those who refuse to serve us out of a sense of pettiness will soon find that we aren't customers anymore.
    So Apple iPhone and Commercial Appeal, it's been good knowing you, but I can probably live without you.
    (Galaxy Nexus, I hear you calling!)