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!

'Hidden' Facebook page has treasure trove of old Holly Springs photos, stories

    A couple of years ago Candice Holbrook Logue created a page on Facebook called "Celebrating Growing Up in Holly Springs." This page was quickly joined by more than 200 people who uploaded all sorts of great historical and not-quite-yet historical photos.
    The page was set up as an "event," rather than as a group. So when the event dates passed, so did everyone's link to that page -- and to all of the wonderful old photos and stories it contained.
    I thought the stuff was lost forever, but I found a link to the inactive page with my Facebook Activity Log, and you can go to it by following the link above. It's a shame the page can't be converted to a group, but at least now everyone can have a link to it through this blog.

Despite Facebook liar's claim, I am opposed to the death penalty

    I got defriended by a freenemy on Facebook recently, which is fine. Sometimes people disagree too much to be Facebook friends. He is a member of the George Zimmerman lynch mob; I think Zimmerman is a hero for stepping up to serve his community as a Neighborhood Watch volunteer.
   As part of the defriending process my freenemy posted on Facebook that "not to long ago" I told him I supported the death penalty: "Frank told me not very long ago that executing innocent Americans is just part of the price that should be paid to keep the death penalty."
    This is, of course, a lie that I was unable to counter since we were no longer Facebook friends
    Anyone (all two dozen or so of you) who has followed this blog knows that I oppose the death penalty on the grounds that too many innocent people are in jail. As I've said before, most prosecutors do their job fairly and ethically, but there are some bad apples out there who are in it just to win every case. Think Mike Nifong or Angela Corey.
    My views started to change some years ago, but the Duke Lacrosse case was the absolute turning point. It made be realize that too often unethical prosecutors act on political pressure and not facts. It's lynch mob justice. Since changing my mind on this issue I've also come to realize that even though most people in jail are guilty, we have a good number of innocent people in our jails.
    At any rate, to have someone just lie bothers me. As I told the guy in a message, I have enough views that are outside the mainstream for him to have to gin up false claims against me.
   Oh, and one final note. Most conservatives support the death penalty. I don't. I'm not going to get on a soapbox, but if you do support the death penalty, I hope you will take this opportunity to rethink it. There are simply too many convictions of innocent people for us to exact a punishment that can't be undone.
    Listed below are several posts I've had over the past few years concerning the death penalty. All of them express views that are exactly opposite of those that my former Facebook friend accused me of having.

http://colrebsez.blogspot.com/2011/10/reminder-balko-panel-discussion-to.html

http://colrebsez.blogspot.com/2011/06/texas-gov-perry-may-run-but-not-with-my.html

http://colrebsez.blogspot.com/2011/06/jimmy-robertson-pens-article-about.html

http://www.colrebsez.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-hayne-nightmare-continues.html

http://colrebsez.blogspot.com/2012/11/as-promised-ive-contacted-governor-now.html

http://colrebsez.blogspot.com/2013/01/new-york-times-article-reports-problems.html