Can an online petition save Garden Station?

Folks in Dayton are upset about the possible demise of Garden Station, a community garden on abandoned land by the railroad bridge on Wayne Avenue between Third and Fifth Streets. That land, owned by the City of Dayton, was leased to the group that runs Garden Station for $10/year through 2015 with an option to extend through 2020, but with the caveat that the city could “terminate the lease in the event that the property is needed for a future development project.” Now there are reports that the city may have a developer for the land, and people are clamouring to save Garden Station.

One way in which Garden Station supporters are organizing is, of course, via their Facebook group, which currently has 2,983 “likes.” For an idea of how significant 2,983 FB likes are, read my posts about Occupy Dayton and its Facebook page, in which I compare Occupy Dayton’s 5,000+ “likes” with the population of Montgomery County.

Another way Garden Station is gathering support is through a petition on Change.org.

Some Change.org petitions have been successful. NPR has a story about successful petitions to get Bank of America not to charge a $5 monthly debit card fee and to get felony charges against an autistic child who slapped her teacher dropped. The Bank of America petition had 306,892 signatures. The petition in support of the autistic student had only 1,195 signatures.

Garden Station’s petition has just over 1,800 signatures. That doesn’t seem like a lot, especially when you consider that 11,420 people live in ZIP code 45402 (which contains Garden Station) and 15,339 people live in ZIP code 45410 (close to Garden Station). Over five times as many people (9,985) voted in this May’s mayoral primary as have signed the Garden Station petition, and that election has a really small turnout (almost 18,000 people voted for each of the two city commission winners in the November 2011 election).

I signed the Garden Station petition shortly after it was started on June 27th and have since been keeping an eye on it. It took four days to get 1,000 signatures. This past Sunday, six days after breaking 1,000, the petition had only just over 1,300 signatures, which I noted in a comment on David Esrati’s blog post about Garden Station, where I said it looked like the petition had lost momentum. Coincidentally also on Sunday there was a post on the Garden Station FB page urging Update 7/13/2013: Well they didn’t make their goal of 2,000 by the 7/10 commission meeting but did finally get to 2,000 today.

Update 7/26/2013: Okay, 13 days after my last update, this petition now has exactly 2,100 signatures. Looks like it’s petered out.

Update 8/5/2013: 10 days after my last update the petition is up to 2,112 signatures. 12 signatures in 10 days. I’d say the petition’s done.

Update 8/19/2013: 2,119 signatures, about 1 signature every other day. The Garden Station Facebook page is up to 3,073 “likes” (up from 2,983 when I wrote this post)—people can click a “like” button but can’t be bothered to sign an electronic petition, I guess. that people continue to share the petition in order to get 2,000 signatures by tomorrow’s city commission meeting, and sure enough in the past two days they’ve gotten 500 more signatures, so they might make that goal.

Will that be enough, though? I wouldn’t have thought so before doing a little research in preparing this blog post and learning about the 1,195-person petition in support of the autistic student. In my mind 2,000 signatures—many of which are from people who don’t even live in the city of Dayton (one of today’s signers is from Suwanee, GA)—wouldn’t be enough to sway the city commission.

Something I do find interesting about the petition is that not even all of the 2,983 people who “like” Garden Station on Facebook have signed the petition. It’s one thing not to be able to get a majority of the folks who voted in the last primary to sign the petition or a majority of the folks who live in Garden Station’s ZIP code to sign the petition, but to not be able to get all of Garden Station’s Facebook fans to sign the petition is kind of sad.

You might think that signing the petition would be the least you can do, but no, actually clicking “like” on Facebook is the least you can do without doing nothing; signing a petition requires typing your name and contact info. Right now there are about 1,100 people who like Garden Station enough to click a button on Facebook but not enough to sign a petition.

Why did I sign the petition if I didn’t think it would do any good? Partly because a friend asked me to and I thought it was the least I could do. I wasn’t motivated to write a letter or make a phone call, but signing a petition I was willing to do. I’m not against Garden Station (although I’ve never stopped by). I think the city has enough vacant land that they could give this small parcel to the Garden Station group instead of evicting them.

Thinking about the Garden Station petition made me think of another petition I signed this year, the petition asking Google not to kill Google Reader, a petition that, believe it or not, people are still signing. I looked today and 5 more people have signed, bringing the total to 153,814 signatures. Talk about tilting at windmills! I didn’t have much hope that Google would change their minds about Reader when I signed the petition when I first found out about it, but come on, why would anyone sign the Google Reader petition now? There’s no way Google, having carried out their promise to kill Reader, will bring it back now. Signing a petition may be about the least you can do, but signing the Google Reader petition now is just stupid.

As for Garden Station and its petition, I don’t know what the outcome will be. I won’t be surprised if a city that lets decades-old trees on its downtown levees be chopped down also decides to kill a community garden in the hopes that a developer will make better use of the land.

However, I also think that the Garden Station supporters, although comparatively small in number, have some motivated folks in their midst—after all, unlike the Occupy Dayton folks, the Garden Station people managed to get a lease on some land and to develop a garden with regular events and a functional website and a Facebook presence. Somehow, if the online petition fails to impress Dayton’s city commission, I think the Garden Station folks will be back with additional activism.

An anti-Obama Dodge driver

The owner of this black Dodge 4x4 truck, Ohio license DK35RC, would very much like you to know of his disapproval of President Obama:

Proven SEO Stategy and SEO Results

From: Jane R. Villarreal info@janervillarreal.mygbiz.com
To: David Lauri david@davidlauri.com
Date: Wednesday, July 24, 2013 5:02 AM
Subject: Proven SEO Strategy and SEO Results
Hi,

While doing some research on your industry I have come across your site www.davidlauri.com and decided to run an analysis on your competition and your current search rankings. I’m very impressed with your company, but there are some real opportunities for growth that you currently are missing.

Would you like to understand several strategies used for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which have lead to better traffic, driving higher sales, increased leads and more revenue! We are rated as one of the top SEO and digital marketing companies in the US. In 20 minutes I can show you how to fuel your brand and generate more revenue from search engines and social networks.

All I’d like to do is follow up this with a quick phone call and see if we can arrange a time where you can see how this works online in real time. Can I call you this week to discuss your campaign?

Thank you
Best regards,
Jane R. Villarreal
2719 Romrog Way, Grand Island, NE 68801.

I get shit like this all the time, both regarding my personal website and my employer’s website. Someone must actually pay for SEO services from “top SEO companies” who send out SPAM like this, because these SPAMmers wouldn’t do this if they didn’t earn any money from it, but really, how stupid are the people who respond to these emails?

As you already know, davidlauri.com is not the website for a business. I don’t have any competitors. And my website is already the top search result for my name.

But these SEO SPAMmers don’t care. They just know I have a website and that david@davidlauri.com is my email address. (Yes, yes, if I really cared, I’d try to hide my email address, but it’s been out there a long time, and Gmail has pretty good SPAM filters, though one or two SEO SPAMs do get through every day or so.)

A funny thing about SEO SPAM is that for my employer the SPAM is addressed to our “info@xxx.xxx” address. If these SEO SPAMmers cared about any pretense, they’d at least look at our staff listing to figure out who’s responsible for our website (hint: me).

Earlier this week I found out that SEO SPAMmers also try to pitch their services via cold calls. Our receptionist let such a call get through to me. Usually she’s pretty good about screening calls, but this time someone asked to talk to whoever was in charge of our website, and our receptionist just transfered the call. An Indian woman launches into her spiel after first asking if I was in charge of our website. I said no thanks and hung up on her.

Here’s the deal: If you can’t find out from the info on our website who is in charge of our website, you’ve no business talking to the person in charge of our website.

Besides which anyone who pays for SEO services is stupid.

P/R via good works

Okay, since I was rather negative about David Esrati’s chances of winning a city commission seat after he squeaked by in the May runoff, it’s only fair that I say something now that Esrati’s done something I like.

What’s Esrati just done that I like? He’s launched a fun campaign around cleaning up Dayton’s basketball courts. He got barber shops and beauty salons around town to sponsor nets, and then he went out to do the work of cleaning up basketball courts and putting up new nets, capturing it all on video.

You can see the video below:

I’m still not convinced that Esrati can move up from fourth out of five commission candidates in May to one of the two who will win seats in November, but when Esrati does positive campaigning, showing what he can do instead of focusing on others’ negatives, it makes me like him more. That can’t hurt.

I’m even more dubious about “apologies” from ex-gay ministers

“Apologies” from staffers of Exodus as it “shuts down” seem to be all the rage now.

Last month, the president of Exodus, Alan Chambers, announced the closing of that ex-gay ministry and issued an apology of sorts. However, Chambers was very clear that he was not “apologiz[ing] for [his] deeply held biblical beliefs about the boundaries [he] see[s] in scripture surrounding sex” or “for [his] beliefs about marriage.” My response to Chambers’ apology was profane.

Randy Thomas of Exodus, another ex-gay issuing a vague apology to teh gayz This month Exodus’s executive vice president, Randy Thomas, released “An Open Apology to the Gay Community.” Thomas’s apology is interesting both for what it says and what it does not say.

Thomas explicitly apologizes “for idealizing and reinforcing the institutional groupthink of Exodus,” “for remaining publicly silent about the hurt caused by some of Exodus’ leaders and actions,” and “for [his] inexperienced participation in public policy.”

Unlike Chambers, Thomas does not make any specific exclusions in his apology. He doesn’t say that he cannot apologize for his Biblical beliefs or for his views on marriage.

Another difference between Thomas’s apology and Chambers’ is that Chambers’ apology on the Exodus website did not allow for comments while Thomas’s apology on his own website did allow for comments. And Thomas got plenty of comments, so many that today he announced that comments on his blog would be moderated.

I was someone who commented on Thomas’s apology post. Unlike with my own blog post in response to Alan Chambers (in which I told Chambers to just shut the fuck up!), I was not profane in my comment on Thomas’s blog. I simply said that I didn’t put much value in Chambers’ apology given his specific disclaimers on his views of marriage and what the Bible says about sex and given that Chambers seemed not to be closing Exodus so much as rebranding it by opening the new Reduce Fear ministry.

Do apologizing ex-gays now acknowledge a right to civil marriage for queers who don’t want to be ex-gay? I also asked Thomas what his current views on homosexuality were. Does he, for example, acknowledge the right of those who do not think homosexuality is sinful to have full rights to civil marriage equality?

I would give you a link to my comment on Thomas’s blog except that I cannot. Thomas has deleted my comment.

He’s also deleted other people’s comments. Thomas deleted a comment made by David Philip Norris, who emailed me after I commented on Thomas’s blog to thank me for what I said there. Another comment Thomas deleted was one that called his apology a P/R move; Thomas had even replied to this comment to say that no, it wasn’t a P/R move, but Thomas has deleted his own reply now too.

That Thomas is deleting challenging comments on his blog was a bit surprising to me, although it wasn’t to Norris, who told me that Thomas has been known to delete any comments that are negative or aren’t wildly supportive.

Deleting such comments does go against the dialogue that Thomas says he welcomes. In his announcement of his new comment policy, Thomas says, “I love comments and hearing from you. Especially if it is honest, on topic (or somehow related to the topic blogged about), and doesn’t attack other people.” Right above his comment form, Thomas says, “Please note: I love comments! I prefer civil discussion but don’t mind a bit of ‘rowdy’ dialog as long as it is honest.”

Randy Thomas “loves comments”
(except the ones he deletes) Thomas has every right to do what he wants on his own blog. I don’t even allow comments on my site.

However, his saying one thing (“I love comments!”) while doing another (deleting comments that aren’t profane attacks) makes me even more dubious about the validity of this supposed apology.

Sorry, Randy, but I would have thought more of you if you had left critical questions up on your blog. If you’d never even allowed for comments, I wouldn’t have had such a negative view of you as I do now that I know you delete critical comments.

The really fun thing is that you can delete comments on your own blog but you can’t control the Internet. I might not even have blogged about your stupid fake apology at all, but since you’ve deleted my comment on your blog, I’ve written this post here on my own blog. Norris also wrote something on his blog.

Good luck trying to shut the whole Internet up, Randy.

tl;dr — Shut the fuck up, Randy Thomas! And frankly I think that unless you shut the fuck up yourself and go work in a homeless shelter for as long as you’ve worked to warp the minds of queers afraid of what your God thinks, your apology really is, as Norris says, a joke.

Cleaning up a cluttered web page

Today’s post falls under both the tag Web design (bad) and the tag Computer tips. I’m going to show you a web site that has rather cluttered pages and tell you what you can do to fix it.