The first year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News: Part 2 of several

In Part 1 of the retrospective of the first year of this blog, I promised to "continue with the second most popular of the top twelve posts tomorrow." True to form, tomorrow stretched out for several days. In fact, I took so long that the subject of the next post showed up in comments.

kudos to you on all the hard work of posting- i thought i'd raise your comment stats by saying hello and checking in! sad to see that the city of troy beat the city of oak park on your blog, but glad to see you have such a strong (and well-deserved) following! -julie

I responded enthusiastically.

Julie! Thanks for stopping by and commenting. It turns out that Oak Park is number two on the list when it comes to most popular posts. My retrospective on blogging about you and your problems with Oak Park will be the next in the series.

As I promised Julie, here is Part 2.






2. June 30, 2011: Oak Park Woman plants vegetable garden; city objects with 594 page views and 2 comments.

Julie Bass, her garden, and the city of Oak Park's War on Veggies played an instrumental role in growing the readership of this blog. I posted the story on June 30th. I then decided to take advantage of July's theme for NaBloPoMo of Swim, which included the suggestion of writing about "bloggers swimming against the stream." Julie definitely counted.

Two updates later, I noticed that my readership was way up and it was due to this post. Here's what I wrote on July 10th.

Welcome all of you coming over here from Oak Park Hates Veggies! You've made this entry the most popular post of the week for two weeks running as well as making it the fourth most popular of all time with a bullet. Thank you!

That was only a few hours ago. The post is now the third most viewed in the history of this blog, in addition to being the most popular of the current day, week, and month. I wasn' t kidding when I said it was "fourth...with a bullet." How did this happen?

Simple, Drudge happened. A couple of days ago, Matt Drudge placed a link to The Agitator's post on his front page with the headline "Woman faces 93 days in jail for planting garden in front yard..." Since then, the story has spread like wildfire.

Drudge and all the rest of the news outlets who picked up the story drove traffic to The Agitator, which drove traffic to Julie's blog. Julie herself had already posted a link to my post on her blog, so the traffic slopped over from her blog to mine, putting Oak Park Hates Veggies in the top ten referring sites to my blog for the year with 404 visits. Behold the power of Drudge!

I also posted a summary of what happened along with links to my posts in the unfunnybusiness community over at JournalFen. That helped place that site in the top ten referring sites with 442 visits. On the other hand, I did little to promote this particular post at Kunstler's blog, making only a passing reference to it in my comment.

I also have coverage of how local zoning ordinances designed for a happy motoring suburbia are coming in conflict with people who are accidentally trying to prepare for the Long Emergency by growing vegetables in their front lawn. For some reason, this ticks off the powers that be no end.

That particular entry of Kunstler's did not make the top ten link list for referrals to my blog. Consequently, I claim very little credit for my efforts making this post popular. Instead, I credit Julie and Drudge, mostly Julie.

Not only did this post become the second most viewed for last year, the entire controversy drove enough traffic to my blog that July 2011 was the first month I had more than 4,000 visitors. W00t! Thank you, Julie!

Julie did one last favor for me before she moved to Seattle. She spoke to my Environmental Science class, where she recounted her story of becoming an accidental celebrity on behalf of sustainablity. My study group leader called her the most engaging speaker ever to address one of my classes, and I have to agree. Julie was on fire and I could have let her talk for the entire hour. I'm sorry she's no longer right next door so I can ask her to do so again. Thank you, Julie!

By the way, she might find it amusing that when I did a Google Images search for "Oak Park, Michigan," the image of her garden from Treehugger I used above was right next to the city logo on the first page of results. In fact, several photos of her garden appear on the first few pages. Julie, you're still famous.