About Joe Blog
Privacy Notice
I don’t collect cookies, and no logins, passwords or any other info is required to use this site. I do run Google Ads, which in return for a few cents (ZAR) places malvertising on my site and cookies in your browser. I mainly run this site for the education, and I find the horror of Google Ads kinda educational. Please feel free to visit with an ad blocking browser if you prefer.
The most common ad I’ve seen Google placing on this site purports to be a registration link, so please don’t fall for it. If you click on myactivity.google.com, you’ll probably see Google already knows every little detail about you.
I can be contacted at robert.joeblog@gmail.com or via my various social media accounts listed below.
What is Joe Blog?
Joe Blog lists things to do in and around Johannesburg, South Africa. It has a sister site seatavern.co.za which does the same for Cape Town.
Please note, this is an events listing site, not a venue itself or artist booking agency. A reason I removed the “contact” page from my site was nearly all the messages I received were from people who thought they were contacting the organizer of whatever event.
It’s been a hobby/learning project of mine (me being sometimes journalist Robert Laing) since I first registered the joeblog.co.za domain in 10 May 2005, and it has gone through I forget how many content management frameworks and hosting companies over the years.
The content management system I currently use is Hugo and my hosting provider is Linode for anyone interested.
In its current incarnation, Joe Blog and Seatavern aggregate events from various online ticket sellers, and South Africa seems to have a vibrant market here, so there’s a huge number of events to list. I haven’t written scripts to scrape all of them for data yet. I’ve redone the site to follow the schema.org system of describing events to search engines, as requested by Google’s structured data guide.
My main recent goal has been to get this site to pass the various tests that Google’s Lighthouse tool subjects it too. As someone who prefers to code using a proper keyboard and large screen, I was a bit dubious about Google’s mobile first mantra, but Google’s stats (one of the reasons I allow its awful ads on my site) and my own server logs show that, indeed, most of you are visiting this site using smartphone browsers, so I’ve designed the site with lots of space around tap targets and using flex, a relatively new web style.
I’ve done no actual useability testing, so feedback from users is always welcome.
Who is Joe Blog?
Me, sometimes journalist Robert Laing.
My various antisocial media accounts include: