I created my Facebook page on February 23, 2021. Honestly, I should have created it much sooner than that - a year earlier, perhaps, when I interviewed for the open Ward 3 council position.

The name of my Facebook page was Joseph Hendrix, Candidate for Ward 3, Huber Heights - my name first, then what I was running for. I felt that name recognition was more important than the position, at least when getting things in front of people’s eyes.

The URL is important, too. The Facebook URL is https://www.facebook.com/Joe4HuberHeights/, which mirrors the domain of this website (https://www.joe4huberheights.com). This reduces any “cognitive load” (that is, how hard someone has to think) for anyone to distinguish between the two.

Events

Part of my Facebook strategy was to have two events - namely, the Deadline for Voter Registration for the May 4 Primary Election on April 5, 2021, and Primary Election Day on May 4, 2021. This allowed me to share these two very important happenings, and have my page attached to them.

I also made sure to put my Huber Heights Community Cleanup as a Facebook event. This event was also posted on this website as well as plenty of other places.

Ads

I created two ads - one ad for the Deadline for Voter Registration for the May 4 Primary Election and one for the Primary Election Day. You can see a summary of these events in Facebook’s Ad Library. (Note that the Ad Library shows three events - two of which are for the Primary Election Day event. I made a few mistakes with one of them and the ad never ran.)

What’s interesting about these ads - since I was running an ad that was aimed at affecting an election, I had to get approved. This involved Facebook snail-mailing me a code to my address, which I then had to enter on Facebook. I also had to name the committee that I created for my campaign (that committee being Citizens for Joseph Hendrix).

The Audience

With Facebook, you can specify an audience. Sometimes, this audience is based on interest, such as dogs, or job title, such as software engineer. You can also specify an audience by geography - such as country, state, or even city.

I got a little more specific than even city. I live pretty central to my ward, so I narrowed down the audience to anyone within one mile of my address.

The Cost

I spent $20 on each ad - $40 total. You can see both of these expenses on the expenses section of this website.

The Results

Here are the raw numbers for the results from each ad:

Deadline for Voter Registration for the May 4 Primary Election

• Event Response: 2
• Reach: 614
• Post Engagement: 19
• Link Clicks: 13

Audience:

• 62.6% Women, 37.4% Men
• Mobile App: 584
• Desktop: 40
• Ohio 614

Primary Election Day

• Event Response: 4
• Reach: 567
• Post Engagement: 16
• Post Reactions: 5
• Link Clicks: 10

Audience:

• 70.7% Women, 29.3% Men
• Mobile App: 584
• Desktop: 40
• Ohio 614

Sharing to Groups

I also shared my events and other posts to local Facebook groups.

These groups were:

• Everything Huber Heights!
• Brick City Town Hall
• Huber Heights Town Hall

They’re private groups so you may not be able to see what’s happening if your not a member.

But what was great about sharing to these groups was that my posts got more exposure and views - for free! - than from paying for ads.

Watching Other Pages

One this Facebook allows pages to do is watch up to five other pages.

Of course, I decided to watch the page of one of my opponents - Frank Wylie. My other opponent - Kathleen Baker, the incumbent - doesn’t appear to have a Facebook page.

Does that mean I left the remaining four spots unwatched? Absolutely not! It just so happens that in this election cycle, there was a three-way race for mayor. So I watched each of the mayoral candidate’s Facebook pages:

• Jeff Gore, the incumbent
• Glenn Otto
• Ed Lyons

Aftermath

With the primary election, only two people could continue to the general election.

I came in third, so I renamed the page to Joseph Hendrix, Huber Heights Ward 3 Resident. Fun fact: Facebook had to approve the name change, although they did so almost instantly.

I’ve yet to change my header image - I will as soon as I think of something. But I will continue to share my thought on this page, and share things on my Facebook page as well.

The Domain

Why did I choose joe4huberheights.com? Most importantly, because it was available.

But I also chose a dot-com extension versus the hundreds of top-level domains available because it is the most familiar to people.

And the 4 between my name and the city’s name helps break up the words so that it’s easier to read.

Now, I suppose I had a choice between joe4huberheights and huberheights4joe, but I felt it more appropriate that I was running for the benefit of Huber Heights, not that Huber Heights existed for the benefit of me.

I could have also used my full name - perhaps joehendrix4huberheights or even josephhendrix4huberheights, but that’s getting a bit long-winded. Plus, using just the simple nickname version of my first name seems much more personable.

And there’s the nickname I use across the Internet - JoeHx. A Google search for JoeHx or even an Amazon search for JoeHx shows a bunch of the crazy stuff I’ve been up to.

But I was running not as my Internet persona, but as a citizen of Huber Heights. Besides, joe4huberheights is easier to remember than joehx4huberheights.

So joe4huberheights.com it is.

Completely On My Own

I didn’t pay anyone to create this site. I wrote it all on my own. All I paid was $12 to Google for the domain. Head on over to the expenses section of this website and all you’ll see regarding this website is the $12 transaction to Google on February 17th.

Hosting is free. How? Via GitHub pages. This is actually the fourth site I’ve made with GitHub pages. The other three are:

• JoeHx Blog
• Puppy Snuggles
• Microwave Cooking Times

The latter two have been a bit neglected; I blog semi-regularly (mostly on money and technical topics) on the first.

If you want the technical details, GitHub Pages uses a static blog generator known as Jekyll. But once it reaches you, it’s all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I use very little JavaScript on this site. The only bit I do use is for Google Analytics, so I know how much traffic this site gets.

If you want to view the “backend” of this site, it’s publicly available on GitHub.

The Styling

Or, why yellow?

Yellow because it’s my favorite color. And yellow is my favorite color because it’s my mom’s favorite color. And because most people’s favorite color is not yellow (most people’s favorite color is blue).

Yellow, along with purple, is also a libertarian color. As stated in the FAQ, I’m a libertarian.

I could have used purple instead of the black, but I felt that black contrasted better than purple.

The design - my name in yellow text surrounded by a black box with the remaining text in black with the yellow background - is mostly based on a political yard sign I saw online. I just liked how it looked.

Submitting to Indexes

For the most part, you never need to submit a site to indexes (like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing?). They’ll find you.

But there are a few places I make sure have my site indexed. And making sure it’s indexed is as simple as searching for my site on the indexer site.

Here are the index sites I submit a brand new site to:

• Alexa.com
• Netcraft Site Report
• Moz Link Explorer

I also set up a Google Webmasters/Google Search Console property for the domain.

Getting Backlinks

Most reading this won’t know what backlinks are. You probably do know what links are.

Links are that bit of blue text that you click on that takes you to another page.

A backlink is a special type of link that takes you from one domain to another.

For instance, if I link to google.com, that link in this sentence is a backlink to Google from this site.

Backlinks are the core of how Google ranks pages - the more backlinks, the more likely a site will appear on their results page (note: a lot has changed since Google first started doing this, but this is a simplified explanation).

So, I mentioned this campaign site on at least two posts on my regular blog:

• February 2021 Blog Statistics
• April 2021 Blog Statistics

I also answered as many requests for candidate information as I could. This netted me a backlink from WDTN.com. I also have a backlink from Vote-USA.org.

I also filled out my profile on a wiki known as LPedia.

Finally, I submit these various blog posts to reddit (mostly on my profile to avoid spam issues), Mix.com, and Muck Rack.

Additionally

I make sure the entire site is archived on the Wayback Machine, as well as process each blog post through Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and Twitter’s Card Validator.

That’s it for today. Next time, I’ll think I’ll talk about my Facebook strategy, and why I didn’t set up a Twitter campaign account.

Frank Wylie and Kate Baker are going on to compete in the general election. I will be transitioning this website and my Facebook page into a citizen page.

If you’re curious about the results, here are the numbers:

These numbers are available on WDTN’s site as well as the Montgomery County Board of Elections site.

If you want deeper analysis, head on over to this Montgomery County Election Night Results page or look at this results.txt file.

In the results.txt file, we can see the breakdown of votes per precinct:

Huber Heights 3-A

Huber Heights 3-B

Huber Heights 3-C

Huber Heights 3-D

There are 4,111 registered voters for Ward 3. That means only less than 10% - and only slightly more than 9% - voted in the primary.

Here’s a breakdown of registered voters per precinct and the number of votes:

Over the next week or so, I’m going to make some posts about some of the strategies I took, lessons learned, as well as some (former) competitor analysis.

Since the public records portal’s inception, there have been at least 470 public records requests. The first available ticket (ticket #1) was June 28, 2018:

To make a “more transparent” government, then the information that people are requesting should already be available. Indeed, some of it is - people might not know where to look and just go straight to making a public records request.

Nevertheless, looking at what the common requests are is a good way to see what people want to know. And one common item people request is email. Email between council members. Email between council and the city manager.

I think that every email should already be available - preferable on the city’s website (maybe at a subdomain like mail.hhoh.org). Well, maybe not every email - spam should be excluded. Perhaps emails from external sources - and emails that contain things like social security numbers and bank account numbers should be excluded (or at least the confidential information removed).

Systems already exist that archive email for display in a web-based environment, although it seems it’s aimed for “mailing lists”. But it could still work for transparency reasons.

A popular such system is GNU Mailman (read its article on Wikipedia for a less-technical overview).

To see it in action, check out this March 2021 archive of the English Wikipedia Article of the Day mailing list. If you want to see something where people interact, check out this March 2021 Wikimedia archive by thread. Other options include archived by subject and archived by author.

Also - if these lists are publicly available, they can be searched with search engines such as Google. Try searching ohio site:https://lists.wikimedia.org!

I’ve been a bit confused as to why anyone saw a need for a gate there. Dayton has gates on random streets, too, apparently to fight crime. Is that why this gate on Corby Way is there?

When I was petitioning to get on the ballot, I asked one person who lived right next to the gate if they had any opinion on the gate. They said while it was annoying - especially when they had company over and someone had to park on the other side - they really had no opinion on it.

A wee bit later, I asked a few people on the largest Huber Heights community group on Facebook. While I got quite a few people speculating on the crimes and drug aspect, a few people seemed to have a deeper insight. Since the Mt Hood area is privately owned, the residents are solely responsible for the upkeep of the roads. The gates prevent people from driving through, further deteriorating the roads.

I emailed City Engineer Russ Bergman asking what he knows about the gate. He confirmed what others answering my Facebook question knew:

The gate you are referring to was installed about 12 years ago by Chip Huber, who was in charge of the maintenance of the Huber Bungalows. Since the development is all privately owned, they wanted to keep plow trucks and other Huber residences from using the private streets. The City does not have any preference on whether it is kept or removed.

What I find interesting about this response is that the gates keep plow trucks - what I assume are snow plows - from plowing the Mt Hood area (which Mr. Bergman called the “Huber Bungalows”). If I remember right, during the heavy snowfall a few months ago, there were complaints that the roads back in that area were not getting plowed.

If you’re wondering “would anyone even use Corby Way if the gate is opened?” then the answer is probably yes. The gate was broken in late February/early March, and I did see at least one person drive through it.

If the gate is to be removed - or just simply opened - then it’s up to the citizens who live in the Huber Bungalows, along with the company that manages the gate.

Also, there’s a gate on the other side of the Huber Bungalows as well on Mt. Everest Street:

So I looked at a few neighboring cities and found that, yes, it is normal for cities to be members of their chambers of commerce. Granted, I didn’t look at every city that exists, so this is

Here are the Cities that are members of their Chamber:

• The City of Riverside is a member of the Riverside Area Chamber of Commerce
• The Kettering Moraine Oakwood Chamber has all three cities as members:
  • The City of Kettering
  • The City of Moraine
  • The City of Oakwood
  • Heck, Oakwood City Council is a member.
• Both the township and city are members of the Vandalia Butler Chamber of Commerce:
  • Butler Township
  • The City of Vandalia
• The City of Trotwood is a member of the Trotwood Chamber of Commerce.

Yes, the City of Dayton is a member of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce

Interestingly enough, so is Huber Heights, along with the following cities:

• The City of Brookville
• The City of Centerville
• The City of Clayton
• The City of Germantown
• The City of Riverside

Also, and interestingly enough, while the city is not a member of the Huber Heights Chamber of Commerce, the Huber Heights Division of Fire, Huber Heights Police Division, and Huber Heights Streets Division are.

From the Huber Heights Yard Waste Site website:

Yard Waste Site

The Yard Waste drop-off site is located on the north side of I-70 on Wildcat Road. This service is open and free to all Huber Heights residents. The Yard Waste Site will open on Thursday, April 1, 2021, and will remain open until Friday, October 29, 2021.

Hours of operation are Thursdays, 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., and the first Saturday of each month, 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Wood Chips & Compost

The City grinds the leaves and other collected debris to make quality leaf and wood mulch, which is free. During open hours, residents are encouraged to take the available wood chips and leaf compost material free of charge. The end loader operator will load pickup trucks with the wood chips or leaf compost. Only citizens with proof of residency are permitted to drop off acceptable yard waste material. Contractors are not allowed to drop off material at this site. For more information contact the Public Works Division at 937-233-1562.

Acceptable Yard Waste Material

• Tree limbs (no longer than 8 feet and no larger than 6 inches diameter)
• Brush
• Plants
• Leaves

Unacceptable Material

• Trash
• Dirt
• Topsoil
• Grass
• Firewood
• Stumps
• Construction material of any kind

Directions to the New Yard Waste Drop Off Site

202 N to Kellenburger Road. Left on Kellenburger Road to Wildcat Road. Left on Wildcat Road to Cul-de-sac. Follow signs and asphalt driveway to the site.

Or you can use the following Google Map:

Thank you to everyone who showed up for the Huber Heights Community Cleanup!

We were able to collect 13 bags worth of trash in two hours!

Update

It’s on!

It looks like it won’t start raining until noon, so the 10am Community Cleanup is happening! I’ll be at the Rural King end of Waynetowne Plaza in a yellow shirt with my burgundy Honda Odyssey van.

It looks like it might rain Saturday (April 10th).

If so, and depending on how hard it rains, I’m going to reschedule this cleanup one week to next Saturday (April 17th).

I do plan on being in the parking lot rain or shine, in the event people show, so I can let them know.

My campaign has two goals: Improve Myself, and Improve Huber Heights. Win or lose, if my campaign does not meet those two goals, then my campaign has failed.

That’s why, as part of a campaign event, I’m hosting a Community Cleanup on Saturday, April 10th starting at 10 am.

The goal for this event will be to pick up litter in a given area - and the area I’ve chosen for this cleanup is the Kroger/Rural King parking lot (Waynetowne Plaza) along Old Troy Pike.

Trash bags, gloves, hand sanitizer, and bottled water will be provided. Feel free to bring your own gloves if you have a favorite pair.

Huber Heights Community Cleanup

• Date: Saturday, April 10th, 2021.
• Time: 10:00am - 11:00am
• Where: Waynetowne Plaza, Old Troy Pike, Huber Heights, Ohio
• Host: Joseph Hendrix, Candidate for Ward 3, Huber Heights

Event links

• Huber Heights Community Cleanup on Facebook
• Huber Heights Community Cleanup on Eventbrite
• Huber Heights Community Cleanup on Dayton.com
• Add Huber Heights Community Cleanup to Google Calendar
• Add Huber Heights Community Cleanup to Microsoft Outlook
• Add Huber Heights Community Cleanup to Office 365
• Add Huber Heights Community Cleanup to Yahoo Calendar

One of the best ways to be informed about what’s going to be on the ballot is to head on over to the Ohio Board of Elections sample ballot site.

No matter your ward - or even if you happen to live outside of Huber Heights and happened across this post by accident - you can view what will be on your ballot on any upcoming election before you vote.

Hint: After clicking the “Find Ballots” button, press Ctrl-F on your keyboard and enter “Huber” in the search box to quickly jump down to the Huber Heights sample ballots.

There are even sample ballots going back to 2014 (if you want to look)!

I looked at all four sample ballots for Ward 3, and they’re all the same.

Here’s the sample ballot for my precinct (Huber Heights 3-C):

That’s why I’m creating a transparency portal on this website. So far I’ve got two sections based on two different types of reporting I’m required to do with Ohio: a Financial Disclosure section based on the Ohio Ethics Commission Financial Disclosure Statement I was required to file, and an expenses section based on the campaign finance reports I will be required to file.

The website sections are better organized than the paperwork I’m required to file. Plus I am going to include the paperwork (in PDF form) embedded on those pages, as well. I’ve already embedded the Ohio Ethics Commission Financial Disclosure Statement in the Financial Disclosure section.

As I add more sections, I’ll include them in the following list:

• Expenses & Contributions
• Ohio Ethics Commission Financial Disclosure Statement