A bunch of updates after the site went stale for awhile

So... the site went stale over the past year, as in the calendar drifted out of date with some important bits of info, which is pretty terrible. It's bad. There is really nothing worse than showing up to someplace, hungry, hoping to find free food, and facing a locked door. That's bad.

So everything up to October 28 in the comments on the calendar page has been added. Those who made these comments are awesome. And it's apparent that a page should probably be added for meal reviews, complaints, etc. Maybe that'll happen.

Anyone with intel to report on mealtimes and stuff is highly encouraged to do so on the calendar page.

It's getting serious

The calendar gets about 400 views per week. The article about ODSP payment dates gets about 7,000 views per week. That's pretty brutal. That's actual soup kitchen users and actual ODSPers looking for food. Looking for their money. Using the 'net to do so. And yet service providers, from TDIN to your corner church and their meal program, generally don't publish their actual mealtimes to the public. TDIN's not making their holiday meal program guide public this year. No announcement, no particular reason, they just never did it.

The holiday closures totally outnumber the extra holiday meals. Absolutely dwarf them. Those closures are not expressed anywhere online. There's no brochure about them distributed through the system, there's no real notification system at all. If you're not going to these programs on a regular basis, and checking up on their holiday schedule, you have absolutely no way of knowing about closures. Well, except for this website. Where it's accurate. This year won't be so bad. The calendar is mostly up to date. A lot of closures have been flagged. Some of them are pretty major. St. Felix said no more holiday closures, and changed their mind. Good Shepherd said no holiday closures, and changed their mind. Sistering and 416 Dundas are going strong, so women are covered. The ones who are close by or can travel, anyway.

We're heading into this winter with fewer shelter beds than we had last winter, not more. Way fewer. Hundreds less than we had a few years ago. Good luck out there! You'll need it. All three levels of government, and society at large, definitely want all of us dead or in jail. Or at least, totally starving.

The holiday meals, and the calendar

So... the holiday meals list from TDIN is out. And it's been LEAKED!!!! Oh my god oh my god oh my god! They stopped publishing it online, so there is absolutely no way to view it on the internet except, of course, on this site. Because somebody uploaded it to their google docs and posted it. And then it got compared to the Calendar page on this site, which got heavily updated. And then it got embedded below:



There are some clear discrepancies between this schedule and the regular mealtimes of a lot of these places. So there are some details to clear up, but the calendar is much more accurate than it was six hours ago. Many, many disappointing closures have been marked, so hopefully some heartbreak can be avoided./

It's worth noting that there are way, way more closures than extra holiday meals. Way more. Way, way fucking more.

The other thing, this is silly, but Sistering and 416 Dundas, the two major places specifically for women, weren't on the site at all, and now they are. It's pretty startling to finally be able to add a couple of programs that are just two meals every single day, at the same time. Not a few days a week at three different times, not every third and fourth sunday of some bullshit, but every single day of the week, at the same times. And the hours of the drop-in are: 24/7. It's like a whole other world, especially for women. Where you don't have to go all over the city every single day, where you can go to the same place for two or even three meals each day. And you can just go there anytime you need to. That's absolutely amazing. That must be wonderful. It makes a lot more sense why men in poverty are so much more visible: they have to stay on the move, and the women are all hidden away at the women-only programs. There's only one breakfast and lunch program that's open every single day, and includes men, and it's the Good Shepherd.

So, if this site makes money at some point, what's the craziest way we could spend it?

At some point, this site might get enough traffic to make money off AdSense ads. Assuming it's even a polite enough site to qualify.

But if money was raised from this site, what would be the absolute most awesome way to spend it? I've thought of various things, like sponsoring a vitamin program in a soup kitchen, or trying to sponsor some allergen-free, organic meals, or make the first organic food bank or something... but that's all just piling on to a system that sucks bad enough already. Probably Food Not Bombs would be a good choice for donating to, but it'd be nice to spend it on something political. Something that could create change. I mean, it'd be silly to do something big and flashy when we could just feed people, but is there some kind of publicity stunt we could pull that would shame the province? That's what we all really want, isn't it? To shame the province and the public into giving up on their oppression campaign against us. Or maybe to inspire them into it?

I'd like to get some feedback... let's say we had a thousand bucks to throw around. What would be a really great way to really hurt the politicians who've been hurting us? It'd be great to be able to reach out and really, really hurt them, badly. Politically. Like, what could we do to punish Mike Harris, with a thousand bucks? Or Kathleen Wynne, or Dalton McGuinty? Could we like... buy an attack ad on all three of them? Could we buy an attack ad against our own society at large? Maybe we could buy some radio ads, like PSAs, with some of OCAP's "poverty by the numbers" stuff quoted?

Or maybe we could make a documentary about systemic, strategic, manufactured poverty in Ontario and the rest of Canada?

This website is doing really well... because our lives are horseshit

So, this site gets about a hundred fucking hits a day. That's sad. Overall, the calendar has been viewed about twenty thousand times. So has the article about ODSP payment dates. That's pretty fucked. Almost all the site's traffic comes from Google. Almost all that traffic comes from search terms related to finding meal programs, or finding out when ODSP payments come out. But finally, an actual website, not just a comment, but an actual website, has linked to this one. Thank fucking god:

Like this site, it's completely anonymous. And mysterious. Whatever.

Anyway, this site gets good search engine recognition because it provides decent content. Actually, it does well because other sites don't provide that content. Other sites don't talk about ODSP payment dates, especially not government sites. Other sites don't talk about how our benefits compare with the cost of living... oh, wait, yes they do. Like newsmedia sites. Other sites don't talk about meal programs... oh, wait, yes they do - newsmedia articles, when they're talking about how easy it is to find a meal in Toronto and how you'd have to be "fat, lazy or stupid" in order to go hungry. I guess we all missed the part about "...or have any dietary restrictions whatsoever."

Anyway, this site does well because it's not bullshit, and because it's had time to do well. Here's how well it's doing:

Every once in awhile, we get a bigass spike to like 200 hits in one day, wow!

And then, of course, some months are busier than others, like December:

Of course, the big SEO curse is not being able to index for the name of your own site. So of course it's a good thing to come in number one for this. And I'll take any chance to rub it in everyone else's face. Especially since they've got the jobs I wanted when I was trying to be a web designer.

And of course, now that it's November, people are starting to wonder about Christmas... don't worry guys, I'm sure it'll be even worse this year than it was last year. Somehow.

So, yeah. This site rules, and its rising popularity is only making our voices of outrage louder and louder.

A few legit comments have been tagged as spam, sorry... it's been fixed

So... Blogger's a bit funny sometimes... it tries to help out, you know... but it tagged a few people's posts as spam, omitting them for that reason. It didn't catch any actual spam, either. This, added to the fact that their search feature absolutely will not work, almost has me reaching for another CMS. Unfortunately, WordPress is an absolute filthy, stinking pile of vomit-encrusted fecal insanity, and the other ones aren't worth mentioning. Unless there's another one that is worth mentioning, in which case, please do mention it below, in the comments. Because at some point, Google is going to realize I'm using their product to criticize my government's murderous weaponization of their benefits programs, and I'll lose my Blogger account. It's like any job, no matter how carefully you follow the rules, there's always something they can nail you on. They make sure of it. So at some point it will need to switch to another service. If things really come down to it, of course, I can just make the whole thing in HTML and CSS. After all, that's what I used to do for a living. Before reality caught up with me.

Toronto Meal Programs continues to gain traffic... it's getting closer and closer to profitability!

"Profitability?" Yeah. Profitability. As in, at some point, this site is going to get so much traffic that it'll be able to generate money from advertisements, and that money will go to some kind of food security initiative. Best case, we might one day see a 27-hour organic soup kitchen (just a window, really), funded through this site and some other fundraising efforts. That'd be the day.

So these days, the site gets about fourty page views a day. So that's like... twenty people visiting the front page, then going to the calendar. Or ten people checking out the calendar plus three articles each. Something like that. It's peaking at around 200+ pageviews on some busy days, and there's still some days that are so dead that nobody visits the site. But those are becoming more and more rare. The curve you can see in the usage chart below shows how the site gets used a bit more at the beginning and end of each month... that's probably entirely due to the extremely popular article about ODSP payment dates. Because it's the only article that tells the public, accurately, when ODSP payments are released. The government keeps that information a secret. So that's an article that isn't even about meal programs, but already it's gotten over 1300 page views, and a ton of comments.

Here's the main searches that are bringing people to the site, over the past month (pretty typical):

odsp payment dates	24
odsp payment dates 2015	9
http://torontomealprograms.blogspot.com/p/meal-programs-calendar-agenda.html?m=1	8
odsp payment dates 2015 direct deposit	6
free meals toronto	5
http://torontomealprograms.blogspot.com/2013/05/churchoftheredeemer.html	5
http://torontomealprograms.blogspot.com/2013/06/scadding-court-monthly-meal.html	3
odsp dates 2015	3
when does odsp come out	3
do ontario disability cheques come out before cheistmas	2

The most common search term that brings people to the site is "free meals toronto," second most popular is the ODSP payment dates thing, third most popular is "free food toronto."

At this point, if there are any organizations interested in sponsoring a meal or something in exchange for ad space on this site, it's time to get in touch.

Why is there no search function on this site like there used to be?

The search function keeps breaking and Google hasn't fixed it yet. It's happening on a lot of other sites. A workaround hasn't yet been found.

So if you want to search this site, here's what you do: go to Google.com, and enter this text (this works for any website) "site:torontomealprograms.blogspot.com" and then after that text, in the search box, but whatever your search terms are. So if you're looking for information about the Good Shepherd, your search is "site:torontomealprograms.blogspot.com good shepherd" or whatever.

Sorry about the hassle.

This website is getting craploads of traffic, which is great, yay

It's easy enough to lie about this kind of thing. Of course. But here's an update on the kind of web traffic that this site is getting. It's impressive. It's gratifying. It's dangerous. The more popular and used the site becomes, the closer it comes to getting shut down. Why would it get shut down? Because it's useful to clients, and because it reports on the problems with the way services are provided. It may be exposing practices that go against agreements that were made in order to ensure funding. It may expose stakeholders to risk. If and when it does get shut down, it'll just pop up under some other free publishing service, but then it'll take time for that to become easy to search for, and the information will have to be reassembled.

Anyway, here's some screenshots of Blogger's awesome "stats" service, showing how much this site gets used. These screenshots are of statistics taken from the entire lifetime of the site.

Contact (or rather, lack of contact)

There's no point in trying to contact the author for interviews, for advice, for whatever. It's not happening. Fuck that. There's no point. Where's the incentive? People sometimes leave their email address or some contact info in some comments somewhere, but think about it: anyone could contact you back, pretending to be the author. And it just signs you up for more spam, because your email address is sitting around on the web.

What you can do is leave questions in the comments section below, and expect to wait a long time for responses. They'll be put up anonymously, so you have no guarantee that they're written by the author. But any responses that anyone leaves pretending to be the author will be eventually deleted.

So go ahead, ask away. Anything you want to ask, you're going to have to ask in full view of the public. As it should be.

What's with the anonymity? About the author, about the site, etc.

I'm one person working alone, living with a disability, living on disability payments, I used to live on welfare, and before that I had various jobs, including web design and advertising copyrighting. I didn't have a post-secondary education, because I didn't have access to one. Not everybody does have access. I grew up poor, and so did my parents, and so did my grandparents, and poverty is a beast that, like the rest of us, tends to want to preserve itself. Poverty comes back from your past to catch you and bring you back into its clutches. Poverty disconnects one's attitude from one's circumstances, so my outlook, no matter how positive or negative it's been, has never had much effect on the outcomes of my efforts. The culture of poverty has followed me into whatever employment situation I've had, and I've never had someone who can teach me how to not act poor and think poor. And it's really how you act and how you think that dictate your outcomes. I've failed to fake it 'til I made it, because honestly, I didn't know how, and I didn't have the will to do so. It just involves so much lying. So that's my story. That's as specific as I'm going to get. There are tons of people out there just like me. So there's not a lot of possibility of discovery. And, shit, for all you know, the whole story could be a fabrication, full of lies, or full of delusions that make it easier for me to deal with.

What's my motivation for publishing this anonymously? It's mostly just so I can say whatever the fuck I want about these places. It's journalistic independence and integrity, basically. What do I have to lose when somebody finally outs my identity? Just access to meal programs. Or rather, safe access. I fear being recognized by staff and clientele, and any reprisals that may come along with that. But I mostly fear simply not being able to say what I want to say about these places. It's like the Vice Magazine album reviews, and a lot of the more contentious articles. They're published under bogus names. Because that way, they can say whatever they want. And because of that, they're worth reading. They're not boring bullshit.

Of course, it's occurred to me a thousand times that having authored this website may lead to employment of some kind, or recognition of some kind, and those things are nice. But in my experience, employment is fleeting and exploitative. I may find some way out of the cycle of poverty. I might be able to somehow access education, or make some partnerships that lead to an entrepreneurial success story. But at the same time, I have to hedge my bets by becoming as good at being poor as I possibly can be.

I've tried to write most of these articles using grammar that obfuscates the authorship of things on this site. But it's impossible to disguise my writing style. I haven't really tried. I've pulled the old web designer trick of trying to make it seem like I'm several people working for some big company, that I'm a team when really I'm just one person. And I've tried to enlist people from the poverty community to contribute articles, so that the site really can be a group effort. And so that the geographical range of the information can expand. And I still want that. But so far, none of that has happened. The site has a fantastic amount of usage, with the impressive traffic profile that comes along with it. And people do contribute tips in the comments of the various articles. And I'm very, very grateful for that. It's wonderful. It demonstrates that the poverty community does have collaboration skills, and the will to share information. It's just that, generally, our time online is limited and our energy for productivity time is limited. Everyone I know who lives in poverty needs an extreme amount of downtime in their lives, just to cope. Poverty causes illness, and is caused by illness, and people who are ill have trouble doing this kind of thing. And I have trouble doing this kind of thing. I'm in and out of this site. I sometimes work a lot on it, and sometimes not. I miss closures, and leave the calendar inaccurate for months. It's bad. But I do what I can.

Why do I feel like doing this, ultimately? It does involve a sense of indebtedness to the poverty community. Like I owe something. Also, the welfare and ODSP (disability benefits) that I've been living off of are paid for by the taxpayer. I have years of payments to make up for. There aren't any volunteering programs that I can work with... they all have requirements that I simply can't fulfill. So I do all sorts of little anonymous things, to give back. To reduce my shame. To contribute to my own sense of dignity. To be part of the world. And it's also partially just out of frustration: I can do this. It's relatively easy. And those who are being paid to do it... they do a horrible job of it. They're not being paid enough to do it, and not enough of them are being paid to do it. Because of my skillset, it's easy for me. It started out as just me making a google calendar and map of this stuff, to keep my notes straight. And then I was like shit, I could just tie this together on a blog to make it easier to use. And then other people could use it too. And then maybe I'd get intelligence (tips) from the community. And then maybe... maybe maybe maybe, something nice could happen. And it's been nice. Now I have power. Because people visit the site, and my words and experiences, which reflect the experiences of the poverty community, are here. They're not elsewhere, not really, not on the 'net. They're not on meal program websites. Because we're not stakeholders. Charity organizations, government departments, NGOs, and contributing companies, are the stakeholders. They're the ones that get representation and attention. Not the clients. We are the product. We get whatever representation the stakeholders give us. But not on this site. On this site, the truth has lease. Actual real-world experiences have lease.

I do have a plan for my identity being outed. For one thing, anybody could pretend to be the creator of this site. So I have plausible deniability. If somebody posts a picture of me, I can change my look. I can continue to go to these programs, with the additional fear of reprisal that's provided by being outed. I already fear going to these programs. The're not safe, after all, anyway. They are there to be there. They are harm reduction, because they reduce property crime. They are window dressing, because they provide something for the public to point at, saying, we're doing something... somebody is doing something. They're there for companies, to point at, saying, it's not a solution, but it's something. And yeah, it's not a solution. It's an opportunity. And it's a deterrent, for the masses, to leaving their jobs, to questioning their working conditions, stuff like that. It's something to point at to say do I want to be one of those people? No I sure don't, so I'll just ignore my employer's workplace standards violations, just like police threaten people with like you're gonna get raped in jail everyday, and nobody's going to question these charges, only you and I know they're lies.

I had plans to reveal my identity this year. I even wrote about it on this site. And then I removed the post about it. I can do that whenever I want with this site. I can change my plans. I can change my mind. I can present erroneous information. I can delete people's comments. And of course, Google can do whatever it wants with this site. Take it down, track me down, take it over, write bogus stuff... whatever it wants. Maybe I've broken the service agreement. Maybe I've broken the law. The agreements and laws can change at any time without notice, and the public doesn't have the means to know the law, anyway. So any of us could be investigated for any time, and jailed at any time, for any or no reason. And if there is a reason, nobody has any way to know, or any legal right to know, what the reason is. So there are risks to publishing this site. Since I don't know what those risks are, and have no way of finding out, I can't say that I've accepted the risks, but I have accepted the unknown.

Not that I can prove this in any way, but this site isn't published by the hacktivist group anonymous. I don't believe they are a legitimate collective of private citizens. I don't believe anything else about them, either. I just know I have no way of knowing what the fuck they really are, so I'm not drawing any conclusions. But I will sign this "anonymous," and I will continue to publish in anonymity, for now.

Yours in poverty,
Anonymous Journalist

Wow, this site gets used a lot, comments are going unanswered, and the calendar is sketchy

Wow, this site gets used a lot. 78 pageviews yesterday. Over a hundred today. Most visits to the site start with a search like "free food in toronto" or "food banks in toronto" or something like that.

But the comments are going unanswered. It's bad. Comments from a year ago are just now getting responded to. They got lost in the shuffle. Nobody was paying attention, but that's changed.

The calendar is sketchy. Google's Calendar cloud software has a weird bug with repeating events. A permanent solution still hasn't been found! So that's bad.

Toronto Meal Programs (the website) passes the 10,000 visits mark

Now that the site has passed the 10,000 visits mark, it's time to release a bit more information about how people find the site.

The keyphrase at the root of most searches that bring people to this site is: "free meals toronto."

Several other keywords have revealed themselves to be important: Food, Laundry, Meals, and certain days of the week, specifically Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

The question is, are these keywords an indication of a bias towards these words in the site's content, or of the users' needs? Are we not seeing any popularity of "tuesday" in searches because there don't happen to be any articles on the site mentioning tuesdays? Or is it because saturday, sunday and monday are when people need meal programs the most, or when they're the least available? It's unclear. However, based on what little knowledge can be extracted from these statistics, a few ideas may be implemented:

Maybe some articles about food-gathering strategies for the various days of the week would be useful. And maybe expanding more into food-related topics beyond meal programs, and other services like laundry and communications access, would add value to the site. Expanding on listings of a broader range of services was already part of the plan, but the idea of articles for each day is a new one, specifically inspired by these stats. It's nice to have some stats, and for sites with no budget, it's great to have it included automatically, like it is in Blogger.

Here's some other fun stats:

This past month, the calendar was visited about 300 times. The map, not so much. It only got about 20 views. Over the whole history of the site, the map gets about one eighth the number of visits that the calendar does.

It's unclear how many individual users the site has, or how the user group breaks down in terms of how often they use the site. Stats indicating those facts are not available.

On average, the site gets between 8 and 30 visits per day. The site is probably more active during the latter half of each month. This is indicated but not quite verifiable in the available stats, and it also mirrors activity at meal programs. It's reflective of the social benefits payment schedule. Welfare recipients get paid near the end of the month, and Disability recipients get paid right at the end of the month, and both sets of benefits cover about a third of a person's monthly food needs. The tendency is to take a vacation from soup kitchens until the grocery money runs out, and then scramble to cover the discrepancy.

The site's activity has increased incrementally since it was first published in 2007:

From the looks of the chart, it really started to take off in 2011.

Well, those are some of the conclusions we can glean from Google's barebones but nicely-illustrated web stats. If you notice anything else about them that could lead to decisions on content or design, please leave a comment on this article.

Pulling back the curtain just a little bit...

Here's the searches that people did to find this site during the past month:

Browser and platform statistics suggest that over the past week, as many as one third of the site's users are accessing it through their mobile phones rather than computers.

Over the past week, the Calendar continues to get about twice as much use as the map: