Capitol Annex: One Year Anniversary State Of The Blog & Our Favorite Posts

As I sit here this morning blogging, I can’t believe it has been exactly one year since we went online again.

I say “again,” because most of you know that Capitol Annex is my second incarnation as a blogger, after I closed the old “Free State Standard” after the 2004 election cycle and did most of my writing over at Burnt Orange Report, Political State Report, and other places.

Suffice it to say, it has been one hell of a year for Capitol Annex and for Texas blogs in general.

As with any new venture, Capitol Annex has seen a lot of changes in its first year.

When I launched Capitol Annex this time last year, I did so on a platform called Drupal, mainly because that is what Free State Standard ran on many moons ago. While Drupal is a great platform if you are a technical genius (which, sadly, I am not), it has a lot of drawbacks. One was spam comments which quickly overwhelmed the blog and I couldn’t manage to stop no matter what I did. Another was that I never could manage to integrate a “WYSIWYG” editor, meaning I had to code the .html in every post—and that’s something I don’t like doing.

So, back in January, we made the switch to WordPress. We started out with a three-column theme in a wierd blue color scheme. For some reason, I had the idea that three-column blog templates were simply the bomb. After a couple of months, we changed over to the template we have now which is much more reader-friendly. And, as soon as the template that won the “election” for new template gets back from the person who is recoding it so it will behave uniformly in all browsers and on all monitor resolutions, we’ll have our voter-selected template.

The Special Session this year was a turning point for this blog. Our frequent liveblogging of the floor debate attracted a lot of links from other blogs and new visitors. Evidently, they liked what they saw because they stuck around.

That was the first “growth spurt” in visitors we had. The second was following the Democratic Convention in Fort Worth. We had our single highest traffic day in history the Saturday of the convention. While we tapered off again rather quickly, we did manage to gain more regular visitors, and got our second “growth spurt.”

Our most recent “growth suprt” was after the election. Election day and the day after set new records for the number of visitors we had. And, I’m pleased to say that, once traffic stabilized, we doubled our average daily visitors, and that number has held steady a month after the election, giving us our third “growth spurt.”

So, I guess people like Capitol Annex. And, that’s quite a relief to me. When we launched, I was writing the same way I was in 2003 and 2004—which was pretty much “newspaper style,” given my years in the newspaper business.

And, in ‘04, that was fine and people liked that. In 2005/06, however, in the wake of launches of such popular blogs like In the Pink Texas and Pink Dome, people seemed to be looking for something…different.

So, over the months and weeks, my writing style has evolved some as well.  More analysis…more humor…more breaking news…and it seems to work well for me and the blog.

So, as an anniversary present to each of you, here is a rundown of my favorite Capitol Annex posts from 2006, with a little commentary by yours truly:

Get Out Your Map Colors! It’s Time For More Redistricting Fun: I remember I started on this post about 9:30 p.m. and finished it up around 3 a.m. Yes, looking at maps and charts and making lists of what counties have changed from one plan to another is quite time consuming. I seem to remember that one blogger (maybe it was Charles Kuffner) called this post “the most comprehensive blog post I’ve ever seen” or something like that. It was fun to write, though.

The Meaning Of Their Votes: Texas’ Congressional Republicans Must Reap What They Have Sown: This was one of many posts I wrote on the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, which several Texans tried to hold up. I have to admit that sometimes, I felt all alone on this topic because the number of blogs hitting this hard and heavy seemed few and far between. Now, in Texas, our progressive bloggers did a great job, but I seem to recall that there was not nearly as much outrage as I would have liked from national “big dog” bloggers like DailyKOS (and the statewide press slept through most of this, with a few notable exceptions). And, you know when I want some outrage, damn it, I want some outrage.

So, after the House vote when so many of our Texans climbed the walls to disenfranchise people of color, I spewed forth my own outrage:

Mark yesterday, July 13, 2006 on your calanders and in your memories: it is the day the Republican Congressmen from Texas lost their credibility and sailed so far out of the mainstream they ended up in the middle of the ocean.

These Congressmen will, however, point out that they voted for the reauthorization on final passage (save the six who didn’t).

Who cares? They voted to burn down the barn before the voted to save it. In the case of the Congressmen who voted for the amendments and then for final passage, their final passage votes are not enough to redeem the harm they sought to do.

It’s as if a bully beat the hell out of you, cut your arm off, robbed you and then said, “you should thank me because I didn’t kill you after all!”

Oh, but no. Hell no.

We cannot let the Congressmen who voted for the amendments but against reauthorization derive any beneifits from that vote.

Such behavior might be acceptable (and even expected and tolerated) on a spending bill, an energy bill—whatever. But it is not accepable on this bill; not on this day, not ever.

A civil rights bill is not a spending bill or an energy bill or any other class of legislation. It is legislation designed to protect the very rights we all hold dear as Americans. A vote against a civil rights bill isn’t just a vote against Latinos or Asians or African Americans. It is a vote against all of us. And votes for amendments like those the 19 Texas Congressmen voted for are surely votes against a civil rights bill.

I also remember that I actually received phone calls (including one from Barbara Radnofsky) telling me they liked that post.

Tom DeLay: Digesting The Story: This post wasn’t all that spectacular in terms of content; it was mainly just directing you around the Web to other content. What was remarkable about it, however, is that it was the “day after” wrap-up following Tom DeLay’s announcement that he’d step down and not seek re-election.

Amicus Of The 68th Lege In The DeLay Case: I loved writing this post because it combined law with legislative history with a smackdown of Tom DeLay and the Republicans. Plus, Capitol Annex was the first blog to have it. I remember it because it also tested our “technical limits.”

The files in the case were massive—brief and exhibits. Yet, I wanted to be able to direct readers to specific pages without having to have them open the whole brief. Not only that, but a lot of the content was in various forms that didn’t permit cutting and pasting of text I needed to quote on the blog. In short, we learned about programs like PDF2Text and how to copy, paste and separate various pieces of .pdf files. And, these techniques have come in quite handy in other instances as well.

It’s Been A Bad Day For Carole Strayhorn: It seems simeltaniously like it was only yesterday and as though it was a lifetime ago that Carole Keeton Strayhorn hefted her boxes to the Secretary of State’s office. Either way, this remains one of our favorites…especially our musing about what they were doing with the boxes at the SOS.

What Did Rick Perry Promise Sen. Mike Jackson (AKA ‘Oyster Man’)?: This was back when everyone thought Jackson would run in CD-22 (before the court rulings came down, as I recall). Most notable about this post is the Photoshop, which was one of my favorites. Sadly, unlike ITPT’s “powerwashing nanny” or PD’s “douchebag,” Oyster Man never really took off as a widely used Texas Blogsphere soundbite. So sad.

Speaking of Photoshops, this one seemed to be a big reader favorite. This rendition of Carole Strayhorn’s campaign office was our favorite, though.

There are more, but you get the idea. What were your favorites? Leave it in the comments!

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