Some Thoughts On Two Years In The Annex

Somehow, we at Capitol Annex got busy amid the hustle and bustle of the holiday season and forgot something very, very important: our birthday.

No, no. Not my personal birthday, but the birthday of Capitol Annex itself, which was December 9.

Yes, Capitol Annex turned two earlier this month. Of course, I’ve been blogging much longer than that (since 2003 at my own former site, Free State Standard, and then at Burnt Orange Report, Political State Report, and number of other sites–some of which I still blog at from time to time). Next summer will actually mark my fifth year as a political blogger, which seems like an eternity in cyberspace.

We at Capitol Annex are often privileged to receive emails from readers thanking us for the news and, more often, analysis which we publish. Every time we receive one of those emails, it warms our heart to know that, somewhere out there in cyberspace, what we’re doing makes a difference to (or helps) somebody understand the sometimes crazy, often fun, game that is Texas politics.

Since we failed to reflect on this important occasion a couple of weeks ago, we hope, as we dive head-first into our third year as a site, you will permit us some sappy nostalgic rambling.

When Capitol Annex was first established, it wasn’t something done on a whim. We’d run a political blog before and knew, to put it mildly, that doing so was often not exactly a bed of roses (it is actually hard work). We’d settled on the name, “Capitol Annex,” long before we actually decided to take the plunge and go “out on our own,” so to speak, because we’ve always been fond of the annex to the Texas Capitol. It seemed more than appropriate, too, since we don’t actually blog from the capital city as do many of the state’s political bloggers.

You may also be interested to know that we almost ditched the whole damned thing in a fit of folly about a month after we got it started back up. When we founded Capitol Annex, it was begun as a site running the Drupal content management system. If you are a computer geek, Drupal is wonderful. If you are a blogger who just wants to get content out to the masses with as little pain as possible Drupal isn’t (or at least, wasn’t at the time) the right choice. We’d used it before at Free State Standard, but changes to Drupal’s coding and behavior made it far too difficult for our second round of hanging out a shingle, so to speak. That, and it literally got covered over with spam in about 72 hours (which, it turns out, is not an unfamiliar happening with any blogging system.

Shortly after the dawn of 2006, we’d sadly neglected this fledgling blog because (a) it was covered with spam and (b) updating was very complicated. In mid-January of 2006, however, we made the change over to Wordpress and haven’t looked back. Although we’ve taken a couple of week-long vacations from blogging, we’ve still managed to blog 3,626 posts just in the nearly two years since we’ve switched to Wordpress. We may not be the HuffPo, but volume (combined, hopefully, with quality), is never something we’ve been short on here in the Annex.

We’ve also had some nice recognition in the last couple of years. Along with some nice emails from state legislators and other politicos, we’ve had a number of mentions in the media, and Carl Whitmarsh, who runs one of the biggest Democratic email lists around, has sent out a few of our posts to his many readers, which is always flattering.

However, all of this could not happen in a vacuum. Sure, it is nice to know just how many folks in the Capitol read us based upon our SiteMeter stats, but there are three groups of people without whom Capitol Annex would not be what it is today: our readers, our tipsters, and our fellow bloggers.

I’ve said before and will say many times again that Texas’ progressive blogosphere is perhaps the most vibrant state-level blogosphere in America. The tremendous growth it has seen in the last two years has been wonderful and will, hopefully, continue for some time to come.  The other day, I heard a joke, which bears retelling now simply to illustrate my point:

Q: How many bloggers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: One to change it, one to blog about changing it, one to link to the blogger who blogged about changing it, two to blog about how the first blogger changed the light bulb wrong, one to blog about how the blogger who changed the light bulb changed it right, one to blog about how the two who disagreed with the first blogger are wrong and one to post a picture of the light bulb being changed alongside a picture of a cat with a cute caption.

That may not be exactly how the blogosphere works, but you get the idea. Without our blogger colleagues paying attention to what we do (and us paying attention to them in return), offering additional analysis, and even the occasional disagreement, none of us–least of all Capitol Annex–would be where we are today. So, to our fellow bloggers: thanks for two wonderful years.

We must also give a massive word of thanks to our tipsters. If it weren’t for the many, many, many tipsters who have discovered Capitol Annex from all levels (and, indeed sides) of state government and the political spectrum, many of the stories we’ve been able to break would have gone unreported.

As for our readers, you deserve the biggest thanks of all. As much as we at Capitol Annex love to hear ourselves talk (and ask anyone, we love to hear whatever we have to say), we love to read what we’ve written even more (hence our frequent use of the royal “we” and sometimes flowery prose we are prone to from time to time). Nevertheless, we don’t love reading our own work that much, and we wouldn’t put in the time and effort if it weren’t for all of you wonderful people, out there in the dark [that's a Sunset Boulevard reference, if you are wondering] who log on every day and read what we’ve written. Thanks.

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