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Over the rest of the weekend, we’ll be updating out “Hot House Race” rankings, and catching up on all of the content we’ve missed during our down time.

We wish to take this opportunity to thank all of our wonderful readers for their patience during this difficult time. We also wish to thank our advertisers for their patience as we were offline.

In addition, we want to thank several people who helped make this very difficult move possible. George Nassar from The Texas Blue and Jason from The Seminal, and Sean-Paul from The Agonist were most kind and helpful. Thanks, guys!

We had planned on keeping the look of Capitol Annex the same through the 2008 election cycle. However, a couple of problems with our other template made today’s changes necessary. The template had several problems on the “back end” that weren’t visible to readers but which may have negatively impacted our ranking in Google.

For the most part, our sidebar content remains intact. We did delete a few items and may delete a few more as the the new redesign gets “field tested” by our readers. One new thing about this redesign (although readers won’t likely notice the change) is that the Capitol Annex sidebars are now fully “widgetized,” meaning that, instead of coding the sidebars within the files of the template, we’ve made full use of WordPress’s widget function, which was made a part of WordPress’s features several releases back.

Another change to Capitol Annex behind the scenes that readers likely won’t notice is that all of the site’s feeds are now handled through FeedBurner, via a WordPress plugin. If you have subscribed to our RSS feed in a reader such as Bloglines, you shouldn’t notice any difference.

As always, your comments on the redesign are welcome. Please feel free to leave them in the comments on this post.

For you math nuts out there, that’s an average of 4.26 posts per day over a 938 day period.

For now, all Capitol Annex readers are able to comment by simply filling out their name and email address, putting down their comment, and filling out the CAPTCHA form on each post. Registration is not, at this time, required to post a comment. However, we do recommend and encourage you to register before posting comments.

Although the comment process will be less burdensome, comments from first-time commenters will be moderated for review as a precaution.

Second, on a trial basis, we’ve lifted the requirement that readers be registered and logged in to comment on Capitol Annex. Hopefully, thanks to a CAPTCHA plugin (yes, that means those squiggly letters and numbers), we won’t be bombarded with spam comments. We’ll try this for a week and see how it goes.

First and foremost, thanks to everyone who contacted us to inquire. We greatly appreciate hearing from our readers.

Second, to answer the question: today.

The 2008 Democratic Primary season was a very busy time for us here at Capitol Annex. In addition to trying like mad to blog the presidential race (which led us to an appearance on BBC) prior to March 4, we were also involved heavily in volunteering and consulting for some candidates, most notably Dale Henry’s race for Texas Railroad Commissioner.

After March 4, things only became more busy as we prepared for county conventions and the looming runoff.

With both of those events behind us, we took a little time off from blogging last week–both to rest and to reflect on the election season past.

During the course of the last week, one reader with whom we weren’t previously acquainted noted that continued coverage of Texas politics must be a “thankless and time consuming” endeavor.

That, of course, got us to thinking. Blogging is nothing if not time consuming. In order to maintain a quality blog and quality readership, it requires a lot of time. Thankless, however, is another story.

We don’t particularly believe it is a “thankless job,” although the media (and, indeed, sometimes other bloggers), and the right wing are quick to heap abuse on political bloggers.

Which begs the question, “Why blog? Why bother?”

It is not a question with an easy (or short) answer.

Having done this since 2003 (at our former blog, which many of you may have been around the blogosphere long enough to remember), from experience, we can tell you that there are many reasons citizen journalism like this is important. You can probably think of your own, but voter education–clearly–is a top priority. The mainstream media simply doesn’t have the resources or focus to pay attention to all of the races that you’ll find covered in the blogophere. Too, in terms of legislative coverage (which, we must admit, has surpassed election coverage as our favorite type of blogging), there are few outlets–the media included–where you can get information about all of the important happenings during a legislative session. Yes, the media will tell you about the general appropriations act passing the House, but they won’t tell you about State Rep. Jodie Laubenberg screaming at Rep. Rafael Anchia, or give you a blow-by-blow account of darned near every amendment and what impact each one has on the budget process.

Without being too long winded, the long and short of the answer to the question, “why blog,” is because it matters. Getting the information out there matters. Making votes aware matters. Engaging activists and recruiting more activists matters.

That’s why we blog.

We are doing so for several reasons. We believe bringing additional voices to Capitol Annex readers who may not read other blogs is a great idea during this season of peaking traffic, and we also think this is a great opportunity to make sure that some of the many other voices in the large and diverse Texas Progressive Blogosphere gain additional exposure to the many readers (especially those in the media) who are reading Capitol Annex daily for primary news and information.

We are pleased to welcome aboard: TXSharon from BlueDaze, Texas Toad from North Texas Liberal, PDiddie from Brains and Eggs, John Coby from Bay Area Houston, and McBlogger from (where else?) McBlogger. We’re also pleased to welcome back Muse from Musings, who guest posted at Capitol Annex over the summer from Yearly Kos 2007, and Refinish69 from Doing My Part For The Left, who guest blogged last winter.
We’ve invited these fine bloggers to post both original content and cross-post their work from other blogs here. Please join myself, Ellie, Lyndon, Senfronia, and the entire Capitol Annex family in welcoming them aboard!

The Presidential primaries have brought out a first for Capitol Annex–people commenting on stories in Spanish.

We have translated their comments, but the online translation engine left a lot to be desired. However, we encourage you to read them and translate them for yourself. Also, we’re very glad to see comments in Spanish. And, in honor of that, we’ve translated this post (using AltaVista’s BabelFish) into Spanish.

(Note, the translation below was done by an online translation engine, and we’re not sure how well it has worked; we translated the below from English to Spanish back about half a dozen times, and had to change many of the English words to make sure it made sense. This isn’t a 100 percent perfect translation, but it was the best we could do with AltaVista.)

Bienvenido a nuestros lectores de habla hispana!

La primaria presidencial ha traído algo nuevo para este sitio: la gente comentando historias en español.

Hemos traducido sus comentarios, pero el motor de traducción en línea deja mucho que desear. Sin embargo, le animamos a leer y traducir los comentarios. Además, estamos muy felices de ver los comentarios en español. Y en honor a ese momento, hemos traducido al español esta entrada

So, if you see some strange stuff going on today in the Annex, it is because Ellie, our official mascot, has rounded up our team of Theme Elves, and they are working on a redesign for Capitol Annex. Every time she barks, one of the elves that works on our themes kicks one of the hamsters that runs our servers and something changes. So, I’m going off to take a nap while Ellie, the elves, and the hamsters change the look of the site.