Latest Bylines and a 2017 Recap

In December I barely posted on the blog at all because I was working on the move to self-hosting. Even opting for the easy peasy “Let WordPress handle the details” version, it turned out to be a pretty big job. Every single thing you read about how to be a successful blogger says it’s better to self-host. But to be honest, I’m not sure it was the right decision. Anyway, on the paying-work front, November and December were quiet but I did have a few things published.

The Year in Paid Work

Government work and business work is a lot harder to count than article bylines. So I’m not counting it. Just looking at published articles, I wrote 82 pieces last year. That tells me I need to focus on higher pay rates in 2018, because if I’m broke, it’s not for lack of work. My stories published in December are listed below. If you’re interested in earlier articles, check out the links on my Publications page.

On ParentMap

In November I saw Newsies at Village Theatre in Issaquah and recommended 40 Holiday Shows to fill the season. I’m kind of a sucker for boys dancing about labor issues. (I loved Billy Elliot, too.) Early in December, I got to attend opening night of Howl’s Moving Castle at Book-It Theatre. I’m a big fan of Diana Wynn-Jones’ book, and Howl is possibly my favorite Ghibli movie. I had high expectations for the musical, but fortunately the production lived up to them. My whole family laughed out loud and I was glad the run sold out. I want to see it produced again.

On AvvoStories

Over on the law blog, I wrote about a new form of ticket fraud, how small businesses can make the most of Small Business Saturday, whether the feds need a warrant to search your cell phone (spoiler: no) and a growing parallel court system to serve veterans.

Stories about constitutional law are always my favorites. I got to write about one case where the Supreme Court got it wrong, Korematsu v United States and asked whether the J20 case threatens the First Amendment (spoiler: yes). I also wrote about why even conservatives wanted to keep net neutrality protections, and what Washington state is doing to keep it.

On the privacy front, the City of Seattle is restricting surveillance technology, while an Oregon law is requiring to teachers to report sexually active teens. Washington state got an extension to delay compliance with the Real ID requirement.

There’s a bill that would legalize lane-splitting in Arizona. More questions: would a Miracle on 34th Street be possible today? Does the U.S. meet the obligations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (spoiler: no).

On the Blog

I got to go to Freakout Fest for the NadaMucho blog.

Despite only posting 4 times in December, the old site got some views. Besides the home page, the most popular posts were:

• I’ve Moved – I hope they all bookmarked the new URL!
• Choose Your Own Adventure – With Sex! – The post that keeps on giving. Now at a new URL.
• The Family Barber (of Seville) – I hope they take the kids next time.
• The Looney Toons World of Marriage of Figaro – Someone was probably trying to figure out which opera was which. It’s easy to get the two Figaro operas confused.

2017 in Blogging

I used to get a cool year-end report from WordPress. Maybe they stopped doing it or I lost my summary privileges when I switched hosts, but this year I didn’t get one. I did find this in my stats page, though:

Annual Site Stats – 2017

Busiest Month: March

Total Posts: 101

Total Comments: 80

Average Comments per Post: 1

Total Words: 49,863

Average Words per Post: 494

(Considering that I posted most to my 1000 Words category, which has one-paragraph captions for photos, the remaining posts must be really wordy. Sorry, I’ll try to tighten things up this year.)