As of this year, I’ve been blogging at ZD for two decades! This is about 40% of my life, longer than I’ve held any one job, and longer than I’ve lived in any one US state. I spent a lot of time in graduate school, so it still isn’t quite as long as the total amount of time I was in school. And I’ve been married quite a bit longer than I’ve been blogging. But still, it’s a long freaking time! Of course, a lot of my persistence is just technological stubbornness, as interest in the blogs leaked away first to text-based social media, and then even further to social media based on images and videos, while I’ve just hung around here in my comfort zone. It’s also fringe Mormonism stubbornness, as it seems like a lot of people on the edges either eventually leave or (less often, I think) return to being more in the mainstream of the Church, while I’ve stayed in largely the same place over time.
I’ve been thinking back over what I’ve blogged about over the years, and I thought it might be fun to do a review of my blogging in kind of the format of my Conference reviews. (For a different take, back in 2019, I did a more data-and-chart review of myself.) Like in those posts, some of the categories are more objective and others more subjective, so I understand if you disagree with my selections. And of course it’s particularly difficult to evaluate my own work, as even posts I look back on now and maybe cringe at were still things that I thought a lot about and in many cases did a lot of data collection for. So what I’m saying is that I understand if you see my evaluations of my posts as clearly being done with rose-colored glasses.
Total posts: 442
Most posts in a year: 33, in 2015
Most posts in a quarter: 12, in 2015Q2
Most posts in a month: 6, in November, 2015, the month when the Exclusion Policy came out
Last month in which I failed to post: July, 2018. (I realize posting once a month is a low bar, but I’m not the most energetic blogger.)
Favorite titles:
- The Selfish Gene (-ral Authority)
- The Incredible Shrinking Statistical Report
- Mary, did you know . . . you need to cover up?
Least favorite title: Pewferences
Phoning it in titles:
- I’ve used variations on the phrase “correlated cards for Valentine’s Day” for five different posts.
- I’ve also used variations on the phrase “Conference predictions” for four different posts.
Longest title: A Mother There or Multiple Mothers There? A look at whether GA statements about Heavenly Mother leave the door open for polygamy
Shortest title: Stay
Wannabe academic title: Distal Effects of Missionary Age Changes
Worst title typo: Different Way [sic] the Handbook Says “Don’t”
Most graphs: Nacle Numbers, 2003-2008, Part 2: The Blogs had 45 graphs, followed closely by Are Mormons More Homogeneous in Belief than Members of Other Churches?, which had 44.
Fewest graphs: A ton of posts tied with zero.
Favorite graph: I particularly like this graph I made for a 2024 post that shows estimated shifting of patrons from temple to temple in Utah when one temple is closed. I think it’s most fun because it’s so unusual for me. Mostly I just make tons of line and bar graphs.
Least favorite graph: The graph in this 2020 post where I counted which Q15 members were following Russell M. Nelson’s exhortation to post about gratitude on social media looks really ugly to me now. I didn’t choose colors or bar spacing well.
Best image: I like Robert Zund’s Road to Emmaus painting that 
Best image: I really like Yongsung Kim’s painting The Hand of God that 
