Before I get to my favorite posts of 2015, however, I need to get something off of my chest.
This may come as a shock to those who toss the “clickbait” accusation at a clever headline, but we don’t write this stuff just for our personal gratification and financial remuneration. We’d also kind of prefer that folks gather around our soapbox and bend an ear to hear our shpiel. Sometimes, though, we put a lot of effort into something, but the planets don’t align and relatively few people read it.
There was a recent post of mine about a Texas plumber suing a dealer who took his Ford Super Duty pickup truck as a trade-in on a new work truck. The dealer neglected to remove the plumber’s advertising decals and the truck got shipped overseas where it ended up on the front lines, publicized on social media, with some jihadis in Syria.
Around the same time, I posted a two–part series about Bonneville Salt Flat promoter and speed record holder Ab Jenkins and his record setting Duesenberg named the Mormon Meteor. In one of those serendipitous occurrences, while I was searching for info on the car, I came across the finding aid for a personal collection of J. Herbert Newport, who designed the Meteor’s body. The collection, which included Newport’s own original drawings of the car, happened to be at one of the University of Michigan’s libraries, about 45 minutes from my home. Now, to be honest, the Meteor piece was already long enough to split in two. I doubt very much that any of the readers would have found the piece lacking without images of those drawings, but Leonard Schreiber, DVM, taught me that I had to do the best job I could, no matter the job, so I made the drive.
Putting aside the hours of research and writing involved in the Jenkins series (including a trip to Auburn, Indiana, where I photographed the Meteor), I undoubtedly spent more time driving to and from Ann Arbor and photographing those artifacts than I did working on the entire plumbing-truck-gone-jihad post. Combined, though, the two posts on Jenkins on his Duesenberg ended up getting a fraction of the readers of the jihadi truck post — which ended up being the most read post on the site that week by a large margin.
I’d be lying to say that I wasn’t happy about a successful post that got a lot of traffic, but it’d have been nice if all that traffic was for something about which I genuinely cared.
As a result, some of my choices below are indeed posts that I think deserve more readers than they got the first time around. Some, but not all. The rest I picked by what struck my fancy. I was going to just pick a single post from each month, but since I’m making the rules, there are a few more than twelve.
Collect by: http://tinyurl.com/h5f9srw
