The PAC Dance Team and Advanced Dance performing at Homecoming 2018, Walden Grove High School, Sahuarita, AZ – Harry Potter theme! You can watch more of their routines at this link.

Choreography/Coach: Kristi Lopez, Assistant Coach: Kathya Quihuiz
Inquiries: klopez@sahuarita.net, Hat tip to David Martin for the find.

‘Merry Christmas’ to all of you on the nominalist’s calendar, believers and secularists alike! A blessed St Spyridon’s Day to any Orthodox Christian stopping by today, as well.

I have been posting online since 2004, even earlier if you include the classes I taught at Barnes and Noble University right after the publication of Hidden Key to Harry Potter at the end of 2002. But HogwartsProfessor.com didn’t take its present form as a WordPress weblog until 25 December 2006 when I wrote and posted ‘Welcome to the New HogwartsProfessor.com!‘ We were off and running that same day with my first thoughts about the possible meanings of the then just announced title of the Hogwarts Saga finale, Deathly Hallows. [If you’re looking for someone to laud or blame for all this, Travis Prinzi was the webmaster who created the site as we have it, trouble shot the many glitches, and hosted it as well on a server for many years.]

So the site is 11 years old today, 12 if you live in Japan (where you are ‘1’ rather than ‘0’ in your first year of life). To mark this numerologically significant occasion I have gone all-in on the ‘Pillar Posts’ project. This morning I put up place holders in the dedicated sidebar for seven categories of Pillars with twenty-eight subcategories.

The answer to ‘why bother?’ is two-fold. (1) There are a lot of posts, currently 388 pages with 1,937 articles of various lengths, with a boat-load of quality content and (2), mixed together as it all is in the archives,  it’s very difficult to find the relevant posts on a specific subject. The searchbar, frankly, is undependable and scrolling through close to 400 pages in hopes of a ‘find’ is a task for mad-hatters and trust-funders. 

The project will progress in three stages. The first has been installing the sidebar widget (thank you, BlogMechanic!) and organizing and posting the preliminary place holders in sequence. That was the easy part I finished today.

The second stage will involve updating those blank place-holders with lists of urls for the subject and then organizing those lists into topic categories with short explanations and pointers about where to start. For a look at the url listing page looks like, see the ‘Literary Alchemy’ Pillar Post work in progress.

The third stage will be a proper introduction to the subject as well as an annotated index to HogwartsProfessor posts on the subject. I’m working on that for the Lethal White pillar to go up this next week. On larger subjects, this will take some doing but it is exciting to have started on the necessary journey of organizing the weblog after all these years.

Thank you to Travis Prinzi for his example, encouragement, and patronage at the start and through the years. Thank you, too, to the HogwartsProfessor faculty, especially Elizabeth Baird-Hardy and Louise Freeman, for sharing your thoughts here, and to the host of Guest Post writers for your various contributions.

And ‘Thank you’ most of all to you loyal readers, from the distant past before Deathly Hallows was published to those joining us for the first time this month to talk about Newt Scamander and friends in Paris. Your comments, corrections, and conversations have been the proverbial wind in my sails. The six books I’ve written and published since 2006 were all conceived here and much improved because of your feedback.

Thank you one and all for your patience with me since 2006, and, in advance, with the Pillar Posts project. 

Seven Reasons that Rowling Deserves the Literature Nobel Prize: An Exercise in Formalist Criticism

Pillar Post Place Holder for Sidebar Listing

Pillar Post Place Holder for Sidebar Listing