Author Topic: The Early Years of CelticsBlog  (Read 5059 times)

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The Early Years of CelticsBlog
« on: August 28, 2009, 07:58:12 AM »

Offline Jeff

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I guess it is as good a time as any to put this down for posterity's sake.  If there was a book written about CelticsBlog, this would be the first chapter.  I can't imagine anyone buying that book, but whatever.

I won't bore you with my life story, but I guess it starts with the fact that I moved to Virginia to go to school and stuck there after graduation.  Growing up in Plymouth MA I was spoiled by always having fellow fans to talk sports with.  When I found myself sitting at a desk job in an entry level job with some time on my hands, I found some great communities of Celtics fans in the early days of message boards.  My favorites were the FanHome forums and the Boston.com chat room.  I was prone to go off on rants about subjects I was passionate about and the name "ranter" became my handle.

In addition, for about a year or two, I tried creating a general sports website with a small group of my friends called SportsRant.net.  It was a lot of fun, but our traffic consisted of about 5 regular readers and it just wasn't worth it after a while.

Still, I had my outlet of talking on Celtics forums.  Over time I found myself enjoying the role of finding news, posting a link to the latest stories, and getting the discussion going on the forums.  After some time, I was recruited to be a mod and eventually the lead mod on the Celtics forum at Fanhome - I took over for hagrid who left over differences with the management.

At some point I decided to give the website thing another go, this time focusing on the one subject I'm really passionate about - the Celtics.  I asked hagrid to join me and I asked a few of the friends I had made over time to come check out the site.

Oh yeah, and the big thing that helped was the fact that blogs were invented.  It was a pain creating HTML pages and linking them and uploading them to a server and all that.  I had been waiting for something like blogs to be invented for years before they arrived.  It was a revelation.

So CelticsBlog was born.  We had a small group of friends that told their friends about the site and the popularity slowly grew.  I still posted on the forums and chat room and added a link in my signature to the blog.

The big break, if you will, happened when Boston.com decided to kill off the old chat room.  They were replacing it with forums and everyone was in an uproar over it.

I saw an opportunity and I jumped on it.  I found some simple chat software script, dropped it onto a website, and linked it up to the blog and invited everyone to come over and use my chat room.  Everyone was very grateful (except a few folks that couldn't use Javascript on their computers - that was unfortunate) and of course they got a daily reminder to check out the blog portion of the site as well.  Everyone won.

Somewhere along the way we added forums as well and I invited a number of people (like Bent and Master PO) to write a few articles as well.  After a while hagrid ended up with a job that took him away from the computer during the day, and the other authors didn't really have the desire to write every day, so I just ran with it.

I suppose the next time the blog really ballooned in popularity was when Antoine Walker returned.  For some reason that struck a cord with fans and many found the site as a great outlet to discuss the event.

The rest you probably know - and now you might just know more than you ever cared to.  But it was good to write it down before any more of the facts faded away into the dark recesses of my mind.
Faith and Sports - an essay by Jeff Clark

"Know what I pray for? The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference." - Calvin (Bill Watterson)

Re: The Early Years of CelticsBlog
« Reply #1 on: August 28, 2009, 08:35:55 AM »

Offline Mike-Dub

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Thanks Jeff I liked hearing about the history of CelticsBlog.
"It's all about having the heart of a champion." - #34 Paul Pierce

Re: The Early Years of CelticsBlog
« Reply #2 on: August 28, 2009, 09:21:41 AM »

Offline wil

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yea...thanks Jeff.  I would definitely buy that book!

Re: The Early Years of CelticsBlog
« Reply #3 on: August 28, 2009, 09:24:44 AM »

Offline Master Po

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I may to help Jeff on his memory ......I know I know.....I should just get the drinks.

Good Stuff and Good times

"A band of Brothers"

Re: The Early Years of CelticsBlog
« Reply #4 on: August 28, 2009, 09:45:19 AM »

Offline Kwhit10

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Interesting stuff, thanks Jeff.