Fighting Talker

You’ll notice that the design on this site has been changing a whole bunch. The reason that is the case is that the old theme I was using did not include the author’s name with the posts, so you wouldn’t be able to tell posts written by me and posts writen by Ed apart. That is no good.

I have been experimenting with a few other themes in the past 48 hours until I find one I like nearly as much as the old one. The RSS feeds are totally unaffected by these changes, so those folks reading through aggrigators won’t notice or need to adjust anything.

With the explosion of interest in Fighting Talker, and my upcoming week-long vacation to Maine, I have reached out to a good friend and fellow lapsed sportswriter join this fair blog.

I am happy to introduce Ed Morgans to the Fighting Talker fold. Morgans wrote for The Journal Newspapers, based in Alexandria, VA, (and now The Examiner) from 1996-2002; covering United from 1997-2002. He wrote for the team web site in 2003 (sort of the forerunner to Behind the Badge) and has been writing for the Barra Brava site for the past three seasons.. Another former member of the WMET Soccer Show alumni society, he now holds court primarily in the tailgating lot with fellow members of the Barra Brava. Other than United, Morgans also supports:

• Washington Capitals
• Napoli
• Manchester United
• Chicago Cubs
• Pittsburgh Steelers

He’s one of the funniest folks around and I am sure you will enjoy his stuff.

WordPress solved the issue I has having with moving my blog to www.fightingtalker.com. That, along with the old .wordpress address both work.

The only potential issue for readers is that folks with old feed-readers may need to re-subscribe to the new feed. I haven’t noticed any traffic drops from syndicated hits since yesterday, so I suspect the problem is very, very limited.

Please let me know if you are having any trouble accessing the feed or the site.

Thanks!

This blog is now available at www.fightingtalker.com. Everything on the site will still look and work the same but if you use a feed reader, you should probably just update it with my new feed addresses. You may not even have to do that, depending on what feed reader you have.

Update: Yahoo is misbehaving with it. For now it’s back at the old address.

I missed the game last night due to travel commitments. I’ll have more on it later.

Congratulations to the gang over at the DCenters for three years of great service to all DC United supporters.

Don’t forget that you can win a free copy of John Foot’s history of Italian soccer by clicking here and taking part in Fighting Talker’s little contest.

The Capital Weather Gang (”Bloods? crips? No, I ride with the C.W.G”) at the Washington Post have created a “Unitedcast” forecast for all home United matches. They can be accessed here.

It’s a nice feature and right now they are iffy on whether Saturday’s game will be dry one.

It’s located at behindthebadge.com. There is also a Spanish version.

So, we likely don’t need to tell you that we’ll be providing ridiculous access to the players, coaches and front office of the most successful soccer team this country has ever seen. Allow us to share, however, that what you see here is only the beginning – we’ve got a ton of great features launching over the next few weeks, so keep checking back. You’ll hear primarily from members of the four-time reigning PR department of the year, but from time-to-time, our players, coaches and higher-ups will check in with their thoughts.

This potentially could be a great way of communicating with fans and I am thrilled that they also did a Spanish version. Why haven’t other teams done this?

USA Today soccer guru and overall nice dude (despite being a dookie) Beau Dure has started a soccer blog called the Netminder. If it’s half as good as his pregame RFK dining room musings, it’ll surely become required reading.