Fighting Talker

Hey folks, I am heading up to Portland, ME for a week-long vacation tomorrow, so I won’t be posting quite as much as usual. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to let you know my thoughts on Craig Thompson’s upcoming signing with Arsenal (he’s all we can afford at this point), but otherwise I am going to enjoy some nice weather, the brisk freezing Atlantic ocean, and some good seafood. I don’t know if there is soccer in Maine. I don’t really care either. But don’t fret too much folks, I am sure Ed will take good care of this place.

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.

As a certified Ring-Head*, I will be talking about the games quite a bit on here so be prepared. I am also adding a category to my blogroll with some of the better blogs devoted to the Olympics. Take a look, it’s good stuff.

* Ring-Head, \ˈriŋ\ˈhed\, a fan or journalist who likes and enjoys the Olympic games. Similar to Seam-Head, except doesn’t keep a poster of Peter Gammons above his bed.

Thank you readers. You’ve pushed Fighting Talker to the front page of WordPress.com.

I am finding EPL Talk more and more indispensable each day. It’s good stuff.

I want to take a moment thank my readers for reading this blog. I never imagined that only a few months after start-up, I’d get between 100-200 readers a day. Sure it’s not a lot compared to bigger blogs, but to me, it’s amazing success. The chart above show’s Fighting Talker’s monthly traffic starting from my March debut up to now. It gobsmacks me every time I look at it.

Thank you all so much for taking the time to read my ramblings and ranting. I appreciate it very, very much.

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.

This time it’s Caught in Possession, by Charles Boehm, who covers United for mlsnet.com. He’s a good dude and a great writer.