Site news

While I’m weighing multiple $300m+ offers, I wanted to take a moment to announce a change to the site: I will no longer be making regular daily game thread posts.

If anyone is interested in stepping up to fill that void, let me know. (Perhaps a once-a week rotation could work.)

The good news is that I will still be lurking in the background to keep the site running and making the occasional snide comment. I’ll keep the contests running, too. 

Hello fellow Cubs fans!

You may have noticed a few subtle changes to the site :D. It's going to take some time for some of the pages to be altered to fit in with the scheme, but either the content's author will have to do the work or I'll do it and coordinate with her/him if necessary. Bottom line is that each editor shouldn't try to do too much with their writings. I can create special classes for highlights or layouts that are often used. I can also set the editor up such that all embedded styling is automatically removed.

First off, I got a new MacBook Air this weekend. I'm hoping this helps with keeping the blog up-to-date better as my old laptop was on its last legs and seriously annoying me so much that I didn't even want to surf the net much.

As for the site, Disqus has been a bit of a disappointment. Not quite what I thought was advertised. While there are features I like, my biggest disappointments so far are:

• lack of new comment notifications when re-visiting site
• lack of real-time updating
• odd thread structure when putting in new comments

I think the "Latest Comments" sidebar helps with the lack of new comment notifications. I just go there and see what I missed, but it doesn't seem to update too quickly and I feel like I'm missing comments. Granted, things are slow right now and interest is at pathetically low levels this time of year, but when the news starts coming again in the offseason, I think it will get even more annoying.

So, I'm going to try upgrading to what they call Disqus 2012. We'll see if it's any better. This requires nothing on any of your parts, but by tomorrow morning, the comments will look a little different. We'll see how we like that after a few weeks. If I/we are still unhappy with the comments, I'll see about getting the native Drupal comment system working again.

By my rough count - and I suppose Christian would be a better authority on it - this is the 7th major incarnation of the site. If I recall, there was its inception, then its days on all-baseball.com, then the buyout by mvp.com which is about the time I joined, then the move to a whole new mvp.com website, then the move to our own site so we could use profanities, I'm then going to count the last year when the old site design failed and I've been running the default theme for far too long and now this.

(Fancy hand gestures, lights go out, puff of smoke...lights go back on)

Voila!!!!

I can't apologize enough for how long this took, I pretty much had it ready in April and did something terribly stupid and had to start from scratch. Life and work tend to get in the way too much for me to devote the time I once did, but luckily a kind reader helped me this time around and we were able to get it going after Thursday's crash. I still have some tweaks to make and I'll share those in a bit. I've checked the site on Firefox, Safari and Chrome and seems to be all working. I don't have Internet Explorer and you shouldn't either, but if you do, let me know if you have any problems and then I'll suggest to you to try a better browser.

Enough of the boring stuff...here's a quick rundown of the new stuff and other supremely important things.

As I've mentioned in the comments, a new site design is on its way in the near(ish) future. Ideally before Opening Day arrives so I can work out the bugs before the games start. It will hopefully be easier to navigate and more importantly to me, easier to maintain as I'm finding the time that I can spend on the site dwindling year by year.

Since absolutely nothing remotely interesting is happening, I'm going to dip into the shark infested waters and dare to ask what more or less you'd like to see from the site.

Well I'm sure there are some bugs, but as far as I can tell everything is functioning with one minor exception. That being under the "Our Writers" drop-down menu, the links for Arizona Phil's latest (also under AZ Phil's Corner), Cubnut's latest, Dr. Hecht's latest, etc currently aren't working. Some of the code is clashing with some other code and now they're waiting for the other to apologize. I should be able to fix it down the road, but it's not particulalry vital either for the site...at least not for the moment.

There's going to be an upgrade done to the site sometime over the weekend, so apologies if it's down when you try to escape your in-laws . This could last anywhere from late Thursday night through Sunday(the upgrade and avoiding your in-laws) and I'm sure it's a guarantee that the Cubs will pull off some big news event just to mess with me.

See everyone on the other side and enjoy the holiday break.

- Cubbery at its finest:

As Lee and Baker were mobbed by teammates in the dugout, relief pitcher Angel Guzman slapped the side of Lee's helmet, causing Lee to experience neck spasms that forced him to come out of the game for defense in the bottom of the ninth.

- Rich Harden is shutting it down for the year, a mutual decision between him and the club. The tone of the article sounds like there isn't much interest by either party in reuniting beyond this season. Fine by me, but will the Cubs offer arbitration?

- Wittenmyer has a rundown of the Cubs rotation down the stretch.

At some point tonight, probably around 10pm CST - although it could be later, could be sooner - we'll be doing a small software upgrade and the site will be down for however long it takes to get done.

If you're still parachatting these days, you can load the link before the upgrade kicks in and keep it open. Once it connects to Parachat, it shouldn't need to access our site, unless you get booted out and have to log-in again.

Lineup for tonight is Fukudome, Blanco, Lee, Hoffpauir, Fontenot, Baker, Hill, Colvin and Dempster versus Brad Penny.