CelticsBlog Is Joining SBNation

I'm very pleased to announce that CelticsBlog is joining the SBNation family of blogs .  For those unfamiliar with SBN, take a look at the Ball Don't Lie "Blog Association" rankings.  For the 30 different NBA teams, SBN has the top ranked blog for 14 of them (counting CelticsBlog) and they are in the top 3 for 20 of the 30 teams.  So we'll be in good company.  I think this is a great move for the blog and personally I couldn't be happier joining such a strong team.

I will still be the lead writer and editor.  We'll still have forums and chat and Celtics Stuff Live and all the stuff you love about CelticsBlog.  In fact, we'll even be adding a few more cool ways for you to interact and do some blogging of your own.

As a bonus we'll be merging with Green Bandwagon and as a result adding Jim Weeks to the author staff.  Please welcome him and the Bandwagon community to the CelticsBlog family.

The plan is for this to happen this Friday, October 24^th.  That should give us the weekend to work out the bugs and be ready for the regular season opener.  I know I do this sort of thing to you every year, so you all should be used to it by now.  The difference is this time we'll have a team of SBN tech support folks available to help you 24/7 during the transition.  I'll post more details as we get closer to the switchover (but to sooth any fears, yes, you will keep your post counts and Tommy Points).

For the time being, I thought it might be fun to take you on a visual tour of the prior versions of CelticsBlog (and give you a preview of what the site will look like next).  See the images after the jump.

CelticsBlog 1.0

The original blogger format.  The fact that I knew enough photoshop to do this much and enough HTML to alter the blog format put me ahead of the curve at the time.  Good times.

CelticsBlog 2.0

When the Boston.com chat room was closed down, I saw an opportunity to do a favor for some online friends and maybe gain a few readers in the process.  I set up a chat room and invited everyone over.  Around that time I also set up a message board.  The blog community started taking shape.

Pay no attention to the place where I call Mark Blount a top 5 center in the East.  Ugh.  Let's just move on.

CelticsBlog 3.0

I wanted to have more flexibility and options, so I set up a WordPress blog.  The Get Buckets Brigade turned into the Perkolators and then just fizzled. I still like the idea behind the original Cheap Seats and always wanted to revisit it.  Now with SBNation, you have the FanPosts and FanShots.

This was a good time of growth for the blog.  Of course as the traffic started rising the server started crashing. 

CelticsBlog 4.0

Enter Bob Day, webmaster guardian angel, who saved us from server purgatory and set us up with a beautiful site on Joomla.  A big hat tip to Bradley from Go Fetch Marketing who designed our logos.

CelticsBlog 5.0

As you can see, the black-green-white theme remains the trademark of the blog.  The site follows the SBN template but has enough flexibility to make it customizable.  Plus they have a whole design and tech support team that can help us with special projects from time to time.