Snowman On Fire

Bit by bit, I’m recovering the roughly 170 blog entries from the V1.0 SnowmanOnFire blog that didn’t completely suck. Some sucked, but not so thoroughly as to be left to bit rot forever. At my current rate of cut and paste, as well as proof-reading, fixing broken links and adding color commentary, it will take me about 2 full weeks to repair everything.

If there’s good news in this, it’s that the new version of WordPress doesn’t seem to suffer from the spam attraction/insertion problems as the 3-year old version with which I started. Further, I’m able to add tags to posts, so you can click on a tag and see any and all related content. I desperately need to get caught up so that Google searches, external links and other cross-references work once more.

And then all dozen of my readers can breathe a collective sigh of relief, or so I would like to believe.

The NHL has put up a rather short and edited blog roll on nhl.com. I’ve been of the impression that blogs are the vox populi, what the average puck head offers as an assist to the other hockey fan. Or just blunt commentary on why it costs $25 to feed two people at the Meadowlands, or why the Devils keep holding out for Scott Stevens to return to the team even though they’ve announced a date to retire his number.

It’s not the the NHL blogs are bad — Robbie Merrill (bass player for one of my pre-game fave bands Godsmack) is funny and articulate. A recent post about Guy Kawasaki captures some of the very reasons I started playing again after an 18-year off season. But what about the other millions of fans, worldwide, who have something to say?

Note to NHL online execs: open up the blogosphere. Run ads in our blogs, it’s fair, but give the fans a voice and an outlet again. Otherwise the NHL blogs are simply columns written by folks who miss a sports beat.