Hello everyone and welcome to the new and improved Canes Country! If this is your first visit to the site, we primarily cover the Carolina Hurricanes, but we also discuss the rest of the NHL as well. If you are a "CC" regular, you can see that we have officially been assimilated by the Sports Blog Nation "collective". Allow me to explain why this is a great thing for the blog as well as for you, our loyal readers.
First of all, we no longer have to worry about upgrades, servers crashing, power outages, and overloaded webhosts. SBN takes care of all the technical stuff now, which allows us to concentrate more on content. The network also provides rosters, statistics, scheduling, game recaps, and other team related information. All of this is integrated within the site and will allow us to provide more in-depth information in our articles and on the blog itself. Our regulars who previously enjoyed leaving feedback will also notice a much more sophisticated comment system than what we have used in the past. You can now preview and edit your comments, as well as direct your comment to other specific ones if you wish.
If you have something more to say that is unrelated to a specific article, you can now create your own blog postings in the "fanpost" area which can also be commented on, or you can share published information in the "fanshot" area. (we will get more into that later). We will continue our Canes Country Points contests in the fanpost area and have other plans for that section as well.
Cory and I are very excited about this opportunity and have several ideas about how to continue to improve the site. We have been approached by other blog networks in the past with offers to join, but none of them were very appealing because we just didn't see much value in partnering with them. But Sports Blog Nation not only has the best tools to help us provide our readers with more information, they also have some of the biggest names and most influential people in all of blogging on the scene to help make this site a huge success.
SBN's president, Tyler Bleszinski, is known as one of the best bloggers in all of sports. James Mirtle, one of the top hockey bloggers in the business, is managing the hockey section and is committed to building the best NHL blog network on the web. SBN's chairman, Jim Bankoff, has acquired major equity funding and has big plans for the growth of the site. Even Capitals owner Ted Leonsis has invested in the project. It's certainly hard to find a more qualified group of people to partner with.
Change is hard for some of us and it might take a little time for a few of you to get comfortable with the new digs. You will need to register to leave comments and there might be a few other minor inconveniences to deal with in starting over. But all in all, we feel the positives far out-weigh any negatives. Cory and I are totally committed to making this the best, most informative hockey blog that we possibly can and SBN's resources will enable us to do exactly that..
Finally, I would like to thank James, Tyler, and Jim for this opportunity as well as for providing all the information and assistance during the transition. Also a big thank you to Chris and Ryan for their help in setting things up, and to JP and Frank for their guidance as well.
Last but not least, thank you to our loyal readers who have helped to put Canes Country on the map and who make all the hard work worthwhile. Take your time and check out the new features. Although not completed yet, we still have our links on the left sidebar along with our previous RSS feeds. The remodeling and reconstruction of the blog will be ongoing. As always, we are open to suggestions so feel free to leave a comment or email us at canescountry@gmail.com.