Important New Features

Hello my dear friends, time for the announcement I was talking about yesterday. Most of you know that this blog has been around for a year now, I started it on the 28th of December 2008. I’m very thankful to all of you for what it became today, a popular blog with a great community of readers. That is why I’m constantly thinking about how to improve it and give you more interesting features.

OK, I guess that’s enough for an introduction, let me tell you what will happen here starting… now!

Opening Up

I already said that I think I learned more from you than you did from me, your input has always been great. On the other hand I know that many of you have great Football Manager stories to tell. I’m very happy that you are reading my stories but I thought that it would be great to open the blog for other authors. The bottom line is that any of you will have the chance to get an account and publish his stories here, you will have a numerous readership right away plus a few other benefits:

• your own name@footballmanagerstory.com email.
• the possibility to insert your own ads in the posts you’ll be publishing. (Don’t worry, you won’t get rich :P But you could earn a few honest pennies.)
• the possibility to advertise your own websites inside your posts.
• …and all that is for free, the hosting bills and all the other expenses will continue to be my problem.

There are a few benefits for me too: this community will grow even bigger and I will have the comfort of being sure that this blog will go on even without me. I won’t retire soon but I might consider that in a few years, so then the blog will be handed over to people that I like and respect.

There are a few requirements though, not anybody will get an «author» account here, I will try to maintain the standard that you got used to. The authors that will get their stories published here must have:

1. Good writing skills and knowledge of the English language.
2. True passion for the greatest game on earth, Football Manager.

So, if you want to apply you can do that by writing me an email at johnny[at]footballmanagerstory[dot]com.

New Author

Indeed, we already have a new author! Most of you already know him and his blog, it’s Kevin and his fine Swindon Town story! He agreed to continue his story here, I’m delighted to host him as an author on this blog. He is already writing a new post and you will see it published here shortly, in a few hours. (Give him a warm welcome, I know you can :) )

Stay In Touch

Another new feature is something that I created to make it easier for you to keep in touch with all the stories and the people in here. It’s a community toolbar that you can install in your web browser (it works with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari). That toolbar will show you the updates in real time, latest posts, comments, twitter updates but it also has a great feature, a chat room!

You can download the toolbar from here and install it into your browser, it will only take a few seconds. After installing it you will see something like this:

The toolbar is 100% safe, I tested it for a whole week, but I recommend un-ticking all the check boxes in that window that will pop up and then click «finish». After you do that you can enjoy all the features safely, here’s how the chat room will look like:

I won’t be online there 24 hours a day but I will try to be there as often and as long as possible.

Over to you now, what do you think about all these changes? Would you like to see new features added to the toolbar? Let me know! I would also love to hear your suggestions about the things that you would like to be implemented here, I would be very grateful if you would share your views.