SUPER BIG NEWS (Let's call it SBN for short)

Yup, that's right. Some big-ass news.

Battle of California is moving to a new home. http://www.battleofcali.com/ (an SBN blog)-- though this link won't work until later today, I think. Once our new site is active, I'll add the link up above, but this does represent the final post of the blogspot site we've inhabited for some 2 1/2 years. That's right, we're selling out.

I guess the first topic to talk about is why we're moving over to SBN, and the answer is pretty much because James Mirtle asked. He's the guy who started this blog back in the day when I had no idea how to start a blog; more or less he's the reason this blog exists. Plus in the two years I've been monitoring blog traffic, roughly 10% of our traffic has come straight from his site, now at From the Rink. Mirtle has been amassing a set of team-specific bloggers to cover the 30 teams at SBN, and it's a pretty cool vision, one I'm willing to support...in spirit.

That's right. I went there.
You see, this is actually where we are letting Mirtle down, as he was originally hoping we could fill his Ducks and Kings vacancies. But I was pretty insistent on keeping our multi-team multi-author Voltron unit together -- as a blogger, I'm way too in love with the BoC dynamic. I'm very interested in the takes of Sharks and Kings fans, it turns out I enjoy writing for both Ducks haters and Ducks fans, and I'm also too lazy to carry a blog on my own.

We've arranged things to hopefully stay exactly as they are -- PJ will still be at Sharkspage, Mike Chen will still be at Kukla's Korner, James O'Brien will still cross-post at Cycle like the Sedins, and I'll still try to do a weekly cartoon at NHL FanHouse -- the way we interacted with BoC yesterday will hopefully be the way we interact with BoC tomorrow.

I'll apologize now for new bookmarks, new hyperlinks, new RSS feeds, new logins, and any other technical nonsense we'll run into because of this (which will all be entirely my fault -- the tech dudes at SBN have been kick-ass), but hopefully it's not too much a pain for anybody. There's some cool new functionality at SBN -- you can post your own FanPost or FanShot content, for one -- plus with the aforementioned kick-ass tech team, I think we'll find some benefit in the move. I do want to say though -- after two and a half years, I don't have anything bad to say about blogspot. They hosted our shit for free for years, and we'll keep this site as-is for as long as they continue that service. We are also in the process of migrating our archives over to SBN, though (one of the reasons we're not live just yet), just in case blogspot turns into a back-stabbing whore.


The last two years of blogspot traffic.
I'll update this post when the new site is fully active, but for now, while we're still just talking about it, it feels appropriate to give a little thanks. Thanks first and foremost to the commenters and fellow bloggers that gave our little website some legs -- you guys are awesome, and hopefully will continue to interact with our SBN posts with the same wit and insight as before. Also, thanks to the Ducks, Kings, Sharks, and Stars for never taking our asses to court. I don't think we've done anything terrible towards our teams, but with NHL politics, you never can quite tell. And finally, thanks to the NHL media's east coast bias -- without it, we may have never found anything in common to develop a collective perspective.

So, that's BoC's Super Big News (SBN). Feel free to react in the comments here or comments at SBN once we're up and active. Betrayed? Excited? Worried? Confused? Good, so are we.

Go BoC.