Moving home is said to be among life’s most stressful activities. Colin Randall has moved seven times in five years and knows all about it. Now he’s moved a football fan site (Salut! Sunderland), so knows that even an electronic change of address isn’t without its moments of tension …
Slowly but – just about – surely, Salut! Sunderland has completed, with enormous help from Sam and his colleagues at Football United, its housemoving exercise, shifting the site and its whopping archive from Typepad to WordPress.
The result of this move, and a rare bit of self-promotion, has sent readership levels to heights known only during the week we stayed up and Newcastle United went down (save for the odd deluge when the Who Are They? feature attracts the fans of other clubs, notably Pompey, West Ham and Nottingham Forest).
We hope you have found and will continue to find items here that interest or amuse you, or provoke thoughts of your own. Football thrives on controversy and Salut! Sunderland is happy to stick its neck out from time to time, usually though not always on topics of at least indirect interest to Sunderland supporters.
One example: this coming week being football-free, as in being merely an international break, I will give another airing to my Club vs Country reflections (subtitled “an easy home win”).
The move has not been completed without hitches. Not all images seem to have accompanied the text on its way over from Typepad (click on the Denise Robertson item in the Salut! Smiles feature and you will probably see what I mean). Some files may have been corrupted – one of my rants against Laurent Blanc appeared in much shortened
form until I spotted it. Our Soccerlinks football site ranking has slipped from a high of something like 65th to its recent, pitiful 261nd – though that is only because it has been recording only visits to the old site, which means virtually none at all, since the move was completed. At least qe are climbing again …
In addition, we are a long way from restoring all the sidebar links to other sites, and to our Amazon bookshelf, which some will remember from the original Salut! Sunderland.
All will be accomplished as time permits. It goes without saying that we will pay careful attention to any suggestions or comments concerning the site.
Your patience during the move has been appreciated, and we will do our best to live up to our new slogan: Premier League writing for a Premier League club. But bear in mind that lofty (cl)aim does not imply any guarantee against the typos, mistaken assumptions and blind faith that are the staples of any self-respecting football site.