Happy Second Anniversary to FanHouse!

Today is the official two-year anniversary of this thing called FanHouse. Last year, I did a retrospective of events that happened in the previous year to celebrate this day. Today, I will do something different.

Here's my own abridged unofficial history of the site -- omitting things I forgot, semi-embarrassing stuff, and attempting to edit my prolix self because I'm writing this at the last second and don't have much time to mess with it. With apologies to those sensitive to gratuitous self-indulgence, chronic overuse of adverbs and windy sentences ...

In the beginning, FanHouse was just NFL FanHouse with no other sports coverage. Our blogfather, Jamie Mottram, now running the Yahoo! blogs and continuing Mr. Irrelevant, researched to find NFL bloggers to cover each team and the NFL in general. The idea behind FanHouse was to collect various blog voices from places around the interwebs, and put them in one place to make them easier to find. It would be a place where you could keep up with everything NFL, and have knowledgeable, passionate fans tell you what the real deal was with those teams in an entertaining way.

Though bloggers could keep their own idiosyncratic ways of writing, we were not to use the real naughty words. This was going to be a sports blog that you wouldn't be too embarrassed for your parents to read (insert tired "once you called them down to the basement" blogger joke here).

Jamie told us at first that FanHouse would launch with just NFL info, and then NCAA Football. If these sports were successful, eventually we would cover other sports as well. And then after a while, that happened. Don't ask me when, because I forget.

Over two years, we have had three different mainsite urls (please update your bookmarks if you haven't) and more writers than I know to count. We won the best sports blog EPpy last year, which I had no idea what it was at all before we won it, but I feel proud anyway.

For some people, FanHouse is a faceless corporate monolith blog steadily churning out posts. And, to some degree, we are that. Night or day, you can find plenty of sports stuff to read either on the main page or the individual sports pages listed on the left. (Yes, I realize "Back Porch" is not a sport in most of polite society, but it is the word FanHouse uses to refer to sports news that doesn't fit the other categories).

For me, FanHouse is a place where I've met some terrific people who care as much about sports as I do. I enjoy reading the enthusiasm in their writing, even if I don't care for that particular sport or team, because there is a place for earnest in this world. Sports fandom survives on caring deeply about subjects that in the big scheme of things don't matter.

Okay, my history has swerved violently sentimental as I've run out of steam, but sniff, sniff...sOB....SNORKkkkk....you guys are the best.

As I wipe away the lone tear falling down my cheek, please feel free to share your thoughts on our anniversary and history. Or if you have any questions or suggestions about FanHouse, you can comment here or send them by e-mail in the resources link in the lower left. Please be relatively kind because, hey, the people here are friends of mine, and well, I don't want to have to punch you square in the face. Anniversaries should be joyous times, so please feel free to indulge in the celebratory beverage of your choosing. And cheers.