MileHighHockey is proud of the community that has flourished here over the last couple of seasons.  SBN just gave us the site stats for the previous year and I thought I'd pass along some info to the good people at MHH.

Total Comments

87004 (up from 37010 in 2008)

Total Stories

704 (down from 809 in 2008)

Total FanPosts

326 (up from 147 in 2008)

Total FanShots

612 (up from 167 in 2008)

Total of Stories, FanPosts, and FanShots

1642 (up from 1123 in 2008)

That's a ton of comments and content for our beloved Avalanche!  Hopefully, all the members and lurkers continue to make MHH the premiere Colorado Avalanche fan community on the intrawebs.

And now for the individual awards...

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More photos » SAM LEUNG - AP

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Your eyes are not deceiving you.  MHH and all other SBN blogs have undergone an aesthetic overhaul.

You'll notice many things look different, and many things seem out of place.  Also, you'll notice that comments no longer have paragraph breaks where they should for some reason.  We're currently working with the SBN tech team to iron out the problems and concerns we have, so bear with us.

Also, there are apparently issues with Firefox Adblocker, so if you're having problems posting comments or seeing content, that could be related.

My initial response to the new look is: why?  What was broken about the old look?

But that's just me.

Feel free to belly-ache below.

I've been trying to find the right words for this post all day, and I'm still not quite sure what I'm going to say. As many of you know, I've been contributing part time at Mile High Hockey since its inception (and by "part-time", I mean "not as often as I had promised"). After some extra wordy discussions with Joe and Mike from MHH this week, I have decided to join Mile High on a full-time basis. I'll essentially be doing the same thing I've been doing for the last couple of years (recaps and other various Avalanche noodling); I'll just be doing it there instead of here.

Why, you ask? Mostly, because Joe asked me. I know he's worked his ass off to build Mile High Hockey into a terrific Avalanche community. He's gone all the way from underwear-in-the-basement to just shy of dee-lux-apartment-in-the-sky in a short period of time. And he wants make MHH even bigger (but he's very busy working towards earning his GED or something). Since there's a lot of overlap between the two sites - in readers, content and editorial bias - so it seemed to make sense for us to pool our resources so to speak. I believe that most readers here are already familiar with MHH and may be reading both sites anyway. For them, this consolidation should make life a little easier. If there's any ITCS fans not familiar with Mile High Hockey, I hope you'll take the opportunity to check us out. I'm very excited to help make MHH your new internet overlord. Or something.

I started this blog back in August of 2006. At the time, I didn't really have any idea what I was going to do with the place (as you can see from my first post). I knew almost nothing about blogging. I just knew I wanted to write (I've always fancied myself more as a writer than a blogger). At first, I was aiming to talk about hockey and sports in general, but before long I gravitated towards writing about the one topic that I love the most - the Colorado Avalanche (and hockey jerseys, of course). 640 posts and almost 380,000 words later, I'm literally floored by how many people visit this place every day. For everyone who allowed me to clog up their browser with too many words...a profound thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I also want to thank Dario for his occasional - but always entertaining - guest posts and insightful commentary. You added a sense of legitimacy to the site, my friend, and I really appreciate it.

I don't really know what's going to happen to the Cheap Seats. It won't go away entirely, but any new Avalanche content will be at Mile High Hockey. I'm still going to be working on the game reports - maybe I'll update the progress on those over here for the three of you interested in that. I'll probably keep the game list widget updated (if for no other reason than the fact that I use it quite a bit) and I'll keep the vs last year widget updated too. Some of this may get incorporated into MHH. Or maybe it won't be - if there's something you'd really like to see moved, let us know. I'll still be checking comments here, and all the contact information will still work.

Thank you again for your patronage and I hope to see you all in my new home.

Last year, I introduced a game report that included the Avalanche lines and shift charts. Honestly, my programming skills were (are) such that I was pretty happy with what I came up with. But, it required a lot of work on my end. This summer, I set out to automate a lot more of the process, and, so far, I'm quite pleased with my progress. And, what started out as just an easier way to generate the shift charts has turned into a much bigger process.

Currently, each NHL game is represented by either 8 or 9 different reports. There's a game summary, an event summary, a faceoff report, a play by play, two TOI reports (one for each team), a roster report, a shot report (new this year) and, if applicable, a shootout summary. It's great to have the depth of statistics available, but it can be a little unwieldy. At some point, I decided that since I was grabbing data from several of the reports to make the shift charts, it might be useful to include a lot of the relevant information all on one page.

This is very much a work in progress, and I'll probably be making additions / tweaks / changes all season long. I'll probably finish just in time for the NHL to completely change their format, sending me back to square one. Until then, I'll be doing reports for the Avs (I have the capability now to do it for ALL teams, but I'm not ready to take on that workload...yet). Keep in mind, I just know enough HTML to get myself in trouble. For now, the forms are a little rough. In a stroke of genius, I designed most of it using my 22" monitor at home - and so, they don't look so hot yet on smaller monitors. I use Firefox, and so that's the browser I'd recommend viewing them in. I took some quick peaks in Chrome, and they seemed to look okay. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for IE. If you're using IE and running, say, a 1024x768 resolution...well, um, sorry about that.

For now, here's the 5 preseason Avalanche games we have stats for (the NHL doesn't keep stats at neutral site games in the preseason). I also have the two Bruins preseason games (they played 3 neutral site games). As I said, I have a lot of changes in mind, but for now they're passable (in my opinion). Please feel free to add ideas for improvement in the comments (or send me an email via the about link).

Avalanche:

• Game 1


• Game 2


• Game 4


• Game 5


• Game 6

• Game 4


• Game 5

Hits for my summary of day one of the Avs' rookie camp: 107

Hits for my link to NHL 3rd Jersey news: 2,316...and counting.

So, effective today, I'm dropping all coverage of the Avalanche and focusing on jerseys.

Just kidding.

That's it. We've gone from Skrastins to Smyth over the last two months, and now the grades are in for all 32 players to play for the Avalanche in 2007-2008 (except for Tyler Weiman). I took a much more leisurely pace this year, but I still finished before Joe got past #15 on his summer list. For the record, Tyler Arnason's entry was the most commented (21), followed closely by Jordan Leopold (19) with Marek Svatos a distant third (9). I believe the tops last year was Joe Sakic with 6, so I guess traffic is up.

I'll still be plugging away this summer, posting when something interests me. I had some grandiose plans to gussy up the site this summer, but I really haven't done much at all in that department besides turning on the freaky gravatars in the comment section. Oh, I also hosed most of the ads, at least for now. After earning a grand total of 63 cents in ad revenue, I've come to the realization that I'm probably not going to become filthy rich doing this. And that's okay.

In addition to not improving the website, I've also been putting off a couple of other summer projects. I have some really big improvements in mind for the shift charts I started doing last year (and petered out on) and also am aiming to tweak the gamescore metric I started playing with at the beginning of the year (and then abandoned). I do hope to have those ready to unveil by the start of the season, but I kind of need to get cranking. Instead, I've kind of been focusing on getting my flabby butt into shape, with the help of sites like this and this.

So, stay tuned. There should be some improvements coming to the site. Someday. Or something.

It's a critical time for the Colorado Avalanche. In an example of not-so-perfect timing, I will be in the Caribbean for the next few days. While I am more than excited to be going, I'm kind of bummed to be missing the debut of Ruslan Salei tonight as well as the return to Denver of Adam Foote and Peter Forsberg on Saturday. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to make do with sand, sunshine and fruity drinks with those little umbrellas by the pool.

I don't know if I'll have time or connectivity to check on this site, so assume there will be no updates until next Tuesday. The graphics in the sidebar probably won't be updated, I won't be able to check any comments (or approve comments from new or unrecognized posters), etc etc etc. Thanks for your patience.

Go Avs.

EDIT: Apparently, I'm going to miss a lot of off-ice drama as well. *sigh*

Due to the holiday, I won't have any notes or recap for tonight's Ranger game. It's doubtful that I'll even get a chance to watch it, which bums me out a bit (especially after watching Marian Gaborik score 5 against them last night).

I'm a little more likely to watch the Vancouver game on Sunday, but I don't know if I'll have notes or recaps for that one either. I might have both, I might do one, I might not have a chance to do either.

If anything critical happens, I may post something about it. But it's entirely possible that my next entry won't be until we play the Red Wings on Thursday.

Either way, I hope everyone out there has a safe and happy holiday!