Bleeding Green Nation turns 3

Sept 26, 2006 Bleeding Green Nation was born.

About 3 years and one month ago David Halprin, the head guy at Blogging the Boys, came across my old Eagles blog and wrote me an email asking if I'd be interested in starting a new site with this new company called SBNation. At the time, SBNation was mostly just a collection of baseball and some college blogs. They had more grandiose plans however... Tyler, who runs Athletics Nation(and now the whole company), wanted to expand on SBNation's NFL coverage, so he sent Dave out in search of NFL bloggers. 

When Dave asked me to join up, I was happy to do so mostly because it meant someone else could run the technical side of things. I love writing, but as you can see from the old site I'm not much of a web designer... Actually BGN itself wasn't always the technical marvel it is today, here's what the site looked like when it first launched. Soon after Bleeding Green Nation went live, we found more bloggers to fill up the NFC East... Then we eventually found someone to cover every NFL team. It seemed like there was more to this little company than people who make my site pretty... Then came the hockey bloggers... In fact, I found our Penguins writer myself! Now over a hundred colleges have their own site as does everything from the NBA, to tennis, cycling, soccer, MMA, boxing... Now the company is drawing in big advertisers and millions of dollars from investors... and it all started from a few guys ranting about their favorite team on the internet.

Since BGN launched the site and my work has been featured on ESPN, CBS, NBC, SI.com, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the NY Times, Washington Post, Yahoo sports, and more. The site has been visited 5,491,485 as of this minute. Five and a half million people! I remember being excited in the early days when I had hundred people visit for the first time. I never could imagine a day when 60k people could visit this site in one day, which happened several times when free agency started. The community that has sprung up around the site is amazing and I thank every one of you that has helped it grow. This is very much your site as much as it is mine.

Since I put Brian Dawkins at the top of my first site when I started it 4 years ago, It's only fitting that I mark the anniversary of BGN with my favorite all time Eagle at the top. In the end, I'm just a fan. I'm not a journalist nor do I aspire to be one with this site. I'm proudly biased, I cheer at the games, and I like talking about football. Those are the reasons I started the site and the reasons I continue to do it today.