Great Things Brewing In This Reds Site

While it’s been a pleasure writing and conversing about United all this while, through ups and downs, (thankfully, so far, there have been more ups than downs) credit must be given to the readers and commenters in this site who have made Red Rants immensely readable for more than a few United fans. (I hope I can say that without getting abuse from my readers 🙂 ) Also thanks to some of the contributors who have chipped in with their articles here at Rants.

Now in order to make things better and more interactive we are pleased to announce a few new additions to the site. They may range from the subtle to the more conspicuous. So read on to see if these changes really interest you.

1. First things first, we are pleased to launch our own forum for Man Utd fans. Of course, the forum would be hosted by our partner site Soccerlens. It will primarily be a separate thread within the Soccerlens forum. We’d greatly appreciate if some of the good natured (and sometimes caustically worded) banter that goes on our rather brilliant comment threads carry on over to the forum as well. I mean, vent your guts out, both here and at the forum.

2. We have had some writers on RR, but we’d like some more authors here who would contribute on a more regular basis. Yes, we won’t accept anything and everything that people write as articles. For that, of course, we have the comment threads where, almost everything, barring some viagra advertising, goes. So if you think you can write reasonably well and passionately too, we’d like you to get in touch with us and send us a sample. If we like your stuff we’ll take it from there. Again no guarantees. So if you do have it in you, head over to the Contact Form.

Those looking to guest blog are welcome, as long as you do string few sentences together that make meaningful reading. Ah well, you know what I mean. No use labouring my point!

3. A lot of regular visitors may have already noticed, but let me make it clear for other readers. If you head over to the bottom of the page to post a comment, you may have noticed a dark-gray/black box on top of the comment box. If you click on it you will have some formatting options ranging from bold, italics to adding hyperlinks without actually having to manually enter HTML tags. Just highlight the text you need to format and select the relevant button and you’re good to go. And oh, as you type your comment you will have a live preview of your comment below the comment box. All this to help improve your commenting experience. So go ahead, keep ranting there. And also, don’t forget the forum.

4. Finally, we do appreciate suggestions to help improve this site – you have the Contact Form for that, again! I do remember someone wanting some sort of a chat window widget to enable fans to chat away during the match. I think it is a good idea and we may have it sometime in the future. Although at the moment we recommend the forum (mentioned for the millionth time in this post!) and the comment threads for that. I also plan to have the most active threads on the forum and pulled up live onto our sidebar here on this site and that I guess looks like it is in the works. So watch this space.

Well, that’s that. Thanks to the readers for bearing with my daily rants, and special thanks to Ahmed Bilal of Soccerlens to help launch this wonderful site of ours and for his inputs.

I will be back shortly talking business – i.e., United. So till then you are free to suggest improvements.