Oliver Perez goes for the Mets today against the Indians, with Opening Day quickly drawing nigh.

This season, open threads will be a little different than last year, as we're going to run a monthly Mets giveaway contest, with prizes including the Mets World Series DVD set, MLB 08: The Show for PS3, and other Mets gear (possibly hats/shirts, or maybe even replica jerseys if we get enough people involved).

Before every game I will post a link to that day's contest form, which will contain some questions about the upcoming game. Every game will include the following questions:

- Mets' score
- Opponent's score
- Mets' starter's game score

Those static questions will be supplemented with two additional questions. Here is today's form, which you can fill out for practice and see what I'm talking about. Results of spring training games will not count, but you can at least get a feel for how the form works.

There are still some bugs to work out with the form; it was originally used on the SBN Blazers site Blazers Edge, but is being ported for use here. You will still see some artifacts of the BE version (the first field on the form still says "Blazersedge user name") but those and some other bugs will be ironed out shortly.

I will post a longer explanation of the contest rules and scoring next week sometime, but I just wanted to get it out there so you guys can try it out. If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know, as this will be a pretty organic process as we stabilize the system.

In addition to the gameday contest, this site will be undergoing a platform change, likely to take place next Thursday night, 3/27. All SBNation sites are being converted to a brand new blogging suite designed specifically for us and geared towards sports blogging. You can see the new platform at already-converted sites like Athletics Nation, Halos Heaven and Minor League Ball, among others.

Obviously, the interface is being overhauled, but there are a number of new features that will make interacting with the community here even easier and more rewarding. "Diaries" are being replaced by something called "Fan Posts", and a new feature called "Fan Shots" allow you to post tiny snippets that might have been too short to be an actual diary in the past. The new site will accommodate user avatars and easier posting of images and YouTube videos, and those of you who visit multiple SBNation sites regularly will be excited about the universal login feature that will be implemented across the network.

There are countless other features that I'm not going to go into just yet, but it's definitely an exciting time to be part of SBN. There will be an adjustment period for everyone, but overall I think everyone will come to embrace the changes and the freedom of functionality that the new platform will bring.

That's it for now. Again, please test out the game form and let me know what you think. If you run into any problems with the interface or posting your answers, just let me know in the comments here.

Just a quick thanks to everyone who dropped by this year and a happy holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, et al) to you and yours. I will be spending the day at Kim's family's house. My folks are Jewish, which means everyone is happy around holiday time because there's no bickering over where to spend which occasion.

I hope everyone enjoys their day off and doesn't get too stressed out with the family and the food and the gifts and the hipping and the hopping and the bipping and the bopping.

There's a new poll up on sidebar. I'm trying to gauge how bored everyone is of this offseason. The depth of my boredom rests comfortably between "gouge my eyes out with a spoon" and "take an acid-filled water balloon to the face". I spent about two hours tonight shoveling snow (read: ice) thanks to the delightful hail storm Jebus decided to dump on us this weekend. Regardless of how often I tell myself that we should do the shoveling when the snow is still soft, I never seem to follow through on that and wind up out there with the ice-breaker, wrenching my back and shoulders to a nice burning soreness.

Kim (the wife) and I moved into a new house in Wyckoff, New Jersey, back in June, so this is our first winter at the new digs. We previously lived in Rochelle Park and we both grew up in Glen Rock, so we have plenty of familiarity with the area. Anyway, our house is a nice corner lot, which fortunately only has sidewalk on one side, saving us from the typical corner lot drawback of having twice as much sidewalk to shovel. To make up for that stroke of luck, the town plows are kind enough to deposit much of the street's snow right onto our walk, providing us twice the snow-shoveling fun than we might otherwise have had.

Kim and I have been together for more than nine years and were married (in Maui!) last August (2006). We have two boys: Oscar and Riley. Oscar is six now; Riley one. Riley sleeps with us religiously; Oscar, only occasionally, though the likelihood of him sleeping with us improves dramatically when there's thunder. I never had a dog growing up, as my father has serious canine allergies that he generously passed along to me. However, we found out that Cairn Terriers are hyper- hypo-allergenic, and after we got Oscar I finally realized what I was missing all of those years. If you're a dog person, you know what I'm talking about.

I started blogging in September of 2003. Inspired much by Aaron Gleeman and David Pinto, I took a crack at the online writing thing and have been doing it ever since. With my love of the Mets and a newly-discovered interest in something called sabermetrics, I combined those two interests into a blog I called SaberMets. A little more than a year after that I teamed up with a bunch of other Mets bloggers -- seven others, to be exact -- and started MetsGeek. Coincidentally, right around the time MetsGeek was getting started I was contacted by Blez to see if I wanted to pen the Mets blog for a fledgling sports blog network called SportsBlogs Nation. The site was to be called Amazin' Avenue, and I've been writing here for almost three years since.

That's how I ended up here.

Those of you with functioning eyeballs will surely have noticed the addition of Google ads at the tail end of the first three posts on the main page. Don't be too alarmed. SBN is testing out some different ways of monetizing our blogs and Google ads is just one of them.

I'll keep you posted if I hear anything else, and feel free to post feedback in the comments here.

UPDATE: Wow, the ad on the first post is especially obtrusive, particularly on short posts like this one. I guess I will just have to adapt and learn to be more verbose with my writing.

Apologies for not updating anything this past day or so. My wife and I (and our two dogs) have packed everything up and are making the big move... three towns to the north. We're closing both houses today (the movers just left and we have a bit of a layover before the second closing), and it's about as hectic as you can imagine (or remember, if you've been through it yourself).

Just wanted to pop my head in and give everyone an update; I haven't forgotten about you, and I am going to try to post as often as I can in the next few days. Alex Nelson is going to fill in with the game threads and, as usual, I encourage my other site-mates to post whatever they feel like. Too, I implore you all to utilize the diaries to make your voices heard and to help this community flourish.

That's all for now. Oh, and let's go Mets!

In the very near future, AA will be going through some site upgrades to enhance functionality and usability of the posting/commenting here. Yay! The upgrades have already been guinea-pigged at Athletics Nation and a couple of our college blogs, and AA is at the top of the list of baseball blogs to receive the makeover.

Here are the biggest components of the upgrade:

• Ajax commenting: you will now be able to expand/collapse comments as you see fit. Basically, you can see what you want and hide what you don't.
• Comment auto-refresh: you won't have to press [F5] or refresh the page in order to see new comments on the page; this will be especially helpful during game chatters. The comments are refreshed dynamically and new comments will be indicated as such. This can be disabled on a per user basis if you decide you hate it.
• Ajax editor: the diary posting interface has been beefed up and will be much more impressive and intuitive. Posting will happen much more quickly without having to reload the site.
• Tags: AA authors will now be able to "tag" stories (right now we are limited to a single "Section"). This will allow more elaborate organizing and searching of posts at AA.

If you want to see the new features in action, you can click through to Athletics Nation. As soon as I know the exact date of the change I will let everyone know. The new features may take a few days to get used to, but they will make the site better in the long run.

In addition to the site changes I have added a new "Game Chatter Hitlist" table to the right sidebar. In essence, this table keeps track of user comments during game chatters so everyone knows who is contributing to the game threads. For instance, DocMets16 is pacing the circuit with 88 comments through the first two games. Right on!

Many apologies for the lack of new stuff here the last couple of days. I have been:

a) In Cambridge
b) Sick
c) Trying to get our house ready to sell
d) Looking for a new house
e) Positively overwhelmed
f) Hungry

We should be back to the normal quantity and quality of amazin' goodness starting on Monday.

There hasn't been a whole lot going on in Mets' camp, aside from the Duaner Sanchez incident. Sanchez was rightfully chastised for showing up for camp out of shape and with a blasé attitude. He has subsequently apologized for his behavior and has vowed to be ready for action as soon as possible. His timetable still pegs his return for after the start of the season, but Sanchez believes he should be ready to go shortly thereafter.

First off, I want to thank everyone who has discovered the site in the past couple of weeks for your patronage, and for those of you who have been loyal to the site from the beginning for your continued support (not to mention everyone in between!). Your feedback and comments and your contributions to the dialog here are what makes this all fun for me.

This is a super busy week for me; I'm up in Boston for work and have had very little free time to post things to the site. I am still going to try to get at least a couple of new things on here every day, but if you folks could all chip in and post some diaries while I'm here that would really help out. I try to post new things here as frequently as possible -- usually many times in a day -- and when I run into crazy weeks like this I don't want things to hit a lull, which is bad for the site and especially bad for you guys.

Anyway, if you ever wanted to post a diary but couldn't think of anything to write about, here are some ideas to get you started:

• A link and a bit of commentary on an interesting news story about the Mets
• Recap of a Mets spring training game -- who did well, who stunk up the joint. Maybe you went to a spring training game and have a scouting report or first hand account that would be helpful
• Pose an insightful question with or without a poll
• Talk about your favorite player (past or present) or why you are a Mets fan
• Anything else you can think of

Anything particularly interesting, analytical or newsworthy, especially if it is well-written, has a good chance of being moved to the main page if posted in the diaries, so put your fingers to the keyboard and let your voice be heard.

Thanks!

Apologies for the obtrusiveness of the new ads. You'll notice a banner ad at the top of the main page as well as a box ad in between the story content and the comments when you click on the "Entry Link" or "Comments". While the ads are likely here to stay in one form or another, the integration of the ads with the rest of the site will be improved.

I'm not sure exactly how or when that integration will work, but the powers that be have informed me that they are working on it as we speak. I have assurances that there will be no pop-up ads, and you'll know as soon as I do what the eventual fate of the existing ads will be.

Thanks for your patience as well as your continued patronage. I'll keep you posted as to the status of this obvious hot-button blogging issue!

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