By now I'm sure you see the visual refresh that was implemented here (and across SB Nation) this morning. It's not a comprehensive redesign, but the look of the site has been tightened up, some fonts tweaked, some white space eliminated, and a few other minor layout changes put in place. The main goals of this refresh are to improve readability of the sites and speed up load times, two areas which folks have grumbled about in the past.

As with anything new, some people are going to be afraid of the changes and want to go back to the old way. I assure you that the changes were made for good reasons and that we'll all get used to them very soon. That said, sometimes there are a few hiccups along the way, so if you notice something that isn't working properly, use the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of this page and select "I think something is broken" from the subsequent page. This will send a note to our tech support team with whatever information you provide so they can take a look at the issue.

As Sam was kind enough to point out, Amazin' Avenue was graced by its one millionth visitor the other day. It's a big fancy number and a great milestone for the site, and I'm very proud of us, writers and readers alike, for collectively having achieved it. It's especially gratifying to have built such a strong community around higher-brow baseball discussion, particularly as the mainstream media careens recklessly in the other direction. So, kudos to everyone for making it this far.

As others have surely pointed out (here, for example), this community has grown considerably in recent months (Exhibit A). There are two significant reasons for the growth. First, Sam, James and Joe came aboard and really helped elevate the quality and quantity of the writing here. I ran the show pretty much on my own for the first three-plus years and, while I had built a modest but devoted following, the addition of these three great writers have, at least in my opinion, lifted the site from "merely good" to "simply great". The best part is that they aren't just knowledgeable Mets fans and terrific writers, but they really do care as much about the site and the community as I do, which makes them a perfect fit for Amazin' Avenue.

Secondly, back in February SB Nation entered into a distribution partnership with Yahoo! Sports, whereby our content would be fed into their baseball (and football, etc.) pages, providing additional coverage to their readers and, in return, a considerable influx of new readership to our sites. The increased readership has had its benefits as well as its drawbacks. Many of the new community members have contributed substantially to the betterment of the site, posting thoughtful comments and submitting quality FanPosts. The gamethreads have grown in popularity and vibrance (and cursing, of late), and the swag contest has had more participation than ever.

On the other hand, some of the newer members don't seem to get what we're doing here, so we end up with a smattering of cretinous Scotties posting inane rubbish like this. Amazin' Avenue is an open forum, but it is not talk radio and it is not an internet message board. We hold ourselves and each other to higher standards of discourse here. Making obtuse claims like "David Wright has no heart" or "Carlos Beltran isn't clutch" may fly elsewhere, but here they will be met with skepticism and, in particularly egregious instances, outright mockery and verbal flogging.

Many other sites have posted community guidelines to keep things in check and, while I have mostly avoided doing something similar in the past, we've probably reached the point where we can no longer go without. We will add to these as necessary.

DO

• Rely on fact-based analysis. This is not a stats-first site, it's a facts-first site. Intellectual honesty means being accountable for your assertions, so if you're going to argue a point you better be sure you have the evidence to support it.
• Be emotional in the gamethreads, but don't check your rationality at the door. We all get caught up in the moment, but do try to be insightful if at all possible.
• Ask questions. If you don't understand something, ask questions. If you don't believe what someone is saying, ask questions. If you simply want to continue (or start) a discussion, ask questions. Oftentimes, a straight comment won't elicit a response, but that same comment with a trailing question (like, "What do you guys think?" or "Are there any recent examples of this?") can keep a dying conversation rolling.
• Treat others with respect if they have earned it. Not everyone deserves your respect, particularly Scotties and other assorted ne'er-do-wells.

DO NOT

• Discuss politics or religion, period. There are lots of places on the internets to discuss these things so there should be no need for it here. You may think that everyone here agrees with you about something but I guarantee you that they do not.
• Rely on tired baseball platitudes to make your point. If your comment/FanPost is indistinguishable from a random Joe Morgan Q&A (i.e. sub-moronic drivel) do yourself and everyone else a favor by not posting it.
• Post links to your own blog/site in the FanShots, unless you contribute something editorially (and usefully so) to the post as well. FanShots are for linking to relevant articles, images, videos, etc. that the rest of the community will find interesting; they are not intended to be free advertising for your website.
• Post gigantic pictures or malformed links in the comments. Lookout Landing has a terrific guide on links and pics, so read it and follow it.

Our policy here has never been one of pro-banning. Other sites govern differently, but I've always trusted the community to police itself. Those who contribute meaningfully to the discourse are respected by others and are made to feel welcome here. Those who contribute nothing of substance are quickly marginalized and forgotten. I think we all want it to remain this way, but if it can't then we won't hesitate to move towards a policy of more liberal cleansing of unwanted elements.

So, congrats and thanks to all who have helped bring the site to this point, and here's to a bigger, better and brighter Amazin' Avenue in the weeks, months and years to come.

There are some new developments here at Amazin' Avenue as well as at SB Nation as a whole that I wanted to share with you quickly.

1. The FanPosts page has been given a makeover. It's now easier than ever to scan the list of recent FanPosts, along with their corresponding comment statuses and recommendations. You can read more about the changes at the SB Nation Blog.
2. You might have noticed a little ways down the right sidebar here that there's a new "SB Nation MLB Postseason" widget, which contains playoff-related headlines from around the SB Nation baseball sites. To go along with the widget is a brand-spanking-new SB Nation MLB Playoff Hub, which features schedules and line scores for all ongoing postseason series, as well as featured playoff content from each playoff team's SB Nation blog.
3. Lastly, Amazin' Avenue is now on Facebook (I've also added a badge section to the left sidebar here). If you're into the whole Facebook thing, click thru to our page and become a fan. I still don't really know what Facebook is or what the point is anyway (I'm guessing pr0n), but I know a lot of you kids are into it so go check it out.

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!