Welcome to the new Hornets247. It’s all magical and fantastic and it’s sure to improve the quality of your life.

Let me run through some of the new features that we’ve added:

User Registration

You can sign up right here. Once you’ve registered, your user name is reserved so nobody else can post as you on the site. You also get a nifty profile page (see mine here) that lists your recent activity and displays some info about you. Once registered, you can access the back end controls by clicking the tab with your user name at the top of every page.

Journals

Everyone who registers with the site can write blog-like posts that we’re calling journals (to avoid confusion and such). All those posts are displayed in our Journals section. So now you can write that 5000-word essay on the intricacies of the Hornets weak-side help defense and have it read by millions and billions of other people.

I’ll post more about Journals someday soon.

News

We completely overhauled the news section. There are actually three sub-sections in it now: articles, game results and lagniappe.

Articles

This is a lot like our old news section, listing and linking to news articles found in all corners of the web.

Game Results

You’ll find links and notes for all Hornets games here.

Lagniappe

This is where we’ll post that little something extra. Unmissable blog posts, funny pictures, interesting forum threads… all that and more gets linked up in here. There’s some great content in there already. Check it out.

And of course you can comment on everything posted in the news sections.

Calendar

Our new calendar section will list pretty much every Hornets-related event you could ever imagine. We’re still adding events to it so there’s not much beyond October right now. All the Buzz in Blue Week stuff is already in there though. Great week ahead.

Wallpaper

I’m sure by now you’ve all seen the fantastic wallpapers made by Dariusz Ejkiewicz. We needed some place to feature all his hard work, so we created a wallpapers section. You can download all his Hornets stuff there and also leave comments. We’ve only got three walls uploaded so far, but there’s plenty more to be added soon.

Shortcuts

I love this feature. When you register with the site, we give you a bunch of handy links to other Hornets sites. These links are accessible from every page of Hornets247.com when you log in. Just click the “shortcuts” link at the top of the page to open them up. You can add as many more shortcuts as you like, or even delete the default ones. There’s also a “create shortcut” button at the bottom of every page on the site. Clicking that will add the page to your shortcuts, so you can easily access it later.

(Note: That “create shortcut” button doesn’t appear to work in Internet Explorer. But we recommend you ditch that anyway and use Firefox instead.)

RSS Feeds

We have a bunch of new RSS feeds. Pretty much everything here at Hornets247 is syndicated now. For more info, check out our feeds page. Also, if you were using any of our old feeds, you’ll need to update the URLs. If you have any difficulty, let us know.

And then some…

There’s actually a lot more stuff to talk about, but I’m really craving a cheeseburger right now so we’ll have to do it another time. Spend a while clicking around the site and see what you find. Let us know what you think of the new site via our contact page or in the comments of this post.

Acknowledgments

Massive thanks to Ryan for holding down the blog these past few months while I’ve been busy trying to get the site ready for launch. Dude’s a legend. Thanks also to Dariusz for all his great suggestions for the new site. We’ve got plenty more features planned because of that. Thanks to everyone who helped us break stuff test the site the last couple of weeks. You’re all fantastic.

And finally, just in case you’re wondering what happened to Ron Hitley, check out this post. Only the good die young.