'BlueChampions' Completes 3 years | Join BC Huddle!

Hi Chelsitos! This is Vijayakrishna here. Most people call me VJ and write my name as vjkrishna. If you wonder if someone’s hacked this blog – no. I’m the man behind this blog. I’m the one who you call BC. Why did I think of disclosing my name today? I don’t know. I just thought I’d do it today. Anyway, keep calling me BC otherwise I won’t know if you’re talking to me

As of today, September 1, 2009, BlueChampions completes three years of Chelsea blogging and steps into the fourth year. BlueChampions has been very much a part of my life. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed running this blog and keeping company with you lot. We’ve not met even once but we have certainly formed a community here.

Very often we do find ourselves in places where there’s no football fan to debate about use of technology for refereeing or there is no premier league fan to argue why foreign ownership is not bad or there is no Chelsea fan to passionately discuss who should be at the tip of our attacking diamond. I bet you got a place where you can do this arguing, debating, discussing and always come back every day for more.

Today is the day of the flashbacks and nostalgia. I want to take you through this little journey of this blog which started in the drawing room of some guy in India and now...er...continues to be run out of that very drawing room. I’ll also heavily use the post of the last anniversary as it still is very valid.

I’d be lying if I tell you that I didn’t expect this blog to grow so much. When I started the blog, I definitely wanted this to be big. I certainly had a vision. I wanted this blog to grow. I wanted this blog to be talked about. I thought today could be a day when I can talk about how this blog was born and how it was raised.

Officially, Sep 1 is the birthday of this blog. On 11-Aug-2006, I created the original version of this blog. I didn’t know much about website hosting so I went for one of these free blogging softwares. When I registered for the blog with blogspot.com, I had to choose a title for the blog. The first title that came to my mind was bluechampions. I wasn’t sure if that would be available but to my surprise, it was. So it was bluechampions.blogspot.com.

I didn’t quite like how the comments area appeared in blogspot. So I moved over to wordpress. It was quite strange considering that it took months for me to see a comment on the blog. From 13-Aug-2006, it was bluechampions.wordpress.com. These sites (bluechampions on blogspot and wordpress) still exist. Check them out.

From the day one, I started writing football/Chelsea articles. Almost everyday, I was writing one article. There were no comments at all and in fact, no one else was reading the blog as only I and my mate had known that such a blog existed. This went for a couple of weeks. I wanted to host the blog on my own domain. I bought the domain bluechampions.com on 1-Sep-2006 and published my first post in the blog. My first post in all these versions of bluechampions has been the same:

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I speak Chelsea!

Okay, this is a Chelsea fan blog! The posts would mostly be the views, opinions and factual statements of a Chelsea fan. Whether you agree or disagree, you’re free to post your comments.

"

Though it looks like a stupid first post, my idea and philosophy around the blog has been very much the same. I have always said that I write my views and opinions, which means I don’t do research, I just write what I’d have tell you. It’s just views and opinions, as simple as that. And I did use the term ‘Chelsea fan’ twice in a post that had two lines. That kind of underlines that there would be some bias and you’d be smart to expect some bias, in fact. I guess that’s exactly what I wanted to convey from that post.

The first comment on this blog, very very coincidentally, was from a gentleman called Jose, who said:

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Yo. Tevez has gone to west ham. Next season he’ll join us.

"

That’s all he said. That was the time I was hoping that we sign Tevez. This gentleman, the first commenter didn’t not visit again to comment. His first comment was the first for this blog and the last for him.

As soon as I started the blog, I began working on the traffic. Back then, I used to post comments and responses in every football blog or forum around just so that this blog link can appear there. I knew that ChelseaBlog was the only Chelsea related blog worthy of note then. I started posting comments in the Chelsea blog with the bluechampions link underneath my comment. To my surprise, I was banned in Chelseablog for promoting my site. Fair play, I didn’t really know the rules of the game then. I did try to establish some contact with the admin there to let me publish my comments but all those attempts failed. I didn’t try to post comments in that blog since then. I guess I’d still be a banned user there!

I started making a lot of friends and visitors, mostly of other clubs. The traffic did grow, a bit slowly though. All through this period if there is one thing I did relentlessly, was to keep publishing posts, irrespective of how many people read it or commented on it. Also, I did one more thing – switching between themes and templates. I guess from then till now, I must have used more than a dozen templates for this blog.

I then had a tie-up with Soccerlens for some time but I couldn’t really keep it up. There were many offers from many football aggregation sites but I didn’t go for any. Ole Ole did come in talk to me on getting this blog hosted on Ole Ole. I did have some live chat with them but then I did not want this to be oleole.bluechampions.com, I just wanted this to remain bluechampions.com, with all the ownership and freedom of what I wanted to do with this blog. That’s one reason why you don’t see any advertisements on this blog. I’m getting at least one advert proposition per week but I just don’t want to spoil the look and feel of the blog or to make it difficult for you to load or read. Plus, I get loads of emails to the BlueChampions mailbox – advert proposals, link exchanges, tie-ups, feedbacks, post requests and many such other things. Gosh, I need an agent, a manager and a personal secretary right away.

Meanwhile, I kept trying out additions and improvements. Back then we had opinion polls but it took time for me to introduce polls with multiple choices. Then came the gravatars – the online face for each contributor. There was this forum or message board that I started and I guess that was a failure or I failed to keep it going. I still think a forum for BlueChampions would be just right – more on that later. Then we had this BC Shout which is still a hit, I must say. I don’t see any other football blog that has a live chat feature. There are a lot of things I want to do but I’m not really a technology person, you see. All that I do with this blog is purely based on the knowledge I gained from the internet and hours of trials and errors. Well, I need a web designer too then.

The biggest milestone was the contact from Chelsea FC. I’ve boasted about that a lot already. It doesn’t matter what and why they contacted me for. My take away from this is that BlueChampions has got the attention of someone at Chelsea FC. That thrills me more than anything else. We’re still working out what we can do for each other. Meanwhile, I’m also looking at various things that would take this blog to a ‘new level’. It’s just that some of these things are expensive in terms of cost and time. I’ll take care of the cost. If you can lend me time, that’ll be great.

I have now written around 730 articles and you have written around 28,400 comments. The blog is really flourishing. But as I said, I want to do more. What I have in mind is to build a large Chelsea community on the web that consists of various facets of which the blog is one. While I continue to write on the blog, I want the BlueChampions brand to be more comprehensive. My vision is that BlueChampions should have a blog, a chatroom, a message board, a facebook style profile pages for all users, an online merchasndise store, a goodies download corner and much more.

As you might have noticed, this is too much work for someone who’s a married man and a father that also  happens to have a day job. This is why I’d come to you. To use corporate language, I will go public. I will have to go public because I need reliable volunteers. I’d need some Chelsea fans who can afford the time and still willing to spend that for free. All I can promise is to share what I get out of this – fun and satisfaction.

And finally, I must say I owe it to you guys! I blogging because you guys are reading. I do read all the comments and I do read all your compliments and appreciations. I may not be able to comment because much of my internet time slot goes just for publishing posts. Thank you very much guys. I know that you talk about the blog to your friends, you’ve got your friends and acquaintances to visit this blog, some of you are very loyal visitors and a big thanks to all the ones that comment and keep the blog lively.

Before I sign off, let me tell you that we now have a full-fledged message board called BlueChampions Huddle. This BC Huddle will have to evolve with time. I’ve set up the whole message board. All that you guys now need to do is to keep it going. Go there, create threads, create polls and discuss and participate. More detailed information on BC Huddle sometime later. Cheers!