New Look, New Feel, New Faces, New MotSaG

Welcome to the newly redesigned site of the world’s oldest (active) Ohio State Blog in the universe, Men of the Scarlet and Gray, now Version 3.0.

It’s been almost five years since we’ve last refreshed anything cosmetic about the Men of the Scarlet and Gray website. Back when we did, it was because our hand had been forced — our original header image was that of the five Ohio State Heisman Trophy winners. Seeing as how this blog launched back in 2006 and we pretty much cataloged Troy Smith’s Heisman run, we were forced into adapting our iconic header to accomodate the newest member of that elite club. Hence, the new header we launched back in 2007.

Well, times have certainly changed since then. The team (both Ohio State’s and ours) have changed. The way content is consumed on the web has changed. And WordPress (our blogging software) has continued to change and evolve into what you see now. So we’ve updated a lot more than just the look and feel (big thanks to Morgan Paul for letting us use his great vintage shot of the Horseshoe for our site header). But that’s the start.

In addition to the new look, there have been some changes to how you can interact with us and your fellow Buckeye fans. Comments are the most prominent change that comes with our new theme. First and foremost, we have added threaded comments, so you can continue to have a conversation within the comments and have the different threads separated for easier reading. This has been possible to do in WordPress for a while now, but I’ll refer you back to paragraph one about that. You can now also comment with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You’ll have to authorize Facebook or Twitter to interact with WordPress.com but hopefully that isn’t too much of a nuisance. You can still, as always, leave comments with a name and email address.

Again, you’ve been able to do this for awhile now, but we haven’t advertised it too much. If you’d prefer to get our updates delivered hot off the press to your email, you can always subscribe to us by using the widget over to the right.

If something we’ve written strikes your fancy, those buttons at the bottom of every post give you a quick way to share a post with your Facebook Friends, Twitter followers or any of the other popular SocNets.

We have also added two bloggers to the stable, Chris Jason and Matt “Porter” Coffmann. We’ll let them introduce themselves in the very near futures.

Other than that, not much else will change here. Our irregular, irreverent content will continue for the foreseeable future.

(Please note that this is a work in progress. We are not web designers by any stretch of the imagination. Your feedback and criticism, constructive or not, is appreciated)

Update: I didn’t mention this initially, but I need to give the sportsMonkey a HUGE THANKS for the work he did pulling together the images and new logo for the site.