NDtex.com News

Ever since I started blogging, I have never really had a solid direction and vision in which I wanted to go.  During my days as a student, I had a Blogger account in which I talked ND football and some other random things.  Eventually the Blogger format seemed to limited to me and I launched NDtex.com, hoping that being able to categorize all my different posts would satisfy my “vision” of being able to write about what ever I wanted.

The initial goal was that this site could house anything that I wanted to write and readers would be able to follow the category feeds they wanted.  It was a great idea initially, but the fact of the matter is that this site really had no direction and actually attempting to put out enough content for all those different categories would be a full time job and then some.

Every football season, this site has a huge jump in hits and my content level increases dramatically.  ND football has always been a constant for any blog format or vision that I tried and it is easily the one that I easily enjoy writing about the most.  During this season, I decided to just focus completely on ND and college football to see how I liked it.  It’s been great, I’ve never written so much, nor enjoyed writing for this site like I have these past few week.

So after much thought, this site will be 100% dedicated to ND football while touching on any other big college football news that I find interesting.  If the mood strikes, I will write on other topics and I have created a Tumblr account for any non-ND football topics.

Along with the content focus, you will see several changes to this site, some of which are already in place.  For instance, you will notice that the NDtex25 rankings are now prominently displayed in their own widget so you won’t have to go digging through all my posts to find them.  I have also enabled a sharing plugin allowing you to easily share my posts through just about any outlet you can think of (there is an option for MySpace for crying out loud!).  My comment system is also now linked through Disqus, which will allow you to sign in via various social media formats like Twitter.  My Tumblr comments will run through the same system, so it just made sense to keep the same format between the two.  Don’t worry, if you made a comment here before, it will be imported over.

This site is also now smartphone friendly.  I need to create a better mobile landing page if you visit the site directly via the NDtex.com URL to clean things up a bit; however, direct links to posts work just great.

I’ll also be working to clean up the main landing page a bit, but I’m still trying to figure out what I’d like to do with it.  You’ll also be seeing category cleanups and other small organizational changes to reduce the clutter of my older non-ND content.

You’ve also likely seen a nice little PayPal donation button up as well.  I’m not real high on throwing ads up on the site as of right now, but I do spend a considerable amount of time on writing, researching, and coding for this site, especially since I started the NDtex25.  Any amount tossed my way would be great, especially since my renewal for my hosting server will hit in early 2012.  I’m not expecting anything to be honest and, yes, your money could definitely go to far better causes than my booze habit server, but if you have some money to throw around, I sure wouldn’t mind it going my way (after all, some of you donated money to get Poot a wedding date!).

I’m very excited for the new direction of the site and I’m still kicking around several different ideas.  If you have any suggestions, feel free to comment below, let me know on twitter, or email me at roritter at ndtex dot com.