General Interest Archives
Relaunched!
By John
I know, you guys are probably wondering what happened to The Officers' Club. In short, junked. Here's why:
The OC really took off. And I when I say it really took off, I mean it really flippin' took off. After about a month and a half of blogging (we started in late Oct 05), Charlie and I had three standing offers on the table to pull us off of blogspot and onto a more capable platform. In the end, it wasn't a difficult choice. Military.com, who also sponsors Defense Tech and Milblogging.com, picked us up, redesigned us, and found us a nice cozy home on their server. They wanted us to help them connect military folks with the benefits and services found on their website, and we wanted them to help us plug their 6 million members into the blogosphere. Not a bad trade eh?
So why the name change? A few reasons, one being the fact that we felt bad calling ourselves "The Officers' Club" when some of our most loyal readers are enlisted troops. That and Officers' Club was clunky; it was two words too many and no one could get the punctuation straight.
OpFor works on a couple of different levels. In the military tongue, OpFor stands for "opposing force," an army-ism that we felt accurately summed up this grand experiment we call milblogging. Plus it's short and makes civilians feel important when they say it.
As for the site itself, we've made "some special modifications." You'll notice a few extra pages up top: resources, support the troops, and podcasting. The resources page was a little project of mine, I was sick of using Red Google to solicit research materials for posts and decided to consolidate a link dump of military and defense sites that would benefit all of our readers, not just Charlie and I.
Support the Troops is self-explanatory, we owe the armed forces a lot. If just one willing donor uses OpFor to connect with a charity that suits him, we've done our job.
As for podcasting, we've already done podcast #1 and we're looking foward to more. That's Charlie's bag, he'll talk about it in future posts I'm sure.
Although we are blogging under a new identiy and a new (and sexier!) site, we're the same John and Charlie, and we'll be blogging on the same topics that we hit on the OC. Many, many thanks to Sekimori Design and Military.com for making OpFor possible, and a huge thanks to Steve Green at Vodkapundit, who has offered phenomenal support, advice, and drinking tips from week one.
We're really excited about OpFor, and hope you guys are too. Thanks for your patronage, you readers are the ones who made this new site a reality.
