When I first started Ducksnorts back in September 1997, I did so primarily as a way to learn HTML and web technologies. Seemed to me like these would be useful skills to have in the job market. Writing about baseball was just an added bonus.

Back then there was no such thing as a blog so the writing was sporadic. I’d throw together the occasional article, often based on something I’d been discussing on one of AOL’s message boards (e.g., Paul Konerko and the Myth of the Dodger Prospect Hype Machine), read in old versions of Bill James’ Baseball Abstract (Looking into the Crystal Ball: Part 1, Part 2, and Revisited), or seen firsthand (Padres Farm Report: Rafael Medina).

I built the current version of the web site as part of a class project in Fall 2001 and unleashed it on the Web in November of that year. It’s gone through a few minor modifications since then, but by and large I’ve been working with the same code and architecture for the past three years. I still stubbornly write my own HTML (and now XML, in an old but easy-to-use RSS flavor that allow sites such as Yahoo! and Bloglines to syndicate Ducksnorts and invite folks to our little corner of the Web) and load the pages via FTP. It’s an outdated method, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but it works for me.

The blog itself has been going strong for about 3 1/2 years now. I honestly didn’t expect the blog fad to last this long and become something much, much greater than a fad. Nor did I expect to find people interested in what I had to say so many years later (my wife’s tolerance can be measured in nanoseconds), but every day hundreds of you come visit. A handful of you fire me off e-mails with regularity to help keep me honest and motivated. Fewer still I’ve had the opportunity to meet in person and talk baseball. To all of you I say thanks.

(Just re-read the above and realize it might seem like I’m going somewhere. No such luck. I’m just in a particularly sentimental mood today. Indulge me.)

So much has changed since I started Ducksnorts, both in terms of technology (anyone remember Netscape 3, or when Internet Explorer wasn’t even a factor in the browser market?) and in terms of the Padres (hint: John Flaherty, Archi Cianfrocco, Craig Shipley, Derrek Lee, Fernando Valenzuela, Sean Bergman, Pete Smith, and Danny Jackson were with the club that year).

But we’re still going strong, and for the first time in a long time, it seems like the Pads are headed in the right direction. Petco Park enjoyed a fantastic debut, and the home team wasn’t eliminated from playoff contention until October. There is still a great deal of room for improvement, but at least we’re not spending the winter trying to figure out how the Padres are going to avoid 100 losses next season.

And I’m still trying to figure out ways to improve Ducksnorts. We’ve got a “Subscribe with Bloglines” button over there in the left navigation so you can easily add us to your Bloglines feeds. If you don’t know what that means, check out Bloglines. It’s a very cool way to have Ducksnorts come to you. Take a look at my subscriptions if you’re curious. (Note also the San Diego weather forecast over there. Could come in handy during the season when you’re trying to decide whether to head down to Petco Park.)

Other stuff I’m looking into right now includes, in no particular order:

• a way to add comments or easily send me e-mail that doesn’t invite boatloads of spam; just to give you an idea, I literally receive thousands of pieces of spam every week — thankfully I have good filters, but even if I clean up every few days, spam is taking up 5-10% of my server space at any given time
• a way for you to change the look and feel of Ducksnorts with the click of a button; I’ve found a pretty good PHP script that does the trick, but I’d have to convert all my pages to PHP — there go the permalinks — so I’m looking into a Javascript solution instead
• a theme song; frivolous perhaps, but also potentially amusing
• a subject index; this would augment the existing search function — I actually started messing around with the idea a while back but haven’t touched it recently

So those are some of the things I’m working on this winter. The hope is that by announcing it to you, I’ll be forced to follow through on at least a few of these. Stay tuned…