The Best of Bob: His Blogger Collection

By: Laurie | November 23rd, 2007

What I will remember most about our Bob is this: Before he came along, there was nothing here.

No team bloggers. No communities of fans. No soccer team aficionados watching the games on their computers thousands of miles apart, dropping by The Offside after each excellent or abysmal play to share their reactions with others who’d just seen the same thing on their computers.

This was all Bob.

Armed only with a domain name, a passion for the game, and the words, “Write for The Offside,” he created a soccer-loving community that stretches quite literally around the world. He did it by providing us, his bloggers, with quiet encouragement and support. Never breathing down our necks, but always being available to fix our problems and clean up our messes.

If, say, speaking entirely hypothetically here, a blogger were to accidentally, in her very first post, not properly resize a photo? An error which could, with the old software, and again completely theoretically, lead to a life-size photo of French goalkeeper Gregory Coupet taking over the entire main World Cup Blog page? And if this were to happen at 10:30 on a Friday night?

She would merely wake up to an e-mail saying, “I fixed the problem and here’s what you can do next time.”

And then there were those Daily Dose intros. I know a lot of people skipped right over the “Some news to read as you…” part of the Daily Dose. You shouldn’t have. Bob managed to include some hysterically funny and occasionally even thought-provoking stuff that you might never come across elsewhere.

And so I leave you with some stories to read while you…