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1997 How did we start ?
While I have always been an avid GSU football fan, my full time
employment and concurrent part-time job in the Georgia National Guard
(1987-1996) kept me from having too much free time prior to 1997 to spend
talking and discussing GSU Athletics.
Change was made with the Georgia Southern football program, as Paul
Johnson returned to Statesboro, this time as head coach. Prior to PJ being hired as the Head
Coach, I finally broke down and joined the Information Age by purchasing my
first computer. In May of 1997, my son was born. I've worked the graveyard
shift since 1992, and in doing so had a lot of time during the day that first
year to keep my son. Since he was excellent at staying put the first few
months, I was able to get a lot of stuff done on the site. The first year of
his life, I spent many hours "babysitting" while learning basic
programming skills and surfing the Internet. I was disappointed to find
nearly nothing about Georgia Southern or GSU football on the Internet, so I
began this site by building a simple HTML page of all of my favorite sports
links, including the weekly Division I-AA football rankings. About the time football season rolled around, I had discovered
the RSFC (rec.sport.football.college) newsgroup, and a neat little weekly
‘net publication called the I-AA Preview. Pat Dunn was the author at the time, and I believe he
started the Preview in 1991 (or thereabouts). Pat compiled a ton of information on I-AA programs, and
occasionally included game summaries from selected games. Several weeks into the 1997 season, I
started sending Pat summaries from the GSU games, which he graciously
included in his Preview. He
continued doing this through 1998 until he put the Preview on hiatus, in
order to finish work on his Doctorate at Ohio State. Eric Gemunder took up where Pat left
off, and now operates the I-AA Weekly Preview, though without the weekly
updates from outside contributors. Once I had constructed the basic setup, I began my quest for
other GSU fans talking about GSU sports. My long and arduous search netted
several Internet-savvy individuals (Lance Smith, Tim Medford, Cleve Meinke,
Lee Arnold, Rick Hulsey and Bill Bates to name a few) and we commenced with
daily GSU discussions on the CNNSi sports messageboards. A few days after GSU's disappointing 9 point loss to Delaware
in the I-AA quarterfinals, I decided to add a messageboard to my site,
becoming the first site on the Internet to host an interactive Georgia Southern
sports site. This was actually more by accident, than something I had
planned. The CNNSi boards had
become extremely popular with the smack talkers of the world, overloaded to
the point that their systems had become totally unreliable and unavailable
with annoying frequency. When they did work, you had to post and have it
approved by a censor before it would load on their site. I said the heck with
that, and promptly set up a board with a SportsOnly, a conglomeration of
sports messageboards for all sorts of sports. During the first few months of operating the board, we had
no more than 10 regulars, folks who would post on a consistent basis. 1998 Pretty much nothing to report in 1998, other than the fact we
significantly changed the look of the site twice, and enjoyed writing 14
consecutive columns on Eagle football victories. Now that 15th one when the
Eagles played Massachusetts was a difficult story to write. Site traffic grew, and in February we hit the highest level of
daily traffic since I had started the site. On signing day, we recorded a little over 400 hits. At this point, we probably had around
30-40 regulars who visited the site and messageboards. 1999 1999 was the turning point for this site. After solidifying
our status as the place to turn to for GSU sports talk, we were approached by
an Internet startup, Rivalnet, to join their growing sports network. We
jumped at the chance, and used the signing bonus to purchase the digital
camera used to provide all the photos on the site. Rivalnet launched us in
April, and after a restructuring in August of 1999, renamed the network
Rivals.Com in August, when another boatload of sites were added in. Upon joining the network, the site was exposed to quite a
larger audience, and we quickly built up a database of over 300 regular
users. In December, the week
following the championship game against Youngstown State, we had nearly
500,000 hits. We generated nearly 4 million hits during the calendar year. 2000 The move to the network meant a near-total disposal of daily
maintenance chores, outside of maintaining decorum on the messageboards. We
focused all of our time on providing the best football coverage possible,
then expanded to basketball and baseball coverage. Y2K was the first year we
roamed outside of football coverage. We generated over 5 million hits during the calendar year,
with over 1 million hits alone in December of 2000. 2001 In April of 2001, Rivals.Com declared bankruptcy, and all the
sites were shut down by the home office in Seattle. Since that time, many
have been resurrected at new entities, while this one persists in its present
format, operating under independent production. One thing we learned is that
change is constant. The return of independent production meant a return to the
daily maintenance chores and re-learning computer programming. Of course,
since 1998, things had changed on the programming front, which really made it
fun and challenging. The change
has been positive for this site, as we have not had to deal with the network
downtimes and other network problems we endured from 1999 thru early
2001. Additionally, this
has allowed us to build our site as we see fit, and are not restricted to the
limitations of a network design. Along with independent production of the site, in April of
2001, we acquired server space and the requisite software to host and operate
our own messageboard system.
Easily the most popular feature of the site, the software which powers
the messageboard is a vast improvement over software we used in the
past. Using the powerful
scripting language PHP, we now have a searchable database that can archive
over 20,000 messages (and counting).
Since PHP is an open-source programming language, there are constant
improvements and refinements underway in developing the messageboard software
we employ. We anticipate loading
a major upgrade in the software at some point in early 2002, which will
provide even greater levels of site interactivity. The acquisition of server space needed to host the site and messageboards,
as well as the monthly bandwidth necessary to drive the site, has been funded
in part by an advertising partnership with Burst! Media (www.burstmedia.com) and by loyal visitors to the website. Once our partnership with Rivals.com
ended, hosting costs associated to the site became our responsibility. The revenue model for Rivals.com was
predicated on banner advertising paying the bills. It worked for a while, but once ad rates hit bottom, so
did Rivals.com. We knew that to
maintain the site in the same capacity, would require additional funds beyond
advertising partnerships. In April, the decision was made to move certain features of
the site to a “Member’s Only” section.
Photographs, Recruiting News, Daily Article Links, Screensavers, and
other specialty items such as a Member’s Only messageboard were separated
from the general access areas.
To obtain access for these select items, we required an annual
contribution to the site, which in turn has been used to fund the hosting
costs of the site. The revenue
from advertising and member subscriptions has been sufficient to nearly
offset our annual operating costs. Site traffic leveled off in 2001, primarily due to our move
off of the network. We recorded
just under 2 million hits during the first four months of 2001, then
delivered 2.4 million hits during the remainder of the year, to total nearly
4.5 million hits on the year.
Using the old messageboard system, a single message viewed registered
as a single hit. Under our new
configuration using a non-threaded messageboard, several messages can be
delivered under a single hit.
While this decreases the impact of advertising in our revenue model,
it improves the site’s daily bandwidth consumption. With nearly 600 registered users, our site is now busier
than in year’s past, though traffic values (raw hit counts) will not reflect
this. 2002 So far in 2002, we have redesigned our layout to accommodate
changes in the advertising industry and our partnership with Burst!. Additionally, we have upgraded our
messageboard system to the latest stable revision (phpBB version 1.4.4), and
anticipate upgrading to phpBB Version 2.0 once the code is deemed stable. About the Authors: Paul Barkley The founder of Southern-Connection.com, Barkley has operated
TSC since the fall of 1997. TSC
was the first interactive Georgia Southern sports site to be established on
the Internet, and one of just a handful of sites devoted solely to Division
I-AA Football. Site design, site
programming, systems operation, site photography, messageboard moderation,
content creation and content management are just a few of the tasks performed
by Paul. During regular work hours, Barkley is a Clinical Lab
Supervisor at the Medical Center of Central Georgia. Barkley graduated from Georgia
Southern in 1990 with a BS in Biology.
Barkley also graduated from the Medical College of Georgia in 1991,
with a BS in Medical Technology. Lance Smith One of the founding forces behind this site, Smith has worked
tirelessly since the first days Southern-Connection.com was on the
Internet. Through all the
evolutions of Southern-Connection.com, Lance has been the constant guinea-pig
who has tested and critiqued the ever-changing look and functionality of the
site. One of Lance’s favorite
parts of college athletics is collegiate recruiting. Lance’s dedication to the recruiting
aspects, daily net searches for GSU Athletics articles, messageboard
moderation and content creation are just a few of the assets Smith brings to
the site. Lance’s involvement
this past year with Kevin Tillery in developing the “Blues Reviews” radio
show, has proved to be a hit as well.
During regular office hours, Smith is the Human Resources and
Office Manager for BWAY Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia. Smith earned a BBA (1986) and MBA
(1988) from Georgia Southern University.
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