Fifteen Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward

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13 years ago

I spend a lot of time talking about the distant past when I bring up important dates. Upon reaching DetroitHockey.Net’s fifteenth birthday, I just want to take some time to look over the last year and ahead to the next one.

The fifteenth season of DH.N was supposed to include a lot of changes to the site. Unfortunately, only some of them happened.

The DetroitHockey.Net Community Forums have undergone a major upgrade. A big part of this is the ability for visitors to log in and post using a Twitter or Facebook account, rather than having to create an account here.

Speaking of Twitter, DH.N has embraced that technology in the last year, with the official account being @detroithockey96. Tweets are archived on DH.N, with important ones pulled onto the site home page.

Said home page was redesigned as part of a reworking of the site’s news system. The other most visible part of that update is that news posts and blog posts have been separated in the site, with the blogs.detroithockey.net domain now in use. The forum upgrades were also carried into this area, as Twitter and Facebook users can comment on news stories and blog posts without having to sign up for an account here.

The site’s multimedia archive is next up for upgrades. Already almost 500 low-quality multimedia files have been removed from the system, with work to make it more usable and interactive underway.

What will DetroitHockey.Net’s sixteenth year bring? Continued upgrades and (hopefully) a major event.

The aforementioned multimedia upgrades should wrap early in the NHL season. After that is a stats project and another round of forum upgrades, with maybe a new store thrown in as well.

If you’re a fan of old-school hockey video games (Blades of Steel, Ice Hockey, the early NHL series, etc.) or charities that help sick children, keep an eye out for news about the Retro Hockey Challenge. It’s an idea I’m excited about but I have no idea yet if it’ll work. If it happens, it’ll be the biggest thing of DetroitHockey.Net’s next year.