A Steelers blog honoring the black left side of the Steelers' helmet - By Neal Coolong
Sunday, August 31
Welcome to On The Black Side
For the 10s of people who read Die Hard Steel (don't bother clicking this link, it's been down for some time now), you may be wondering what happened to it.
Your guess is as good as mine. I'll leave it at that.
On The Black Side represents the left side of the Steelers helmet, which is intentionally left logo-less. Plus, it's a quasi-reference to the Miramax classic movie series Eddie & The Cruisers, and the song "On The Dark Side." It's a college thing.
I am in the long and arduous process of creating a web site. It will have the same name, and it'll be a little less Blogger-esque than this one. In the meantime, I'll maintain a pretty rigorous posting schedule, and my aim is to provide Steelers fans with a place to read about the latest happenings of the Five Time Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers.
It's not just going to be a collection of links to stories written by Bouchette, Wexell, Dulac, Prisuta and other top Steelers writers (although the Blog Soup feature will contain links to several other great Steelers sites). I will use their articles and news as reference points, but I want to provide insight of my own. It will be somewhat light-hearted, but if you want schmaltzy web writing, I can point out about 85 blogs about the Steelers alone making reference to trendy pop culture themes, generic, overdone "from the cheap seats" perspectives and various other cheesy Internet gimmicks.
My goal is to provide a web site Steelers fans can read and discuss the daily activities of the team in an intelligent manner where substance and content are given higher priority than swinging at the easy joke softball, lame Photoshopped pictures or short snippets of stories, expecting you, the reader, to be entertained but not informed.
Steelers fans are not dumb. I'm not writing this because I'm impressed with myself, or because I have aspirations of taking the jobs of the aforementioned writers. I'm writing this because I enjoy writing and I want to connect with other Steelers fans. I'm a freelance journalist with a modest background of work at a few daily newspapers, and a decent amount of experience as a writer. I write a Steelers column and the Fan Pulse feature for Real Football 365, and I will be writing a Match-Ups column for Wexell at Steel City Insider again this season.
Again, I'm not trying to impress anyone, but there is a difference between quality writing and hack writing. I think I fall in between there.
Comments are encouraged. I'm even going to have a guest column spot on the new site, and consistency is going to be essential. I am never going to go more than a day without a post, and it's not going to be random stuff. I will have a feature each day of the week, and I'm hoping readers and fans can suggest some as well. I'm really hoping to meet some other like-minded fans looking to discuss the Greatest Team on Earth.
So yeah...as Worm says, there's the river, down and dirty. Drop me a line if you feel so inclined. Blog Soup is coming this afternoon.
Best wishes on your new venture. You're off to a great start; I thoroughly enjoyed reading your first 3 posts.
Take care,
Alex Guzman