Welcome to your new little online humble abode Cyclone Nation.
Welcome to version three of Cyclone Fanatic.
As most of you know, this whole thing began back in 2006. A man named Jeremy Lind (more on him later) had a vision. He wanted to create a place for Iowa State fans to congregate online. Lind’s vision was to not just create a website, but an online community (Hundreds of thousands of threads on lawn car, computers and video games later, I’d say he was successful).
Lind sold CF to a local businessman (jason Loutch and his parthers Matt and Brian Lazear) back in the summer of 2009. I was hired to be the site’s publisher in October of that year. It was at that time when we launched CF version two, which gave us a front page for covering the Cyclones among other things.
And now here we are today with the launch of Cyclone Fanatic 3.0, unrivaled, whatever you want to call it.
This version of the site was created with one goal in mind. That was to give you, the Cyclone Fanatics, more features, better content and an overall better experience while being on the site, all without any cost to you, 100 percent FREE.
On the new CF, you’ll see things like schedules, depth charts, scholarship charts and a state of the art photo gallery that we plan to utilize to its fullest potential. The new CF is more organized. Gone are the days of searching for an old radio show podcast or video. Simply click on the “CFTV’ and “CF Radio” tabs to find what you want and need. That’s only one example.
Technically, the latest version of the site gives us flexibility that we never had before. In addition to that, because of our new custom CMS, the site is now more secure than ever as well.
Now we are well aware that with any change to pretty much any website there is a learning curve so please, give the change time. Yes – the forums look different and yes, it might take a little bit of getting used to. There will likley be some bugs and we are fully intent on fixing them as soon as possible. But this change was very necessary from a security standpoint and will allow us to do things we’ve never been able to do before. It’s the same forum software that we’ve used since day one, just on an upgraded version.
There are a handful of people who I need to thank in regards to the completion of our new site.
The first is the man who founded CF, Jeremy Lind. You know the main reason (in my opinion) that CF took off the way that it did was because of the obvious draw – that being the most popular message board on the Internet – that is dedicated to Iowa State fans. One of the reasons that CF’s forum became so popular in the first place was Jeremy’s tireless work on customizing things. Jeremy knew how to do the little things to make the site go and he was constantly improving the board.
When it came time to do some work on getting our forums to the new site, we had issues. Major issues. Issues that literally only one man could solve. That was the man who built the site in the first place. So we called up Jeremy. He gladly came to our rescue. Here’s a big, public thank you to CF’s founder Jeremy Lind for the work he’s done on CF 3.0. Thank you so much.
I’d like to thank a man who I consider the technical savior of CF. That’s Sam Jadali of Host Duplex. We teamed up with Sam a little over a year ago and since then, any security issues we’ve had in the past have been cleared up. I’m now proud to say that we host our site with Sam as well. He’s the brains behind the operation around here. I’d encourage any of you out there in need of web hosting or pretty much anything in that industry to get in touch with Sam. His contact information is listed in the “Our Team” within “About Us” at the top of the site.
Thank you to the good folks at Trilix Interactive who built CF 3.0. When co-owner Todd Senne contacted me back in the winter about tackling this project, I didn’t quite know what to think. However when we met, I discovered that Todd is a diehard Iowa Stater. In fact, Todd might be on this site more than me on a daily basis! Todd had a vision for what he, a passionate user on the site, wanted the new CF to be. His team of experts did a fantastic job and we are proud to have partnered with such a great group.
Every user on this website needs to be thankful for its current ownership group – headed up by Jason Loutsch. I’ve said this numerous times about my trio of bosses. They very rarely tell me no. I came to them last winter and said, “For us to go to the next level, we need a new site.” They listened. And here we are today.
Thanks to my friend Jon Miller, a man who has been in the Internet sports game for longer than anybody I know, for his great advice along the way.
Thanks to my wife for putting up with some late nights over the last two months and a moody husband who doesn’t always deal with stress very well.
Thanks to our amazing group of loyal advertisers who keep this site FREE and thanks to you, the Cyclone Fanatics, for your patience and loyalty.
This is your site. Enjoy the not new, but what we feel very improved Cyclone Fanatic.
