Our First Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of Third String Goalie and we wanted to take a few moments to thank you for being a part of it before we get to today's jersey.

Third String Goalie originally began with a slightly different approach and a very different name. First called the Hockey Jersey of the Day Blog, we quickly changed to Third String Goalie to allow us the freedom to wander off topic from time to time and take the occasional day off. While we took the luxury of writing about goalie masks, posting the occasional day of just videos, a history lesson from time to time or telling the occasional story which did not feature a jersey, to date we have not taken a day off all year.

Slowly the blog evolved into much more than posting a picture of a different jersey each day with a little background behind the jersey into much more of a hockey history site illustrated with relevant jerseys, as we discovered more and more fascinating stories that just had to be shared.

As of today, we estimate we have pictured 482 jerseys, ranging from a 1907 Kenora Thistles jersey to the 2009-10 Montreal Canadiens Centennial jerseys, located from Victoria, British Columbia to Omsk, Russia, a distance of 7670 miles apart from west to east.

We have written about jerseys from Austria, Belarus, Canada, the Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Soviet Union, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United States and West Germany from various levels of hockey, from high school, college, juniors, minor leagues, European professional leagues, of course the National Hockey League as well as various national teams.

We have been amazed at our visitors from 102 different countries, with roughly 60% being from the United States, 30% from Canada and 10% from the rest of the world, primarily from Finland, Latvia, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom with regular readers from Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan. Thank you so much!

It's been an unbelieveable year, with our work here leading to us having also written articles for The Hockey News Greatest Jerseys of All-Time special edition and Wild.com, crossing a few jerseys off our admittedly obscure want list, getting your questions via email and all the comments on our posts, which we greatly appreciate.

In doing our research for potential topics for Third String Goalie, we came across so many Wayne Gretzky facts, we eventually decided to collect them in their own blog, which spawned our other web site, The Wayne Gretzky Fact of the Day Blog.

We've also done some housecleaning in honor of our first anniversary to improve things for our readers.

• First and foremost, we have discontinued the use of any "in-text" ads to clean up the look of the articles and make it clear that any links you see in our stories from here on out are placed there by us and relevant to the article you are reading. We hope you like this change in policy.

• We have also taken some time to reformat the jersey location map at the bottom of the main page. After reaching a certain number, they began to roll over onto a second page, making them invisible. We simplified each marker on the map to correspond to a particular team, rather than each post. If we post a dozen University of Minnesota jerseys, there will only be one pin for that club. This will allow us to include many more locations, all visible on the same map. In addition, whenever possible, if you zoom in on the map, we have located the pin exactly on the location of each team's home arena, even if the building is no longer standing! (In the case of some national teams, we located the pin at the nation's capital.)

• We are also happy to announce that all of our products, featuring Hall of Famer and Montreal Canadiens great and hockey pioneer Georges Vezina, are on sale in our Third String Goalie Online Shop through the end of the month. There's a wide variety of items to choose from to show you support of Third String Goalie available just in time for Father's Day.

Additionally, we've added a couple of items to our wantlist, so if you haven't read that for a while, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a fresh look at the list over in the right hand column.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or feedback, want to report any broken links, factual errors or one of our hundreds of typos, please don't hesitate to send us an email at spyboy1@gmail.com

Again, thanks for reading and we look forward to another year of great, and some not-so-great, jerseys and the fascinating stories behind them!

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To celebrate our first anniversary, we revisit our very first topic in the post directly below, long-time Detroit Red Wings captain Steve Yzerman, who conincidentally shares a birthday with Third String Goalie.