Third String Goalie's Second Anniversary

Today is the second anniversary of Third String Goalie. While we originally intended for this to be a way to share our hockey jersey collection with hockey fans in North America, we soon learned that there were many great stories from the world of hockey that we wanted to tell, but did not own jerseys to illustrate them.

Once we freed ourselves of the restriction of only posting jerseys that we own, it allowed us to bring you many stories we found fascinating, sad, hilarious, remarkable and inspirational.

Over the course of the last two years we were in for several surprises, one of which was certainly how many people from all over the globe have paid a visit to this blog, be it on purpose or surely by accident. As of today we have documented visitors from 150 different countries, a fact that shocks and amazes us to the point that we now have our flag counter as a regular feature of our right hand sidebar. We only wish we would have discovered this sooner so the visitor numbers would be accurate since the day be began, as it only accounts for half of our total pageviews.

We are genuinely pleased that so many of you from around the world have paid us a visit or two, and to hopefully make your visit easier, we also added a google translate feature above the flag counter which will convert Third String Goalie into the language of your choice.

Once we started to see visitors from Europe and around the world, seeing the numbers from traditional hockey playing countries were understandable, places such as Russia, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland, but that so many have come from Australia, France and especially Great Britain has truly been a surprise. Speaking of surprises, one can only wonder what the visitors from Nicaragua, Iran, Botswana, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Bangldesh and Iraq were looking for when they stumbled across us!

To date, over 200,000 visitors to Third String Goalie have viewed over 300,000 pages and our daily numbers continue to rise, much to our excitement.

Some other numbers to run by you include over 400 retweets of our posts on Twitter, over 750 tweets we have made on our twitter feed, which now has over 220 daily followers of quality (as we try to weed out the spammers as much as we can) and 172 people who like our Facebook page, which if you felt like "liking" we certainly encourage, and 765 total posts we have written, which range from the 1902-03 Rat Portage Thistles to yesterday's update on the 2011 IIHF World Championships, from 183 different teams from 27 different countries, ranging from Alaska in the west around the world to Japan in the east, from Iceland in the north to Miami, Florida in the south, all documented in our google map of Third String Goalie jersey locations, which can be viewed daily at the bottom of the main page.

View Third String Goalie jersey location map in a larger map

To celebrate our second anniversary we are having a sale in our Third String Goalie Online Shop, where everything will be marked down to it's lowest price possible for the next week.

Thank you all so much for reading and supporting Third String Goalie, especially those of you who have taken the time to post comments, send in corrections and email us. It's greatly appreciated!

Now, on to our traditional annual post in honor of Steve Yzerman, who shares a birthday with Third String Goalie.