RFFootball.com was a great idea at one point in time, but in the latter stages of the game I’ve played over the last year, the site became neglected.  Time was spread thin, priorities were rearranged, and more than one good site has gone tumbleweed over the dusty terrain of my writing career.  I think I still see Russian Football Now rolling in the distance.  I miss you, Vasili.

The nadir of this neglect came last month.  The World Cup was an absolute drain, much more of a commitment than I could have possibly imagined.  At the beginning of May, the requests started coming, the content had to flow, and by the middle of July, I was a spent vessel.  I’d like to tell you that my quality didn’t suffer during that time, but at least I can hang my hat on quantity.  I hope I still provided something you could use.

Two weeks of recuperation and I’m finally starting to feel like my old self.  For the first time since Spain beat the Netherlands, I broke out my notebook.  I’ve restarted the endless pursuit for matches to watch, and I’m starting to write things I enjoy (and some things I know you won’t).

As is usually the case, the writing’s been done while ideas for projects float in my head.  This time, as opposed to starting new ventures, the ideas center around what to do with existing ones.  Russian Football Now is a great site, and considering how little coverage that great league gets, I want to save RFN (if not make it a model).  Set Piece Analysts had greater writers like Ray Curren, Eben Lehman and Ryan Rosenblatt.  Maybe something like that could work for more than just the Women’s Soccer Podcast?

And what of this site?  I’ve always considered this an online CV, and there’s nothing worse than distributing an out-of-date resumé.  This site used to be one place to distribute all my content – written and audio.  Seems like it could be useful for that.

But more helpful, I’ve been fiddling around with trying to get Mediawiki for Mas OS X to work off a flash drive.  No luck, no time, but given I was doing that as a way to help organize my notes, I started wondering if RFFootball.com’s blog might not serve the same purpose.  See something I want to keep in mind?  Put it on the blog, maybe people can get value out of my thoughts, notes, or mere flag, and when I need the information for a piece somewhere else, I can just come to the blog and search.

Find new sites that are useful?  My posts and tags could be my bookmarks.  I piece of feedback I found particularly insightful and want to expand upon?  I can do so here.

And what of the work I’m trying to do to improve the podcasts – testing different set-ups of equipment, uses of technologies? We can try them out here.

And all my larks, side projects, and things I will eventually wish I never said?  Seems like RFFootball has a purpose.

Who knows how long it will last.  Over the past six months I’ve paid people to keep this site up-to-date, and that didn’t work.  Now that I’m doing it for free again, this might be a temporary thing.

But with my trite rebirth post just over 550 words, we’re already going long.  Hopefully, RFFootball is back – my personal playground.