100th blog post - thanks for the support!

It seems a long time ago now that I started a blog about the team that I love. I'd often put together "match threads" for various forums over the years (full of stats, generally), but I'd never had an outlet for something a little more creative, somewhere I could ponder all things Swansea City. That led to the creation of theswanseaway.blogspot.co.uk, which quickly became theswanseaway.co.uk, and since then I've posted all manner of things - some which have been well received, and some...not so much.

I do have a tendency to lean towards the statistical side of things, but up until now I've been hindered by two things. One, is that I am really cheap and refuse to pay for my statistics (Yep, that's you EPLIndex), and secondly my laptop is so decrepit it's a miracle it hasn't exploded in my face before now. The noise now emanating from within it resembles a cross between a hoover and an old school dial-up modem, and it's so mind-numbingly pneumatic that I've taken to listening to music on noise-excluding headphones in a bid to drown it out. It doesn't work.

That's all changing today. I've acquired a new computer which will sit on a new desk (thanks ma!), and I'm looking forward to a reduction in computer-based audio levels as much as I'm looking forward to this whole Laudrup "will he won't he" saga being over.

Back to the formation of the site, and when I started doing this in February we were about to face Liverpool in that game prior to the Carling Cup final, but thankfully I soon had something positive to write about - and in truth the article I put up following the cup win remains my favourite post to this day (read it here). Other highlights include an interview with Kevin Johns, a bit of a rant about music in stadia, a "long lost" video of Laudrup starring in a FC Barcelona pop video (featuring some truly outstanding 90's shirts - it's worth a watch just for that) and [another] rant about the lack of technology in football.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've thoroughly enjoyed running a blog so far. I'm looking forward to a summer of (hopefully) relative peace and quiet given the events of the past few weeks, but that's not really how we do things in Swansea, is it? I'm trying to persuade myself that over the next few weeks we'll be talking more about potential signings than about a potential replacement for Messr Laudrup, but it is still all up in the air so we can't rest easy just yet.

As mentioned in the title, this site would be nothing without the opinions of other fans like myself. The idea behind this site is it's somewhere you can trust in terms of information - if something is my opinion I state it to be so and I do the same with rumours. I've no interest in creating scandal for the sake of page views; I simply like the idea that I can provide a stream of news and opinion which you can read safe in the knowledge that it hasn't been put together simply to sell a paper or attract a few clicks of the mouse. Whether I've achieved that so far isn't for me to decide, but I'm giving it a good go.

Again, thanks for the support - it's appreciated. I look forward to hopefully bringing you some new features this summer including interviews with ex-players and (who knows) possibly even a current player or two. My current angle is I speak Spanish and I'm really hairy, so I'm sure there's some kind of funny photo opportunity with Chico Flores on the cards.

Watch this space.