In the nav bar across the top of the page, you'll notice a "Schedule" link. Click that, and you'll see that I've been busy adding upcoming events. So far, I've got the USGA and PGA of America tournaments for the remainder of the year added, plus the next five events for the PGA Tour, Champions Tour, European Tour, Nationwide Tour, LPGA, LET and Futures Tour.

Tomorrow I'll get to work adding the remainder of the 2008 schedule for each of those tours, plus adding in some other tours and tournaments, as well.

Now, here's a cool feature related to the Schedule page, one that you can help make cool whenever you add a FanPost or FanShot. When you are in the process of adding a FanPost or FanShot, look on the righthand side of the page and you'll see a green button that says "Attach Event." What is that?

Well, type in your FanPost or FanShot, then mouse over to the "Attach Event" button and click it. A window opens up; choose "Upcoming" in the drop-down menu and you'll see a list of all the coming tournaments I've added so far.

Check to see if the tournament you've been writing about (assuming your post is related to a coming tournament, of course), and if you see that event, then click the "add" link. This associates your post with that tournament.

And now, when anyone clicks on the tournament's "More Coverage" link on the Schedule page, they'll see your post! Along with any other posts that have been associated with that tournament via the "Attach Event" button.

Pretty cool, eh?

To see how this works, go to the Schedule page:

http://www.waggleroom.com/schedule

Scroll down to the U.S. Open in June, and click "More Coverage." You'll get to the tournament page:

http://www.waggleroom.com/event/cI3VphEP

And you'll see two posts that I've associated with the  U.S. Open via the "Attach Event" button.

And again, just to be clear, you'll see the "Attach Event" button on the right-hand side of the editing page when you are adding a FanPost or FanShot.

 

Here's a cool new feature. Go to the FanShots index:

http://www.waggleroom.com/fanshots

And look above the first FanShot. You'll see a line of text that reads "Right-click this button and choose "Add to Favorites" to quickly post FanShots to SB Nation:" and to the right is button labeled "Share on SB Nation."

If you right-click that button and add to your favorites, you'll be installing the FanShots bookmarklet. And what does that do for you? Well, let's say you're on Golfweek or Golf Digest web site, and you come across a great article or a great photo or a great quote from a golfer; or maybe you're on YouTube and see a great video.

And you want to share what you've found by posting a FanShot on Waggle Room. If you do NOT have the bookmarklet, you'll have to navigate to Waggle Room, away from the page you're on, and copy and paste the URL or pertinent data.

If you DO have the bookmarklet, you can post what you've found in a Waggle Room FanShot without ever leaving the page you're on. Pretty cool, eh? I haven't actually tried it yet myself, but that's the FanShot bookmarklet.

Update: Just installed and tried the bookmarklet. It's a little buggy still, but it did work. However, you'll have to turn off any pop-up blocker you have if you want to use the bookmarklet while on Golfweek, for example, without leaving the Golfweek page you're on.

Welcome to the new Waggle Room. Hope you like it. But before you decide whether you like it, you should probably spend a little setting up your new user page and taking a look at some of the new features.

Be sure to read through tech guy Trei's "welcome" message and overview of the new features.

Also note that there's one part of Trei's message that does not yet apply to Waggle Room. He mentions the integration of stats, scores, schedules and player profiles into SBN blogs. As of this time, only the team blogs - MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL - have that feature. But it is in our future, too.

Don't forget to make use of the "Tags" feature when adding a FanPost or FanShot. List the names of any players our tournament names or tour names in the "Tags" field (you'll see it to the right when you're editing a new FanPost or FanShot). That will allow readers to easily find related posts.

If you want an in-depth explanation of all the features of the new FanPost editing tool, then check out this page -- http://www.sbnation.com/guide/fanpost.

Hey Waggle Room,

Today is the big day. We've switched your community over to the new SB Nation sports blog platform. My name is Trei, and I'm here to help you get adjusted to the new home we've built for you. If you have questions or trouble with the new system, post a comment in this thread and myself or one of the team (lovitt, sixfoot6 or odacrem) will try to point you in the right direction.

Before we begin, I want to let you know we still consider this a beta platform, so don't be surprised if you find a few bugs or if everything isn't exactly right yet. We hope you'll take the time to report any problems you encounter at bugreport@sbnation.com. We'll be continuing to make changes and improving things.

Please take a few minutes to read about what's new below. But if you just can't wait to jump in, here are some quick things to check out:

1. Sign up for your SB Nation network account and claim your old blog accounts
2. Once you're logged in, press your  Z  key in any thread with new comments
3. Explore your dashboard and setup your profile
4. Read the guide to the new FanPost editor
5. Install the FanShot bookmarklet and post videos to Waggle Room from YouTube or images from Flickr
6. Click the "Rec" button on posts and comments to help other people find the good stuff.
7. Customize display options on your Edit Settings page

What Has Changed

SB Nation Network Accounts - the Big Change

Readers across all of our blogs told us they wanted one account to use on every SB Nation blog. To make this work, we're requiring that everyone create a new SB Nation network account. In most cases you should be able to keep your old username, but a few of you may have to choose something new, since every other community in SB Nation will be going through this same transition. We tried to be as fair as possible in deciding who gets to keep which name, using a formula that takes into account length of membership and frequency of activity.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to participate on all of our blogs, but we don't want to encourage everyone to start visiting rival team blogs and initiating flame wars. To maintain friendly communities we ask that you explicitly join each blog in order to participate. It's a two-click process, but it does means accepting each blog's community guidelines. Just as you join each blog individually, you can be banned on each blog individually.

You can claim old accounts from multiple SB Nation blogs, and your new username will be retroactively attached to all your old comments and diaries. So now you'll be able to access all your writings from your single profile page... like magic.

To get started, click here to claim your old blog accounts and create a new SB Nation network account.

FanPosts (the Section Formerly Known as Diaries)

We changed their name. Why? Because we took this major upgrade as an opportunity to leave behind some vocabulary that never made much sense for a sports blog. SB Nation is the network of, by and for fans, and these are the blog posts we make. So we call them FanPosts. When you're at a bar telling someone to check out your online sports opinions, you don't have to suggest they read your diary.

FanPosts are displayed differently on the homepage - we include your avatar to give more credit for the time you spend writing great posts. The new post editor has a WYSIWYG view that provides easy formatting. It also auto-saves drafts so you don't have to worry about losing your work when you compose a post within the web browser. And you can now associate teams, players and games with your posts: these tools promote your FanPosts on our new team, player and game pages - across the entire network.

The new system does not work like the old diary editor. For example, in HTML mode the new editor doesn't auto-create a new paragraph from two line breaks. But it does offer a whole array of new features. Look for the blinking help button on the right side of the FanPost editor for quick tips, and take a look at our full guide to writing FanPosts on the new platform.

IMPORTANT - if you write your posts in Microsoft Word or some other off-line editor, you will get the most reliable behavior if you cut & paste your post into the HTML view of the FanPost editor. And if you do that, remember to wrap <p></p> tags around each paragraph so your text doesn't run together.

Visual Redesign

This one is probably the most obvious change of all. Like other major websites working to improve readability for their audience, we've adopted a fixed-width layout optimized for the 1024 x 768 resolution used by the majority of Waggle Room and SB Nation network users. Use the switcher below the user menu if you prefer the wider layout designed for 1280 monitors. We've introduced a top navigation bar with quick links into old and new sections of the site. We also polished a few edges, made some things larger, others smaller and moved a few boxes here and there. More changes and adjustments to come.

Search

We've completely replaced the old search engine with a new one. We're excited to make it easier to find old posts and comments, but we've only taken our first pass on the tools we're offering. We're focused on making search even better than what you had before, so please know that we're aware search is missing key features and we're working on it.

What's New

Schedule, Scores, Stats and Roster

Waggle Room now has all the basic information about the sports and hundreds of other teams. During games you'll see a regularly updated line score, and as the season progresses we'll track team stat totals and leaders. This is just our first step, so look for us to publish more detailed and archival stats in the future. The best part about all this sports data is that we've integrated it directly into the blog so. We now have special pages that aggregate all blog posts written about games, players and teams.

Recommending FanPosts

Some writing deserves more attention and more conversation. If you want to bump a FanPost up to the top and keep it there for awhile, just click the 'Rec' link under the body of the post. When a FanPost receives enough recommendations it will make the recommended list.

Auto-refreshing Comments

You no longer need to refresh the page to see new comments. If you're logged in, new comments will automatically appear on the page every few seconds. When you post a comment, the page will not refresh either. If you want to quickly cycle through all the new comments, you can press the C key on your keyboard. Unmark a new comment after you've read it with the X key. And use the Z key if you want to umark comments as you're cycling through them.

As you use these shortcuts to cycle through comments, press the R key to reply to the current comment. All these helpful keyboard shortcuts are listed at the top of each comments section for reference.

Recommending Comments

Now you can reward those folks who take the time to look up stats and make smart arguments in the comments. Next to each comment there is an 'actions' link that you can click to find the recommend and flag options.

Flagging Comments

To help the moderators on a site, we've built-in tools that let you flag comments that are spam, trolling or just plain inappropriate. Only moderators can see those flags.

FanShots

Many members of the community just want to post that one link, video, photo or quote, but don't need a full FanPost. We've got you covered: FanShots let you share YouTube videos, Flickr or PhotoBucket photos, quotes from articles, portions of chat transcripts, top 5 lists and simple links. If it's a video or image we'll put a thumbnail on the homepage when you post it.

For those of you who are experienced internet hunter-gatherers of sports material, install the bookmarklet onto the links bar of your browser and share FanShots with the community from wherever on the web you find that killer quote or photo.

Archives

It's much easier to find that post about a certain deadline trade or prospect retro feature. You can browse by year and month.

Avatars

Upload an image so folks can see your custom avatar on your profile, your FanPosts, and all your comments.

Network Profiles

Now that we have unified SB Nation network accounts, your profile will be your central hub for all of your activity on any blogs where you are a member.

Network bar

The top bar stays with you on all SB Nation blogs. It's a quick way to login and logout. When you're logged in, you'll see your avatar and screen name which links to your profile. The icon to the right leads to your Dashboard area where you can edit your settings, profile, account details and any FanPosts or FanShots you've published. As we add more blogs to the new SB Nation network, the My Blogs menu will be a handy way to navigate between the blogs you've joined.

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There are plenty more small changes and additions we've made, so please take a careful look around and explore this new system. We appreciate your patience and hope you'll help us improve the new platform for this and all the other SB Nation blogs.

And in case you missed it, you'll want to start by claiming your old blog accounts and creating a new SB Nation network account.

(Bumped up from diaries, for obvious reasons. And it's official.)

The Associated Press is reporting that Annika Sorenstam will retire from competitive play on the LPGA Tour at the conclusion of this season.

http://www.golf.com/golf/tours_news/article/0,28136,1739723,00.html

"Annika Sorenstam will retire after the season, ending an LPGA Tour career in which she has won 72 tournaments to date and delivered a defining moment when she teed it up against the men on the PGA Tour.

She was to announce her decision at a news conference Tuesday at the Sybase Classic in Clifton, N.J., a person familiar with her plans told The Associated Press.

The 37-year-old Sorenstam has hinted at retirement the past several seasons, saying she wanted to devote more time to her growing business and to start a family. She is engaged to Mike McGee, son of former PGA Tour player Jerry McGee."

It's difficult to imagine a more impressive career for any athlete in any sport. Five consecutive LPGA Player of the Year awards just about says it all.

Godspeed, Annika.

Hennie Otto wins in Europe. I have nothing to contribute. I just like saying "Hennie Otto."

Ryan Herrington has a first-class two-page spread in GolfWorld, May 9, 2008, on Tif, including a half-page photo (first page) and about one-quarter page photo on page two.

Her run-up to becoming successful is quite interesting as well as bits about her humility, sense of humor and self-deprecation.

Congratulations to a hard-working, very deservingly successful young lady.

Here's a post in her Golf For Women blog by Stina Stirnberg about the last episode of Big Break:

http://www.golfforwomen.com/magazine/blogs/editors/2008/05/big-break-shock.html

There's also a preview clip of the next ep.

Stina says Liz and Adrienne were both "inconsolable" after their ousters. And not to underestimate Susan who "can play the pants off most of you."

Hey, Susan can play my pants off any time ... heh heh heh .... um, don't tell my wife I said that!

Just got a marketing email from Rife Putters and their report on use on the Champions Tour.  This logic is a little easier to follow than Nickent a few weeks back, and I don't think it will get them in any trouble - but it might be considered misleading regardless.

"RIFE Captures Victory at The FedEx Kinko's Classic and Has Twice As Many Putters In Play than the Next Closest Competitor"

Sanford, FL -

yada yada yada

"...RIFE Putters won the Darrell-Survey putter count with 27 total putters in play, an astonishing 14 putters ahead of its nearest competitor."

Ok - not the worst logic I've ever seen - and 14 is pretty close to "twice as many" to 27 as you can get.  They just say that the next closest had half as many putters in play.

Gotta give the marketers credit for being able to stretch the truth as far as they can.  Must be a gift...or a birth defect...not sure which. :-)

Did anybody else have trouble seeing the first airing of last night's Big Break ?  All I had was a blank screen. (I have Comcast Southeast)  Had to watch the later broadcast, not that there was a surprise alternate ending or anything like that.

Taking up with Stu's newfound cynicism (just kidding, Stu) - what's with Sofie Sandolo and that scarf ?  They're in Hawaii.  Is she experimenting with ideas to "market" her "brand"...before she's actually accomplished anything other than a REALLY cool calendar ?  This age of agents and marketing companies is really getting on my nerves - too many players with no resume going out to market themselves before showing that they can perform.

How about the fear of bunkers ?  Only 2 of the ladies stepped in with any real confidence - Lori and Susan (though, IMHO, Lori's bravado sounds a bit contrived and rehearsed).  I'm impressed with Susan's nerve and short game skills.  She could be a lot better than she lets on.