About Us: February 2010 Archives

After our highly scientific data gathering poll, Visionaire's tag-line "red on right, white on left, insanity in the middle" received twice the number of votes as the next highest "All courses: average for readers with some experience at this level."  The later was probably my favorite, but a couple of commenters made a great point that our international readers might not get the joke, which is that the line comes from the USEA's omnibus attempt at rating XC course difficulty.  We also had a couple of great suggestions such as Leslie's "eventing news and equestrian views in the right stride" and Sarah's "for those of us who have fallen off too many times."  So, EN has a new tag-line and complementary flags to go on either side of our name, after all, red on right, white on left...

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As part of our award-winning Olympics coverage, I was wondering if any winter Olympic sport could compare to the insanity of Eventing.  So, to give us a perspective, here are a few category superlatives from the Winter Olympics. 

Most dangerous-Watching some of the crashes in last night's women's downhill, I think the whole 70 mph smashing into a sheet of ice followed by a 500 ft slide down said sheet of ice is pretty freaking dangerous.  Honorable mention to speed skating because crashes involve rolling around with super-sharp blades that sometimes sever arteries.

One thing I have been thinking about is changing our tag-line: "Eventing news, results, and ridiculous commentary, from horse trials and three-day events."  This was my first attempt when I was designing the site last year, and I chose it because it was packed with keywords.  Search engines really look at tag-lines as they try to 'understand' what a website is about, but Google seems to understand us just fine these days and I am hoping to find something more stylish.  Visionaire and I have tossed around a few ideas, and the good ones are Visionaire's, the bad ones are mine.

(1) Eventing news and equestrian views delivered fresh daily with a twist of humor and opinions on the side.

(2) Whatever you do, wherever you go...Go eventing.

(3) When is John going to shut up and let the smart people write everything?

(4) Come along for the ride.

(5) Red on right, white on left, insanity in the middle.

(6) Bringing news, insight, and thought-displacing discussion to the eventing community.

(7) All courses: Average for readers with some experience at this level.

Actually, all but number (3) are Visionaire's, mine are no where near good enough to bother posting.  Please let us know your own ideas for tag-lines and which tag-lines you like best in the comment section.  Needless to say, your feedback is going to determine what direction we decide to go, and we will be looking at it on the header every single day, so no pressure folks.

We have also chatted about putting red and white flags on either side of the EN title, which I think would look pretty cool, so look for that possibly soon.

Finally, for some reason we have had over 30 FB friend requests in the last 6 hours, which is way above average.  In fact, it's 6 times above our full daily average for friend requests.  I know it's my job to keep track of everything related to EN, but I'm thinking there might be a link out there that I don't know about.  If anyone knows something, please fire us an email or comment.  Go eventing.