“Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday dear totalBarça

Happy birthday to you!”

These could very well have been the tunes coming out of the totalBarça staff room this morning, had we all been together. Our little baby has turned one year old and looks stronger than ever.

What started out as a pet project from old readers and contributors of the FCBTransfers blog, has now reached a stage where it can call itself a fully-fledged FC Barcelona news site. What started out as a small unknown site reaching only just a little over 100 views our first day, have turned into a big international volunteer success reaching a massive 1 million views as of yesterday morning. Our website over the last year has been featured in BBC blogs, Wikipedia and a handful of newspapers across Europe.

During the span of the last year we have had over 60 people contributing to the site in one way or the other, everything from writers, editors to programmers. Our writers and editors have produced over 4800 posts, reaching an impressive daily average of over 13 posts per day. Their commitment and willingness to spend time on this project is truly admirable, and I hope that each and every one of them will continue with us on this ride.

What you readers see on the site however is only a slight portion of the work put into the site, and I would therefore like to use this special occasion to reach out and praise those people behind, those you do not see in the writer nor editor field.

Aditya from India, also known as KnivesOut, have been one of the leading forces in managing as well as taken care of the technical side of this news page. He originally was the one who convinced me to join in on this project right from the beginning and I do not regret it one bit, thank you! Without him the site would for sure already have died a miserable death by electronic meltdown or whatever can happen to websites now a days.

Bryan from Canada, also known as barcacanada, helped move totalBarça forward from being a chaotic volunteer project into a well-functioning organization. There will always be some sort of fluctuations in volunteer organizations like this, but his expertise, marketing background and friendly attitude has helped gather us and work more streamlined than ever. His energy and commitment to this project is unquestionable and admirable.

Omar from Canada, also known as 0marX, was one of the main initiators of this project. His technical knowhow and ambitions for expanding the social aspect of this site, has given birth to no less than the FC Barcelona Match chat. This one implementation has helped gather the community behind the totalBarça site like nothing else. Furthermore he in collaboration with Aditya has been a main drive behind running the technical side, an invaluable but often ungrateful work.

Søren from Denmark, also known as Jakobsen, has been a huge asset with his everlasting energy and big ambitions for this project. From managing to writing, this guy has given you all lots of funny with the “Caption this” posts. Being from the dark, wrong side of Denmark I must say I’ve been impressed that there are also regular somewhat normally functioning people from there (and yes, I am a Dane myself)!

Many more people need a personal thank you, more than I can write here without boring you all sadly. Everyone who has been working on this project will tell you how proud we all are of our little baby and its impressive prospects. A special thanks to our former staff members and our founding members – who have led the way and helped us set the foundation for an exciting future.

Finally, we hope that you – our dear readers will support and follow us in the future as we constantly try to renew and improve ourselves. Without you, there would be no motivation and drive to continue with this project, your approving comments and discussions have been an integral part in making totalBarça what it is today. For now, long live totalBarça, may you have a long and prosperous life!

Best regards,
Stigsby