CubsNet.com was offline for approximately 36 hours over the past two days. We apologize for the inconvenience. We have moved the site from its former host, OpenSourceHost, which was, according to them, unable to maintain the site.

I have updated the Roster / Contracts page to include Carlos Zambrano's salary information and the Jon Lieber signing. I have also inserted numbers for the minimum service guys, guessing whether they will be on the 25-man roster (which grants them at minimum a $390K salary) or in the minors (approximately $100K, depending on service time). The approximate total salary for 2008 currently stands at $123 million.

You can now become a fan of CubsNet.com on Facebook at the new CubsNet.com Facebook page. Become a fan of us today!

The Cubs' .525 win percentage in 2007 put Lou Piniella 8th among all-time Cubs' managers in win percentage, among managers who have managed at least 100 games. The rankings page has been updated.

We have a new feature in the right sidebar: Squib Hits. Squib Hits is a CubsNet.com blog that contains just short posts not worth a full length front page article. Comments will be open. Here's the welcome post.

We have added a page on the top 25 players in Chicago Cubs history in Cubs career OPS+*, since 1900, with a minimum of 2500 plate appearances, to the stats portion of the site.

You'll notice the site looks different. I upgraded the software that runs the site, and now need to put the old theme back in place. Or maybe I'll come up with a new theme. There are also a few normal features of the site that are not functional yet, but most of the site is functional. Thanks for reading and participating!

UPDATE (6:25pm): The site is just about back at its normal look. Please leave a comment (if you have registered) or email (if you have not) if you notice any problems and do not like anything about the site design.

Registered users can now check a box to subscribe to any blog or forum topic, to help you keep track of updates to discussions. You can manage your subscriptions here.

You can now search the Cubs Blog Army here at CubsNet.com.

After a brief hiatus, you can now view site statistics again. See the most read stories and the most frequent site contributors, by time period.

CubsNet.com has now enabled, on a trial basis, comments by anonymous users. As a result, you can now comment on blog posts and forum threads without registering with the site. All comments by unregistered users will be placed in an approval queue, and there is no guarantee on how soon your comment will show up on the site. In order to write your own blog posts and start your own forum threads, you will still need to register with the site.

UPDATE (12/26/2006 11:10pm): Shortly after we enabled anonymous comments, CubsNet.com was hit with a huge amount of referrer spam (a mini-DNS attack) that forced the site to be shut down due to the server load. Due to Christmas festivities, the problem could not be addressed until now. Turning anonymous comments back off has, so far, fixed the problem. So, they will remain off. As a result, we encourage you all to become a registered user to get the full benefits of the site.

Two new sources have been added to the CubsNet.com aggregator: MLB Rumors and Chicago Cubs Rumors, both from Yahoo! Sports.

The 40-man roster page has been updated with the recent contracts given to Kerry Wood, Aramis Ramirez, Wade Miller, and Mark DeRosa.

CubsNet.com is having a problem at the moment where posts are sorting in ascending order by date, instead of the normal descending order by date. We are working on fixing the problem.

UPDATE (11:05am): CubsNet.com's excellent web host, OpenSourceHost, has fixed the problem, the source of which we're still not sure, by updgrading the version of Drupal used to power the site. Some work needs to be done yet on fixing the theme of the site back to what it was.

UPDATE (11:25am): The style of the site has been fixed. We are still experiencing some database problems. For example, the user pages are broken at the moment.

UPDATE (1:50pm): The user pages have now been fixed. Everything should now be in working order.

There's no reason why CubsNet.com users should be limited in what sports they talk about. As a result, we have created college football and college basketball forums to use. Expect me to be talking about the Iowa Hawkeyes.