With so much intriguing Jets news floating around this fine summer afternoon (yes, I am aware that ESPN has named Rex the 4th best active coach in all of sports, and I must say he is severely underrated), I feel somewhat bad about wasting a posting opportunity like this, but it had to be said eventually. I’m already a week late in officially announcing the Jets Kvetch’s freshly forged partnership with Fox Sports and the Yardbarker Network! Yardbarker is one of the most prominent and respected sports blogging networks online, and I’m proud to be its 634th member, and second member purely devoted to coverage of the New York Jets (The J-E-T Press is the other). What does this mean for the Kvetch and its readers? Both a lot and a little.

Operating a website is a lot like owning a home, provided that it costs a lot less, doesn’t come with a kitchen and is actually nothing like owning a home. But just as one is forever seeking to improve their living conditions, webmasters are constantly looking to make their sites better, sexier and more user-friendly. I’m no different. For the last week, I’ve spent an almost unhealthy number of hours fiddling with Wordpress to find ways to make the Jets Kvetch, at least on a superficial level, the finest football blog known to man, and while I don’t believe that I’m there just yet, there’s a lot of new stuff to be proud of.

The casual eye, merely grazing over the site before moving on down the bookmarks list, would perhaps not notice any differences at all. Sure enough, the basic layout and appearance of the page has not changed. The crazy moving header is still there, and posts are still presented in the same format they’ve used since February. Yet if one were to take advantage of all the services that the site offers beyond the posts themselves, they would find that nearly every aspect of the Jets Kvetch experience has been virtually transformed.

Incredible. When I first posted my fan census, I expected that maybe 20-50 people would partake in it, and that I would have been happy with any number in that range. Then Bassett over at The Jets Blog was kind enough to link to us and the whole damn thing exploded. Within minutes hundreds of people visited this site, which prior to yesterday had never received more than 130 or so hits. We topped 1,000 yesterday. Amazing. Well, 502 responses later, here are the results of the first ever 2010 Jet Nation census, including two bonus questions that I wish I had asked the first time around. Enjoy, and, please, if you like our site, be sure to bookmark us and keep reading!

Why then doesn’t Jets Nation have its own census? How else will we know how many fans we’ve got, how long they’ve stuck with the team and whether that talk of a New Jersey/Long Island split between Jets and Giants fans is true? I’ll bet you Red Sox Nation’s had one of these things for years, and Raider Nation probably would have too, if any of their fans were literate. So please take the time to fill out at least part of the poll questions provided below. There’s a real possibility that the data we collect from this project could provide a very unexpected snapshot of our fan base.

The Jets Kvetch turned one month old yesterday, and I’d like to take a day to not only shine some light on what we’ve been able to achieve in that short stretch of time, but also to comment on our flaws, and lay out a plan of attack for improving JK with the hopes of eventually living up to our self-proclaimed status as “the world’s #1 NY Jets fan site.” Before I get into that, however, I’d like to direct you to a recent feature on our site in the Journal & Courier, the primary newspaper of my new hometown of Lafayette, Indiana. The story, which took up about 1/5 of the front page of the Living section, was part of Tim Brouk’s weekly “Greater Lafayette Blogger” series, which highlights, well, bloggers from Greater Lafayette. So in a way I should consider myself lucky to have landed this write-up, given not only my non-native status, but also that this site documents a football team that some 90% of the locals probably have a strong distaste for.