For the long weekend, I’m going to leave some site announcements up while I prep for what should be a very busy week on HoustonDiehards.com. I want this to stay at the top of the page for a couple of days, so if the Texans make any roster moves in the next couple of days, I’ll probably just insert them here.

Today’s transactions, via the official team site:
TEXANS SIGN DE STANLEY MCCLOVER
The Texans signed DE project Stanley McClover off the waiver wire Sunday. McClover has pass rushing potential, but it never translated to on-the-field results during his two years with the Carolina Panthers. As expected, the team waived OT Cliff Washburn to make room for McClover.

TEXANS SIGN SEVEN TO THE PRACTICE SQUAD
The Texans signed seven of the players they cut on Friday to the practice squad. They are:
RB Darius Walker
LB Kevis Coley
WR Darnell Jenkins
DT Gabe Long
DE Jesse Nading
WR Mark Simmons
CB Derrick Roberson

There are a total of eight spots on the practice squad, so there’s still a space available. Obviously, it’s for a quarterback. Gary Kubiak made it pretty clear that they are going to check the waiver wire for a QB before settling for either Shane Boyd or Alex Brink… so expect them to fill that spot very soon.

SITE UPDATES

Yahoo NFL Pick’em league – I still have three slots available. Everyone who has opted in has created their account, except for Socctty. So I still need three people. If I can’t get 10, I’ll probably just delete the league. By the way, there will be a prize. It won’t be extravagant, but there will be some kind of Texans-related prize for the winner. Probably some kind of nice Texans beer glass, or something similar.

Once we have 10, we’ll talk about whether or not to use confidence points, whether we’ll be picking against the spread, etc.

New site design – I am not an HTML/CSS/PHP wizard, and the new Firefox 3 release is KILLING my new design for HoustonDiehards. I literally had the whole thing completely finished – then when I upgraded to Firefox 3 – a couple of things went haywire, and I have not been able to fix them as of yet. I’d really, really like to get it up and running this week, but until I figure things out, it’s not going to happen.

Podcast update – After the previous podcast disaster in which I had a complete hardware and software failure, I think I have everything worked out. This week I’m shooting for either two separate podcasts (a preview of the Steelers/Texans game with a Steelers blogger, and a fantasy football podcast with Matt Campbell)… or I might just shoot for one podcast with both segments edited in. I’m still working the kinks out, so I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to work out right now.