This is the new RMNB

RMNB had ten million hits last season, and we’re pretty proud of that.

Our sixth year was our biggest, but we think there are even brighter days ahead, and that’s what this redesign is all about.

[dropcap]If one of those ten million pageviews last season belonged to you, thank you. There’s a 3 in 5 chance you visited us from your phone.[/dropcap]

Just one third of us read the site from a desktop. So, for the majority of folks, RMNB did not look that great:

RMNB used to run on a WordPress theme called White House. It was literally what the President was using back then. It was rad for its time. We had the Big Gray Thing at the top. We shouted out our blog buddies in the right rail. We had those awesome voicemail greetings Wes Johnson made for us back in the day. Everything was great.

Back then we would get 200 hits a night, and almost 90 percent of them came from desktop computers. Since then we’ve grown by orders of magnitude, and technology has evolved to the point that I can’t go five goddamn minutes without hearing about Harambe.

So the website must grow with it.

[dropcap]That’s why, in 2014, we did a fundraiser we called Making RMNB Last. We gave away t-shirts and wrote some silly essays, and you helped raise $25 thousand. That money went to paying our contributors, improving our infrastructure, and bankrolling this here website. Lemme tell you about it.[/dropcap]

The new RMNB is responsive. It looks good no matter what device you’re using. It clears the clutter so you can read our stuff, see all the cool art, talk about with your internet pals, and then get on with your day.

Seven reasons why we dig the new site

1. It’s optimized for phones and tablets
2. It loads faster
3. New typography makes it way easier to read
4. There’s less clutter
5. The images are bigger and look great
6. The Trending bar shows you what’s happening at a glance
7. Headlines are in sentence case now (very controversial among the writers)

And, for all the people who have been haranguing us to make an app, this is it. Open the site, then hit “Add to Home Screen” and that’s it. You’re done. Now stop bothering us.

The new site gives us flexibility we didn’t have before. One of our goals was to get a more reliable revenue stream so we can pay our team better. This new site helps us do that by delivering advertisements in different places. We promise not to overdo it or to send you malware, but if you don’t mind, please disable your adblocker or add us to its whitelist. If that’s not a fit for you, we understand; you could always support us by buying a t-shirt or four.

[dropcap]For me and Ian, RMNB is all about passion: a shared spirit of DIY. Maybe that’s why we’ve never found the bigger publishing networks to be a good fit for us. So we don’t have their money, resources, or technology. We’re just a bunch of try-hards scraping by with the help of good people like Brad Bensten and Drew Ahrens and a few hundred gracious supporters, but we like our little corner of the internet.[/dropcap]

And we’re not done yet. Things in RMNB land are changing, growing.

In the next few weeks, you will see the site improving. We’ll be implementing some tweaks to make all our pages look as good as articles do for mobile users. We know some people have complaints about the new look, and we hear you. We see the rough edges too, and we’re smoothing them down right now.

If you see a bug, please let us know. The best way to do that is to shoot us an email:

thecrew@russianmachineneverbreaks.com

Make sure you include the address of the page you’re on and what kind of browser/device you’re using.

That’s all for now, but we’ve got so much cool stuff coming, you’re gonna flip. Crash the net.