Some updates we made to the website recently

Reader, hello. This isn’t a hockey story, just a minor, geeky update about the website.

The third generation of the RMNB website has been live for almost 10 months, and we’re exceedingly happy about it. One of our primary goals with it was selfish: to make the writing experience nicer, and that’s definitely worked. But we also wanted a simpler site that ran faster and would be easier to improve upon.

To that point, we’ve been very quietly rolling out some small improvements. In the interest of radical transparency, here’s some details:

1. The menu bar at the top of article pages disappears as you scroll down. That gives you more space to read the actual article. You can still see the menu if you scroll up, which is where you can see the sharing menu if you’re on a phone.
2. Speaking of: we made it easier to share our articles on Reddit using that sharing menu on the phone. No one ever shares our articles on Reddit, but if they did, we would now save them fully tens of seconds. We’d love it if you shared our articles on Reddit, by the way.
3. We’ve made a bunch of changes to make our images lightweight. We serve smaller files when appropriate, so your poor phone doesn’t load a 2000-pixel, high-resolution photo of Tom Wilson glowering when a 300-pixel, low-resolution photo would do.
4. We increased the numbers of posts showing on our lists from 10 to 20. We like the idea of every post from the last day being on the homepage, plus paging through lists 10 items at a time was a bother.
5. We have more flexibility in how we display images, but it’d be so boring to you, I’m not even going to explain it.

There are also a bunch of infinitesimally small cosmetic changes that you will not notice. If you do notice one, let me know because you are special.

We had this really fun bug that I’ll tell you about because it’ll erode your sanity like it did mine, like we’re both in a Lovecraft story.

So we use a plugin that helps us manage stories that have more than one writer. But the plugin didn’t support a rare edge case where a post doesn’t have any authors, which is technically not supposed to happen, so I don’t blame them. Except for us it happened a bunch on very old stories, plus it happened more because of some bugs we had on a couple uncommon pages, such as our beautiful 404 page. At the same time, because of the inherent chaos of the online ad industry 🤢, we are actually giving out a bunch of invalid addresses. Only naughty bots crawling and scraping our articles all the time see those invalid addresses, but they still got hit all the time — like multiple times per minute, throwing errors every time.

It’s a nest of vipers. Here, this will clear it up:

So we made many, many changes to deal with this tiny, tiny problem, including begging the plugin makers over several months to fix the bug on their side.

So if I’ve been rude to you at all over the last six months, this was why.

Meanwhile, if you follow the industry, you might have heard some drama about the technology that runs our site, WordPress. What everyone thinks synecdochically of as WordPress is actually a bunch of different entities: an open-source code base, a not-for-profit organization, a .org website, and a for-profit corporation. All those entities have one person in common, and he’s beefing with a different for-profit corporation that sells WordPress services just like his company does. Here, this will explain the whole thing:

The person doesn’t think that other company does enough to support the open-source codebase, plus he thinks they’re maybe trading on the WordPress name too closely. So now he’s leading a feud that is affecting all those different entities and putting the open-source code base itself in turmoil.

We use his company for hosting and services, and honestly they’ve been amazing. I don’t think the drama will affect us much; it might force us to change one plugin. But we’ve been monitoring this evolving story every day with equal parts anxiety and fascination.

We’ve got a lot of cool, new stuff that’s coming to the site in the future, but I don’t want to spoil it. I will say that a lot of it will be related to our Patreon. You can join now for as little as $1, which we call our “adblocker amnesty” tier. If you subscribe at a higher level, you can annoy us and be annoyed by us on Discord. Your subscriptions help us pay our writers and keep the website running. Thank you so much for your support.

(Please don’t subscribe through the iOS app; do it through the website. Apple will take a big chunk of your subscription if you do it through the app.)

Thanks for reading this massively self-indulgent post. If you have feedback on the site — questions, suggestions, complaints — please share below or contact us directly, on a page we configured to be the only one on the site that loads the contact form plugin to shave like 120 kilobytes off the payload. Thanks ❤️