When in the course of human events, etc. It’s been a long time coming—boats against the current and so on—and I am extremely excited to welcome you to the new Run of Play. I hope you’ll enjoy exploring it and that you’ll like what you find. Above all, I hope it will offer a pleasant reading experience, and a different sort of reading 
experience from the one you usually encounter on the web. The goal has been to cut down on some of the typical distractions of online reading while also making it possible to host a more engrossing slate of images, videos, and music. That might be a contradictory wish, and I’m not sure its success or failure will be apparent right away. But anyway here we are, and as we debut the B.A.F.C. project in the coming weeks, I hope what we’ve come up with will also help us find the right balance for presenting fiction on the internet.
We’ve tried to set this up so that you won’t encounter many technical glitches during the relaunch, but that said, the first press of the “post comment” button is bound to cause a massive power outage across the northern U.S. and Canada, so if you run into any problems and can make it to an emergency station with a generator, please let me know via the contact form above. Also please note that older posts will look moderately wrecked until we can finish converting the archive. That will take some time, so try not to mind. Old maps looked pretty bad, too, until the cartographers could straighten them out. Which didn’t—hah—prove there was no America.
Read More: The Belly of the Whale
by Brian Phillips · April 3, 2010
[contact-form 5 'Email form']
Welcome back!
Good to see you again. Immaculate design.
Eager anticipation, mate.
This is astonishingly pretty looking, and combined with your writing, will likely become the Slate, Salon whatever of football writing. I am very happy you’re back…
The layout is superb. Just superb, that’s all I have to say about it.
Lovely. i feel as if my comment is metaphorically throwing peanut shells onto the ground of a brand new soccer stadium. Pardon my mess.
Thanks, all! Troubleshooting so far: the first post that went out on the RSS feed after the relaunch might have looked a little wonky, but the dewonkifying filter is now in place, so future posts should be fine. Also, a subset of readers were stuck seeing the old home page due to a bizarre caching issue—actually, stuck seeing the home page as it existed on March 9, don’t ask why—but that’s fixed, too, I hope.
Please let me know if you catch anything else…
Gorgeous.
But where is the robot I was promised on the front page?!
@Noeldeanho He’ll be right back after he finishes shooting Liberty Valance.
How very elegant and effective – can this be the Marco van Basten of websites? Congratulations to you and everyone involved with the design!
Gorgeous design. Glad you’re back.
Now *THIS* is my idea of a well designed website. Not sure if it was timed to contrast the MLSsoccer.com fiasco, but talk about night and day…
Fantastic design. Love it.
Love the design. Can’t wait to see more.
Breaking my silence to say this website is amazing! Well done, Brian.
It is so beautiful, Brian.
This makes me want to cry tears of joy
fonts look bad at the bottom – the “earch” part of search
but it looks nice overall.
Hey, sleek stuff Brian, I like it!
Oh Run of Play, how I’ve missed you
A work of art. It’s remarkable. Excellent work Brian. You’ve certainly raised the bar on this one.
Upstaging the iPad, eh? Musta been Vandal-prone’s idea
More troubleshooting: not paginating archives was resulting in some undesirably large pages for certain queries (the “Brian Phillips” author page was an 8mb download), so I’ve added pagination when an archive tops 50 posts. Also, the comment form isn’t working in some versions of Opera. I can’t promise a quick fix—our official policy on supporting Opera is that we will go to its piano recital but not pick it up after rehab—but I’ve narrowed down the problem, and I’m looking into it.
@Brian Phillips “our official policy on supporting Opera is that we will go to its piano recital but not pick it up after rehab”
You might at least have some compassion for the third soprano!
Love it, man. Football and design should always go together.
This is simply the wowest.
Just looks fantastic.
Too bad about the writing, eh?
(I keed! I keed!)
I seem to have chosen a bad time to study abroad in South Africa, a land where unlimited internet is near nonexistent and bandwidth comes at a price. First, Run of play becomes more reliant on videos with its B.A.F.C. series, and now, with this redesign, every time I reload the page to try and satisfy my withdrawals looking for a new update, I use even more internet credits. At least I can console myself with the knowledge that I’ll be here for the world cup.
My point is, although this is probably irrelevant to most of your readers and therefore irrelevant to you, there is something to be said for a simple text-heavy layout that is easy on the bandwidth. Why do you think Goal.com gets so many comments from Nigeria?
Anyway, it looks good, and I’m sure I’ll like it more when I’m back home.
@aj The new site actually has a slightly smaller overhead than the old site did, and it’s not at all heavy by “simple text-heavy layout” standards. The front page is currently a 535kb download; the front page of Goal.com is 591kb; the front page of the New York Times is over 800kb. Not trying to deny what you’re experiencing, but I can definitely say that one of the priorities with the new design was to keep it lean without sacrificing function.
I’m not sure how your internet credits work, and there could be something I’m not thinking of that would impose a heavier hit within the new design, but if it’s just raw bandwidth, this shouldn’t be so bad.
@Brian Phillips My assumption that more picture-linky things = more bandwidth has been refuted. And how did you know that the NYT is my homepage? I’m a bit frightened by your tech-knowledgey know how.
I guess I’ve been a bit bitter about visiting your site for a few months only to find two videos, on which I refused to use bandwidth (am I also wrong in assuming that your videos take more bandwidth than a text article?). Reading the comments about how good the B.A.F.C. series was just made things worse.
I’m glad you’ve resumed your blog. The articles are entertaining as ever. Thanks for setting me straight on this bandwidth issue as well.
@aj No worries! The images on the new site are definitely eating more bandwidth than the images on the old, but the scripts are a lot more efficient, which more than makes up the difference on most pages. Videos take much more bandwidth than regular pages, but the BAFC vids were just previews of a project that will be 90% text-based. So hopefully you’ll be able to follow along.
Another option would be to subscribe to the site via email or RSS. The feeds are close to text-only and are probably the best way to get the bulk of the main content with minimal bandwidth use. No comments, though, frowny face.
We should set up an RoP scholarship for buying internet credits abroad. Just write an essay proving you prioritize soccer over your schoolwork, etc.
@Brian Phillips “Just write an essay proving you prioritize soccer over your schoolwork, etc.”
It’s 3:20 am here, and I’ve got a meeting with my adviser tomorrow to start working in the lab on Nile crocodile DNA sequencing so that we can determine if river drainage patterns in the Zambezi-Congo watershed due to the East African Rift system caused by plate tectonics over a geological time scale have resulted in population bottlenecks that cause different allele frequencies in different crocodile populations suggesting increasing support for models of allopatric speciation. Also, I was supposed to turn in an update today on how the project is going, but I figured if I turn it in a day late everything will be ok. I’ll end up looking better anyway because after my meeting tomorrow I’ll have more to write about. In academia, unlike in journalism, deadlines are not real.
But, really, following soccer here is easier than in the states. It’s shown on TV here at a reasonable time, and people don’t get sick of you talking about it. The only problem is that practically everyone here is a Manchester United fan which is a bit tiresome to a Liverpool supporter like myself. Steven Pienaar plays for Everton, so that doesn’t help either.
Bentornato.
@ursus arctos And to you! It’s good to see you around these parts!