A Technical Update

First, three non-technical updates. Yes, this is a house of contradiction.

• I realized this morning that I never linked to my Deadspin piece on Football Manager 2011 from a few days back. It’s about reality, and Uruguay, and things that happened in a hard rain that didn’t exist. Check it out. This Rentistas game would have made a tremendous Pro Vercelli-like series if we hadn’t already been through that maze already.
• Also, I have a modest paragraph in today’s New York Times Magazine as part of the Year in Ideas extravaganza. My idea is that I like Barcelona, and that teamwork is good. This is probably not going to recalibrate your mind and torch all your cherished assumptions. Sometimes the truth is simple.
• If you’re not in the UK, this might be hard to get hold of, but I have a column in the first issue of The Green Soccer Journal, which is smartening up newsstands in Britain as we speak. I could tell you that Issue One also features Clarence Seedorf, Bryan Ferry, John Portsmouth Football Club Westwood, and some incredibly stylish photography, but I’m too worked up about the fact that they commissioned an illustration for my column that shows the Graf Zeppelin looming down over the 1930 FA Cup final crowd. All you see is the edge of the shadow of the zeppelin sliding over a bunch of bewildered men in bowler hats. One of them looks like Ezra Pound. If this were online, it would be my desktop wallpaper forever.

Now, for technology: I spent part of the weekend with a welder’s mask and a blowtorch, tinkering with a few loose screws around the site. Basically, this means that you should now be able to leave comments in Opera, and commenters in Chrome should now be safe from the obscure and confidence-destroying threat of seeming to accidentally duplicate the comment before theirs whenever they submit their own finely crafted thoughts. There you were, committed to the Google spirit of innovation and individuality and sensible lunch salads, and suddenly you had no choice but to accidentally parrot the thought of the person before you, as if you were—let’s face it—shudder—Microsoft. Life was a Twilight Zone nightmare of billionaire NBA owners and I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I, and your browser’s crappy cache management was to blame. I’m sorry your browser is so very, very stupid about caching POST requests, Chrome users. But now you are free.

More importantly, or at least as importantly, we now have a mobile site. Your phone should detect this automatically and point you in the right direction, but if it doesn’t, you can always get there by aiming your mobile browser at m.runofplay.com. The new site should provide a dramatically improved reading experience for those times when you’re on the go, or lying on the floor of a bank lobby during a Verizon commercial. However, it’s still pretty new to its job and may not have all the ropes down yet, so if you run across any bugs, thumb your way back to your email and drop us a line at tips@runofplay.com. You, and we, will be glad you did.

Finally, if you like The Run of Play so much that you feel like clicking widgets for it, today’s your last chance to vote in the Soccerlens Awards. We’re nominated for Best Blogger and Most Entertaining Football Site.

Here is an interview I did about this process. I have opinions about Castrol industrial lubricants.