Hey Creatures - you may have noticed that the comments section on your articles and slideshows look different. Hopefully, they’re easier to read and easier to use. You may also be wondering, of all things to fix on the site, why comments?? They were working perfectly well before!

The reason, in short, is speed.

The majority of traffic on Bleacher Report goes to the articles and slideshows that you all create. So, we want those pages to load as quickly as possible, for two major reasons:

• Faster page load times means happier readers. Studies have shown that people using the web have a patience of only a few seconds.
• More importantly, faster page loads means search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing can crawl and index more of the content that you create, thus allowing more readers to find your work. Also, it’s been speculated (but not proven) that search engines give preference to sites that load quickly.

So, when we took a long, hard look at these pages, we noticed a TON of old, crusty code in our comments section. That old code wasn’t being used and was slowing the page down, so we decided to bite the bullet and rewrite the comments code entirely.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to report back to you all in a couple of weeks with some tangible results - in the meanwhile, let us know if you’re enjoying or hating the new comments, and whether or not you’re running into any issues.

Thanks, as always, for making Bleacher Report a happy (and fast) place for sports fans.

BleacherReport.com will be unavailable tonight between midnight and 3am PST for an upgrade to our servers. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please check back after 3am and we’ll have the site restored to normal service.

Hello, Bleacher Creatures — it’s been awhile. We’ve been busy working on improving the site — so busy, in fact, that we’re forgotten to update the company blog.  (Oops.)  Well, here’s what we’ve been working on.

First off, we’ve completely overhauled our Team Pages because our old team pages were, to be honest, painful to look at. But thanks to our designers, now it’s a page you’ll want to spend some time on. In addition to the best team content from Bleacher Report writers, we’re bringing together team news and coverage from all around the web — local papers, official team news, the best blogs. You’ll also find the latest and greatest from each team’s featured columnists, as well as the community’s picks for best articles. Here’s an example, the new New York Giants Team Page.

In the Happening Now section, you’ll find a Facebook-like feed of what people are writing, saying, and liking about the team.

We also realized that it was darn near impossible to find your team’s page, so we’ve overhauled the site’s navigation. You’ll find links to each team if you mouse over the league in the new navigation bar.

Lastly, if you’re a guy (or gal) who follows all of your hometown pro and college teams, check out the new Local Editions. For our 39 sports towns, you’ll find Bleacher Report coverage as well as local news and blogs for all the local teams. Here’s the Cleveland Local Edition, for example.

That’s it—give the new stuff a try and let us know how you like it here in the comments section — we’ll be listening. Thanks.

Hey all,

As we all wait in anticipation of Selection Sunday to start filling out our NCAA Tournament brackets, it’s time to separate the contenders from the pretenders.

Let B/R be your eyes and ears with all-access coverage on-location at four of the sport’s most prestigious conference tournaments.  Follow Jameson Fleming (Big East), Justin McTeer (ACC), Tim Cary (Big Ten) and Kyle Dierking (Big 12), as they will be watching games courtside, attending press conferences and heading into the locker rooms to grab quotes for all of the biggest storylines over the next couple days.

Click on their profiles for updated stories daily, or find their links at http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball.

B/R is officially a major player in March Madness.

Aron

A big thanks to all the writers who filled out the Writer Survey.

We communicate with a lot of the writing community directly via email and bulletin boards, but we would like to perform periodic suverys of this nature.

The information provided will  help us figure out how we build new features, and what kind of improvements people would like to see. It is also interesting to learn how writers are finding B/R, and which experiences have mattered the most to them.

Hey all,

First, I want to respond to a few of the comments I’ve received from some of our sports communities not equally represented here.

We are constantly working on ways to incorporate more and more of the quality content coming from all of our communities, and over the coming weeks and months, we will break through not only with Foxsports.com and CBSSports.com, but many more outstanding sporting sites found all over the Internet.

In the meanwhile, sit tight and whenever I see an opportunity to incorporate more of our content, I will do my best to continue this wave of momentum.

Back to last week’s syndications.

Monday on CBSSports.com: Michael McNeil (fantasy football, twice), Daniel Damico (college basketball), Jeff Allen (college basketball).

Monday on Foxsports.com: Erick Blasco (NBA).

Tuesday on CBSSports.com: Greg Checki (fantasy hockey), John Lorge (fantasy basketball), Dean Holden (NBA), Carter . (NHL), Travis Rand (NHL), Daniel Damico (college basketball).

Tuesday on Foxsports.com: Thomas Halzack (NBA), Dean Holden (Funhouse-NBA), Kris Pollina (Funhouse-humor), James Williamson (Funhouse-NFL), Buddy Smith (Funhouse-Oprah).

Wednesday on CBSSports.com: BabyTate (college football), Jameson Fleming (college basketball), Ron Van Lew (NHL).

Wednesday on Foxsports.com: John Lorge (NBA).

Thursday on CBSSports.com: Larry Burton (college football), Greg Checki (fantasy hockey).

Thursday on Foxsports.com: Andrew Ungvari (NBA).

Friday on CBSSports.com: BabyTate (college football), Sean Crowe (NFL), Michael Moore (MLB), and crawling out from under the stall to get his Big East preview in, Tony Bishop (college basketball).

Friday on Foxsports.com: Matthew Petersen (NBA).

Best,

Aron

Thanks to Lisa and everyone else who raised concerns about the b/rCS. We’re working through the issues, and we’ll announce next steps shortly.

Today, Bleacher Report has released two powerful new writing tools. Last week we pushed out Writer Polls, which have instantly improved the manner in which readers and writers interact. This evening, we are releasing two new ones…

The first feature we are pushing is one that users have been requesting for months…

Auto-Save

Effective tonight, every article will get auto-saved every ten minutes. If a writer gets logged out, loses computer power, or spills beer on their keyboard, then they will automatically recover their article the next time they open the “Write” form.

Writers can also auto-save whenever they like by clicking ’save draft’ on the Write interface.

The site will remember every writer’s most recent work-in-progress until they have successfully submitted the piece.

The second feature is a simple and subtle one, but still quite important:

Pagination.

Though it may seem like a minimal addition, page breaks are very important, and there are several reasons why we have added them:

*Research consistently shows that users are more likely to avoid reading articles that appear very long and therefore time-consuming. It’s that simple. Since Bleacher Report has so many great writers who put a lot of time into their articles, we felt that we needed page breaks as an option in order to limit how many readers bypass longer content.

*It’s the industry standard, and Bleacher Report is committed to giving our articles no less than the full treatment.

*It will help us learn a lot about what kind of articles users read, which in turn, will help us pass valuable information to our writers.

Help us understand more about Bleacher Report’s readers!  Please take this short survey here.

PC Magazine has just released its list of “Top 100 Undiscovered Websites,” and Bleacher Report has earned recognition.

According to the published criteria, Bleacher Report scored well when the judges rated the “content, update frequency, design, innovation, and usefulness or entertainment value (or both)”

This serves as a pat on the back for all of our talented writers, without whom we would not have the content worthy of such praise. This is yet more external verification that Bleacher Report’s writers can compete with the big names found on other networks.

The breadth of coverage was also highlighted, as PC Magazine was in disbelief at the site’s active Cricket community. But make no mistake about it: the diversity of coverage, and the number of writers that Bleacher Report has for each sport (even ones that aren’t popular in America) is just one more strength that sets us apart.