A Few Housekeeping Notes

You may have noticed some changes recently around RBR, and I wanted to give everyone a heads-up on the changes.

First and foremost, you probably have noticed that several of the widgets lining the front page are no longer present. The recruiting widget has been deleted, as have the widgets showing the college football rankings, the featured polls, the YouTube links, and a few other widgets. The reason for this is mainly because RBR has been very slow to load, and all of the widgets were only further slowing everything down. So, we decided we should delete some of the widgets that were really of very little use, and that has made everything load a tad bit faster here at RBR. Things still aren't as quick as we would like them to be, and unfortunately that's really an issue with the SB Nation layout more than anything else, but hopefully the changes we have made will make things load a good bit faster for you than before.

Along those same lines, we have also gone through and culled some of the links from the blogroll. For the most part, though, I don't think anyone will notice any major differences. In the first place, I'm really not sure how often people use that, and at any rate about the only links we have culled for now are the ones to blogs that are either no longer in existence or the ones that are never updated anymore.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, there is no longer a recruiting widget here at RBR, but recruiting coverage is not going anywhere. We are still going to cover recruiting very closely here at RBR, and in place of the commitment widget, what we are going to do in its place is to set up a link on the front page of RBR that takes you to another page with a much more in-depth breakdown of Alabama football recruiting. Also, on this same topic, next week -- probably Wednesday -- I will be bringing back the RBR Meat Market. This may not be a weekly piece, but it will appear as news dictates, and it will become much more frequent as we inch closer and closer to National Signing Day.

Also, I do want to take this opportunity to remind you about the fact that RBR can now be found on Twitter. In the past the RBR Twitter page basically just linked to all of the updates here at the blog, but now it is fully functioning entity in its own right. We update it frequently with a lot of things that don't appear on the blog, so make sure you routinely check us out over there. Note that you can follow our Twitter via a widget here on the front page of RBR about one-third of the way down on the right.

All in all, we're really trying to improve things here at RBR, and we have a lot of exciting things in store coming in the next few weeks. We will have an update on the new logo early next week, and we're hoping to start promoting the blog soon in ways that will hopefully only make things bigger and better. Hopefully everything will be to your liking, and you'll keep coming back.

Updated Addendum: If RBR is still loading a bit slow for your liking, one thing you can do is, once you log in, click on "Edit Settings" to the left. From there, you can change your settings with regard to how many posts show up for you on the front page, how many fanposts, and how many fanshots. If you adjust your settings to show fewer posts per page, everything should load faster. Furthermore, you can also choose to not display member avatars and profile images, which should also increase your load speed.