It's bland. It takes longer to load. It's irritatingly convoluted. Haven't these ninnies heard of beta testing? Oh sweet Jesus. These were among the milder comments when the sportblog was forced to switch to a new publishing platform last month. Our bloggers were right though; as anyone who has waited for the 'loading comments' bar to stagger across the screen, stubbornly refuse to budge, and then crash their browsers will agree.
In recent weeks, however, our techies have been working on a number of fixes and improvements - some of them obvious, others less so - including a new, easy-to-navigate front page, which launches today. Other improvements, to loading times in particular, will follow in the next few months, as well as what our community manager promises will be "enhanced ways to find, follow and participate in conversations on theguardian.com". The sportblog is remains a work in progress, but hopefully we are on the right track.
Today also marks the launch of Big Blogger 2008, with the prize of a paid commission on theguardian.com/sport.
The competition will run as follows:
1) Over the next three weeks, we will invite bloggers to send in 400 words on a theme of our choice.
2) All submissions, which must include your name, blog handle and email address, must be emailed to sports.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk with the headline Big Blogger 2008.
3) Each week we will select the best three blogs and put them to a public vote using our poll mechanism.
4) If there are signs of blatant vote rigging, we will ditch the poll and pick our favourite blog.
5) The three weekly winners will enter a final round where they will be required to submit a further blog. The winner will be decided by the editors of theguardian.com/sport.
6) In all cases the editors' decision is final.
We will be accepting submissions for week one until 00.01am on Tuesday.
Topic for week one: sporting nostalgia.
If you have any questions, please post below. I'll try to answer as many as possible over the next few days.
