Welcome to 2014, Loyal Readers. I hope your hangovers are treating you well and that you will be able to kick back, relax, and enjoy a great day of college football.
I wanted to take a little bit of time to thank everyone for another great year here at HLS. This is largely a labor of love/an insane expression of rabid fandom and y’all help make it a hell of a lot of fun. Further, thanks to your support through our various advertising partners, I’ve been able to send out a $100 donation to Kelly Cares on behalf of HLS and not have it cut into our operating costs at all, an incredible milestone that each and every one of you made possible.
In fact, when I look back on 2013, I see it as a community building year for us. The #HLSRecap has truly taken on a life of it’s own. A single tweet about a crazy comment on a post unleashes a hilarious hornet’s nest. Of course, the general Twitter banter about our posts, podcasts, and recap insanity is a joy.
2013 was also a major year of change. The entire HLS staff has been in a personal whirlwind. We’ve had engagements, major professional changes in our day jobs, and a published author among other things. It’s been a lot harder for us to bring out the daily content, and we often fell short of that goal, but I’m still incredibly proud of the content that we’ve all managed to put together.
Also on the change front, we’ve practically doubled our staff due to the retirement of The Subway Domer. Our new SD Staff is still settling in to the new digs here at HLS and I’m extremely excited to see what we will all produce after we get a full offseason under our belts. We’ve already added a couple of new logos, new podcasts, and some new voices breaking down ND football. It’s only going to get better from here.
Finally, we also made yet another sever move and I’m happy to announce that it appears to be the last one that I’ll ever have to make for the foreseeable future. Since our most recent move in August, our new hosts have kept HLS up 100% of the time. Yes, there have been some hiccups, but been easily corrected as our new hosts were never to blame (and helped me isolate where the issue was immediately). We finally have a truly stable home with some fantastic support. I am no longer monitoring my email with worry that we could go down at any moment. It feels awesome to be able to sleep easy again on that point.
So what will HLS have for you, the Loyal Reader to look forward to in 2014?
Well, once again, I have opened up the hood of HLS and am working on a new design. I started this work in the middle of the season, but once we welcomed all the Subway Domer staff, I have been welcomed with some very new challenges. With all the regular features that we now have, I have the very exciting task of how to organize it all and put it all together to make it all easy to find and easy to discover.
We will also be looking to completely re-vamp our comment system as a part of this re-design. As much as we love the dogpile on crazy comments, we are all looking for a way to foster better discussion on our content. As of now, the basic WordPress commenting system just isn’t cutting it. I’m currently testing out a couple of different options and will hopefully be able to flip the switch on this soon.
In the end though, what you should really be looking forward to is this Death Star of a blogging staff to become fully operational. Once everyone gets settled in, we will have a lot of very opinionated voices ready and willing to throw their thoughts out to the masses. Even better, I truly believe that this staff will host the best collection of diverse opinions that we’ve ever had. At HLS, the goal was never to have one collective opinion, but rather be a place that hosts a collection of well thought out, logical opinions. I believe that 2014 will see us get closer to that goal than ever before.
I’m excited for what the new year will bring and the content that we will be able to deliver. As always, we hope that you will continue to join us for the ride.
- Epilogue - January 3, 2022
- HLS Podcast Finale - January 2, 2022
- The Final Fiesta: Notre Dame vs Oklahoma State NCAA ’14 Sim - December 31, 2021