Loyal Readers, we have a few announcements about some major changes going down at HLS that we’d like to bring to your attention. So if you would, Mr. Bowie, hit it:

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Firstly, we are happy to announce that Bayou Irish has been promoted to Assistant Editor of HLS! Yes, this position just now exists, but still, PROMOTION!

Jokes aside, Bayou has been busting his tail for HLS ever since he came on board and has readily stepped up behind the scenes when Biscuit or I could not. As this will inevitably happen again in the future, Bayou will be our guy to fill that void and help me out in day-to-day operations with scheduling and such.

Secondly, and unfortunately, not all the announced changes are happy ones and this is the parting in sweet sorrow part of this post. The Irish Twins have decided to leave HLS and blaze their own path. No worries, there is no drama, bad blood, or even #BlogWar causalities here. After several format changes, our favorite Irish brothers are looking to create their own format and identity without any other influences other than their own.

We can definitely respect that and the door is always open here at HLS.

Be sure to follow their re-branded podcast, The Irish Mixtape, on Twitter via @IrishMixTape and on their website for info on new episodes. And be sure to also follow the “other brother” or “Twin 1” @KnuteSchoolFool. If you’ve been keeping up with all the usual HLS Twitter accounts though, you are likely already following these gents. If you are not, correct this immediately because they are well worth your time and listening attention.

Finally, changes will be coming soon to HLS in the form of a redesign. Instead of doing a huge block of the re-design all at once, it will be coming in stages to make things easier on me to implement as well as making things easier to roll back should something unexpected happen.

We will begin by trashing the WordPress commenting system and returning to Disqus. You will be able to log in to comment via Twitter, Facebook, and this time, even your HLS account. Disqus will help you unify them all under one profile to help reduce confusion. Of course, we don’t want to force you to create an account for anything so guest posting via a valid email will still be an option as always.

After that is in place, you will see biggest visible change to HLS as our theme will be updated and re-designed. It will be fully responsive (read: will look good on your phone and if you resize your browser on your computer) and will be much easier to navigate and will include some new content as well.

During that time, we will bury the Sideline, but it will rise again in a new and improved form. The forum concept will be gone, but we will instead leverage all of those HLS accounts and give you fine folks posting rights to talk about ND Football and…well…whatever the hell you want to, really. We will use Disqus to drive the discussion on those posts. It should be a lot of fun (if I don’t botch it) so look for more details soon.

Should all the above go well, I will then launch a major player database project that, if I can pull of everything that I want to, will be a great resource to not just check out information on the current roster and ND football alumni, but also connect to the great content here at HLS that mention those fine gents.

It should be quite the hectic offseason, but I am looking forward to all of the new things in store for all of us here at HLS.

Get excited y’all.

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Ryan Ritter

Editor-in-Chief
Texan by birth, Irish by choice.

First-generation Domer and a former student manager, HLS podcast host, HLS Sim creator, Extra Life streamer, and technical problem haver. You can find more non-Notre Dame related writing on his Patreon.

Latest posts by Ryan Ritter (see all)

• Epilogue - January 3, 2022
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