SB Nation (Sports Blogs Nation), the leading network of owned and operated sports-focused web communities, offering the highest quality content, conversations and applications to an audience of over 2.3 million (and growing) passionate sports fans around the world, is seeking an outstanding developer.

You'll join our small product team and participate in every phase of the development cycle, from feature design, prototyping, and technical architecture to development, deployment, and maintenance. Primarily, you'll be coding a Ruby on Rails application backed by a MySQL database and running on Linux servers.

You're a friendly, creative, and pragmatic problem-solver who's passionate about developing elegant solutions and awesome user experiences. You also:

• Have extensive experience building high-traffic web applications, writing complex and efficient SQL queries, profiling and optimizing code, and devising and implementing caching strategies
• Love writing unit tests and using source control & bug tracking systems
• Know your way around *nix operating systems
• Communicate well
• Have a solid grounding in object-oriented programming and fundamental computer science concepts such as concurrency, complexity theory, and algorithms & data structures

Ideally, you also have:

• Built and deployed into production a non-trivial Rails application
• Worked on small development teams and with remote team members
• Experience building Ajax/DHTML interfaces using the Prototype framework
• Experience using a variety of programming languages and frameworks

Other bonuses:

• Experience managing MySQL servers (maintenance, replication, tuning, etc.)
• Experience managing web or application servers (configuring and tuning any of these: Apache, Mongrel, Nginx, Lighttpd)
• Experience in sports media, passionate fan of sports or actively play sports yourself

This is a permanent position with full benefits based in our Washington, DC office (currently a sweet loft space in Chinatown), but we're also considering remote candidates (part of the existing team is remote). Remote candidates must be able to travel to DC from time to time for meetings, product design session, etc. Salary commensurate with experience.

To apply, please send your resume to jobs@sbnation.com.

When we first released the new SB Nation platform and transitioned all your communities back in March-May this year, early feedback included many ideas on how we could make the active community conversations in FanPosts easier to follow. We kept notes and for the past few months our team kept talking about different ways to improve on what you find behind the 'FanPosts' tab in the top menu bar.

Today, we launched a new view of FanPosts: the List View. The key features are:

• Just the facts - scan the list quickly instead of reading through full posts
• Where is the party at? - the most recently active FanPosts, as determined by recent comments, are sorted to the top of the list by default
  
• Forever popular - since FanPosts sometimes get pushed off the recommended list quickly, we added the ability to look at what was popular in different time frames - the last day, the last week, of all time (hall of fame)
• Flexibility - there are now six different ways to look at FanPosts including the ability to switch back to the classic 'Full View' where we show the body of the post old-school style
  

As always, this is just a first step on a continued evolution. We figure you'll have some great feedback and we can work together to make sure FanPosts continue to be the best place to have in-depth conversations about your favorite team and sport. Please jump into the comments here and let us know what you think!

A couple days ago we quietly released an update that detects if you're visiting one of our blogs on a mobile device and redirects you to a mobile-friendly version of the site. A few folks  already found it and sent us some excited notes. We're excited too!

Now your favorite SB Nation blogs should be quick and easy to read while you're riding the metro, walking down the street, or sitting in traffic (we don't condone blogging & driving). Our goal is to provide y'all something that downloads fast and is efficient to scroll through. Presently front page blog posts, comments and FanPosts are all available in this new format. And if you prefer the hi-res experience, you'll find a link to the 'Full Site Version' for all the graphics and widgets.

This is a first step in making all of our blogs more fun to use on your mobile phones and PDAs. We hope you enjoy! There are other mobile features planned in the future. And if you have any trouble browsing our the mobile version of our blogs, please send an email to support@sbnation.com. Fancy screenshot across the jump.

[Update by clockwerks, 10/03/08 3:50 PM EDT ] Louis Gray has a great post about our new mobile format complete with iPhone screenshots.

Continue reading this post »

We've had lots of new visitors over the last few weeks so I wanted to bump this post up to the top of the front age again so the newbies can take advantage. This post was originally made when SBN 2.0 launched in April.

Continue reading this post »

Almost every week we announce a new blog in the SB Nation family of sports blogs. And we're at it again. Welcome to our newest blog - Blog Huddle - a blog that doesn't cover your favorite team or sport, but instead keeps you updated on the happenings of SB Nation itself. I, along with the other good folks who run SB Nation, will be posting as frequently as possible on things like:

• Announcements of new blogs
• Introductions of new features
• Tips + tricks on using the platform
• Scheduled downtime notices and outage explanations
• Media mentions of our blogs and the network
• General observations on the growth of sports blogging overall

But we don't want this to be a one-way thing. We're always looking for feedback and ideas on how we can improve the network. We hope you'll jump in, talk to us, and get to know us a bit. That's why we set this up on our own blogging platform: if you already have an SB Nation account, you can quickly and easily join this blog and start commenting today. And if you don't have an account - of course you should Sign Up today.

One note - if you are encountering problems with any of our blogs or account registration system, please continue to send us reports via email instead of posting a comment or FanPost. Just as a reminder our email address is: support@sbnation.com.

BTW, I'm Trei - you might remember me from such blog posts as Welcome to the new SB Nation or as the guy who often replies to your support requests. I work on products and technology at SB Nation. And because this place is of, by and for the fans, you should know my team is the Astros (one reason why).