Category Archive
for: ‘From the Commissioner’

Time flies when you’re procrastinating… Turns out its been two years and four months since the Design League site was re-designed. Back in February of ‘08 I worked until I just got sick of working on it… I took some notes on what still had to be done and rolled on. I’ve just now gotten back to some of those things and it’s amazing that it has been more than two years… But I realized in the process why I was procrastinating…

Getting the history up from the early years was a bit more tedious as the way we did things back then was different… the format for the Tournament was different, runs scored trumped runs allowed and there weren’t any team or captains pictures… so the teams menu disappears from 2001-2003. For those of you old timers out there, having a look back at what the website looked like back then might be interesting… the following links will only be live for a while as I will soon tear down that old, long vacant web neighborhood, but in the meantime, take a trip in the wayback machine; 2001, 2002, 2003… For the rest of you, the years 2001-2003 are now available under the HISTORY menu of the main site.

You’ll also notice that the graphics; masthead, footer and background have been updated site wide… Same idea, but more how I envisioned things back in ‘08 now… The image for the masthead was taken last week of the South Michigan Avenue skyline from the fence behind Diamond 2. The image for the footer is of 1st base on Diamond 1, also taken last week. The sky in the background is a stock image as the sky rarely looks like that in Chicago ;-)

Still in the works will be a page that documents all-time records for the Design League teams. Other than that, the site is at the point I was hoping to get it to. Hope you like it.

So as of today, I’m retiring the “forum” format we’ve had on the site for past 3 years and replacing it with the “blog” format you see here now. The desire is for a centralized source of information as well as fostering an active community forum where everyone can comment, have a voice and be heard.

From a functionality standpoint, the forum that we’ve had online for the last 3 years was better suited for ‘two-way communication’ unfortunately… but it required posters to register, attracted too much spam and just wasn’t being used… a little bit in the beginning by a handful of people and then it sort of fizzled out. Moving to a blogging format makes information easier to get out and easier to comment on… so I have high hopes.

Examples of what I’ll be posting here are the weekly updates, any rule discussions, changes or updates… miscellaneous game day issues that arise, general league info… I’m also open to suggestions for posts… Also, I’m thinking it will be a great place to incorporate pictures.

And here’s where the ‘community’ part comes in… every post can be commented on…and I’m encouraging all of the Captains to forward the email that got you here on to all the members of your teams so that it can be open to all. Anyone interested in being notified when there’s a new post to this Forum can submit their email address to the Mailing List on the right-side of this page… This will make the conversation much more lively plus I know for a fact that there’s a lot of great baseball minds in the ranks that aren’t necessarily Captains. I’m also open to giving ‘contributor’ status to select members so that they can post to this forum on their own… This would be great in fact.

Here in the beginning it’ll be about getting the word out and getting everyone used to stopping by here for their info. Initially, I’m going to leave things on the honor system requiring no ‘registration’ in order to post a comment, only name and email will be required. No ANONYMOUS or GMAIL ALIAS comments, they’ll be caught by the SPAM filter anyway… but if those started to become prevalent, I’d be forced to require commenters to register and log-in before posting and that’ll ruin everything. So please, keep things up front and on the record.

The design of this area will customize over time… I’m not able to spend a lot of time on that right now and I didn’t want to procrastinate in getting things up and running… so here it is… feel free to comment on any post by clicking the “Comment” link near the top of every post…