Greetings friends, great to be here communicating with you again. As you are probably aware, 2022 hit me real hard. I lost my Dad to Alzheimer's Disease and we had a myriad of problems with our house. It was a constant state of stress. Consequently, some things had to be put on the back burner. This blog being one of them.
Resolving to give this blog more attention here in 2023, let me just start by saying that I could not be more pleased at the re-launch of my personal website. You can find the site here. I have repackaged the site, incorporating all of the old material that I had, in addition to updating with fresh new content, the biggest change being the addition of audio and video play by play clips, an essential element to any broadcaster's website. Much thanks to Mike Machnik and Brock Hines for lending their voices to the clips, it really gave it a genuine feel. A HUGE thank you goes out to the Pack Network and our ESPN colleagues for assisting me with the video clips- Jared Fieldsend, who helped me capture and organize the clips, Tom Casanova, and of course, K.J. Cardinal. We have the best production crew in the business with these professionals. It was a joy working with them all season long and I look forward to more games with them in the future.
I wanted to incorporate as much of my life as I could with the website, touching on as many facets of my creative life and interests as I could. Sportscasting is my life's work and passion, but there's more to me than just that one area- so I thought I would devote time to each of those areas- podcasting, audiobooks, music, writing, and so forth.
As for the website itself, there are two people I need to thank. The first is Meg Ortel, from Sandbox By Design. She is a website architect- and is brilliant at what she does. I am so grateful to her for all her hard work and her patience- she walked me through some pretty technical areas- areas I knew nothing about. The website design looks fabulous and seamless. And the fact that she remains so available to answer questions is a huge help. If you want to learn more about Meg and her great work, give her business a look here.
The second person to thank is my sister, Katie Bartel. Katie provided the creative direction for a lot of the project, helping out with photography and design applications. She pointed me in the direction of Meg, and that in and alone was huge and greatly appreciated. Her creative ability is amazing and her imagination and ingenuity was unparalleled. I'm forever grateful for her time and energy with this. Katie has a thriving business herself and her work is outstanding. Please check out her work at her online home here.
Having the website now fully editable is so wonderful now. I migrated to the new WordPress site from Network Solutions, who I originally connected with when I first built the site many years ago with my Dad. We used a now no longer available piece of software called Microsoft Frontpage to edit things, and I edited on an old Windows machine that has since gone to computer heaven. As a result of that, for several years my website was sitting out there, dormant, and I couldn't edit it. Over a Thanksgiving meal at my sister's home last year, we got to talking about the website and how we could resurrect it. Katie directed me to Meg, and the result is the website you now see today.
With the website now up, you'll see some cool new features, one of them being a calendar which I will be updating on a regular basis. It will have music gigs, podcast releases, broadcasts, everything. That will be fun. This has now motivated and inspired me to move on to the other area that has troubled me for years- getting my books back in circulation. It's a long story as to why they are not in circulation right now, but I have contacted a new publisher and I will be re-submitting my manuscripts to them in the hopes that we can get these books back up and on sale. Podcasts will be continuing every Wednesday, and I also plan to get the books for sale in audiobook form. Also, I endeavor to launch my Internet radio station sooner rather than later.
So that's the latest update. Thanks for tuning in, as always. Lots of fun things to look forward to!
