Thursday, April 3, 2008

And so it begins!


After 21 seasons of communicating entirely by phone, email, and PSR software reports, HARL finally has a web presence in Season #22. Pretty cool huh?

Creating our own home on the web has been something I've thought about for a long time, but I never took the time to make it happen. Why? Mostly because our mix of email communication and PSR reporting methods worked just fine. They still do, really.

Secondly, I've always been a little leery of the time required to maintain pages on the web. Many a league website has been abandoned due to the burden of maintaining it and keeping the information fresh. That's something that still concerns me, but at least I'm going to give this the old college try and see how it all works out.

I'm still going to generate PSR Reports each week from Rhino Baseball. You guys will be able to download the ZIP file containing those reports from HARL Central and view them in the Rhino Viewer like you've done before. Eventually, I may test out incorporating the use of a PowerBuilder plug-in on RhinoSoftware.com so you can view full-color PSR reports online thru your web browser. That won't happen right away, but it's on my things-to-try list.

I will also post a series of online reports as well such as the current Rosters, Waiver Wire, Team Standings, Weekly Roster Moves, and so forth (pretty much the same stuff you came to expect in the body of the weekly emails from the past couple of years). I may also post some additional stats/analysis reports as well, provided it's not overly time consuming.

An archive of the major news/events is also being included on HARL Central, so you'll have a handy way to reference old important news items that you previously received via email.

Most of the weekly newsy notes and league banter & comments will now appear on this Blog, rather than be sent via email each week. So we'll slowly be transitioning from regular email communication to heading to this Blog to get your HARL news.

You'll notice in the lefthand margin there are lots of links. The HARL Stuff section takes you to HARL Central (where you can view online reports, download PSR reports, and read archived news articles). You can also check out the Mega Links to go to a directory which lists every online report that has been posted this year. Clicking on a report name will take you right to that online report.

There's also a helpful collection of links to Baseball News (for daily news/chat and boxscores), Baseball Stats (for player stats), Baseball Blogs (sites where people talk about baseball and fantasy baseball), and Baseball Podcasts (where you can download MP3 audio files and listen to shows on baseball).

I'm sure that our website will grow and improve over time. Your suggestions on helping to mold this blog and the HARL Central site are always welcomed.

Until next time, see you on the web!

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