I’m not sure if I’ve ever truly understood what “labor of love” meant until now. All of this started over a year ago in July 2015 and it is finally done.

*Cue the biggest sigh of relief ever*

So, what’s new? Besides, well, everything, here are a couple of notable changes.

Coxswain recordings

All the recordings posts have been completely redone and updated – if you had any of the old posts bookmarked, delete them! Before there were 32 posts and now there are 43, all of which you can see here. The reason why there are more is because I deleted a lot of individual recordings and spread the remaining ones out over more posts, that way there are only 2-3 recordings per post instead of 4 or 5 like there was for the first couple years. I love how they turned out and think it’ll be much easier for you guys to take something away from them now, especially since each one has a very defined “calls I liked” section. That was a much-requested addition to those posts that I started doing about a year ago but now every post has that included.

Patreon/”Work with me”

If you remember my post from back in May about the ideas I had for the blog, you’ll remember that I asked if you’d be interested in supporting Ready all, row… via donations on Patreon. The positive feedback I got from that was the boost I needed so, if you’re interested, you can check that out and pledge your support here.

On the main menu bar you’ll see a new tab that says “work with me“, which is where you’ll find the Patreon link housed (there’s also one at the bottom of each page), as well as a sign-up section if you’re interested in working with me one-on-one or doing a virtual clinic with some of your teammates over Google Hangouts. You don’t have to be a Patreon supporter to do either of those (although a 30 minute one-on-one is part of one of the reward tiers) so if you’re interested, let’s set something up!

Resources

I’m a big proponent of venturing outside the rowing bubble when looking for reading material on coaching, training, etc. In this section I’ve started curating articles that have a good message or solid info that I think is applicable to rowing even though majority are written by, for, or about athletes and coaches from other sports. I still have a ton to add so make sure you check in regularly to see what’s new – all the new articles will be posted at the top of their respective sections.

I have a lot of rowing and coxing-specific resources that I’ll eventually post as well – things like erg calculators, course maps, etc. – that will also be included in this section.

“Contact”

The other thing you’ll notice on the menu bar is the “questions” tab is gone. You can obviously still ask me questions but rather than leaving them as a comment, now you can fill out the contact form, attach your audio if you want me to listen to a recording, and it’ll go straight to my inbox. This is ultimately more to help me stay organized than anything else but it just looks cleaner too, which I’m all about. As always, if you want your question to remain private and off the blog,  just let me know otherwise I’ll default to posting them on here like usual.

I’ve still got some back-end stuff to do but it’s all relatively minor stuff so you (hopefully) won’t notice many changes from here on out. If there are any major updates I’ll make sure to post about them so you can get as much functionality out of the site as possible. There’s at least one more that I’ll be working on this weekend but if there’s something you think is missing, you come across a dead link, etc., just let me know. Some links might still go back to the old site but that’ll stop once everything begins redirecting on October 1st.

Also, don’t forget to update your bookmarks/RSS feeds and to subscribe to the blog if you’re not already so you can be notified anytime a new post goes up. The subscribe button is up there in the top right of the page – you can’t miss it! If you’re already subscribed via email you’ll continue to receive notifications as usual (let me know if you don’t) but WordPress.com followers will only see new posts in their Reader. You won’t receive email updates unless you subscribe to receive them on the new site or add the new site to your RSS feed.

This has been such a major project for me so I really appreciate everyone being patient this summer when I wasn’t posting anything and was (very … very) slow to respond to emails. Now that 98% of the new site is done and I’ve settled into a groove with everything at Columbia, I’m ready to get back to regular posting and emailing starting next week. Definitely let me know what you think of the site (hopefully you love it as much as I do!) and again, thanks for all the motivation and support!