Sorry for any outages people may have experienced at DoubleDonut.com over the past few days, I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff to clean the site up.
I discovered 200+ broken links on the site that I’ve fixed, which actually also alerted me to the fact that there were like 12 albums missing from the 2006 National Doubles Racquetball Championships, including all of the semifinal and finals matches. The 2006 Doubles Gallery might be worth a look if you missed those shots the first time around. The other big contributors to broken links are other racquetball websites out there who decide to move / re-design content. Pretty disappointing to find out that so much history has disappeared into the sunset.
I’ve also turned off comments for posts older than 2 weeks due to the (literally) hundreds of SPAM comments I get every night. You three people who leave comments have been warned 
Tagging with keywords is slowly chugging along .. you may notice a “related posts” section at the bottom of post pages, where related news stories from Double Donut will automatically get linked. Fun times.
August 27th, 2008
by Geoff Thomsen
So the post title may be a little overly dramatic, but things are going to slow down considerably around here. Just as things have been steadily getting more busy around home/job, I was notified that there weren’t enough funds for USA Racquetball to hire me for the US OPEN this year. Honestly, I was kind of wondering when this day would come. I’ve been traveling to the big national events for 5 years now, and while USA Racquetball has been GREAT to do business with, it’s no surprise that the sport of racquetball isn’t exactly sky-rocketing in popularity. I think the participation numbers in the national draws have been slowing decreasing every single year I’ve attended.
Anyway, I feel like I’m in the spot where I’ve got to either step things up a notch to justify the extra work/stress (like buying equipment, investing in more stable online galleries, etc) or cut back. The news from USA Racquetball was the answer – cut back. I love the sport of racquetball, and will continue to play and shoot photos of local events. Oregon has a great program, and there is no lack of talented athletes to keep my camera busy. I see myself following the men’s and women’s pro tours, but I’m not sure if I’ll be investing the same amount of time in blogging about them.
The momentum of the IRT seems to be building with more/bigger events and the new court, and I sincerly hope that some day racquetball will have the reputation to demand high dollar sponsors which can support big glamorous events and tons of money for the men’s and women’s pro tours. Until then, I’m going to have to spend a little more time in the stands rather than on the sidelines.
August 20th, 2008
by Geoff Thomsen
