Growing older is, well, interesting ...

And along that path comes a time when you start tossing your responsibilities onto the shoulders of capable (and younger) men and women.

I've done that with the STLMedia Message Board, putting in place a team of knowledgeable and enthusiastic radio folks to co-administer the Board until I decide to slide entirely out of the picture.

Yesterday I started moving the management and design of the very first radio industry website I created to someone else.

I first went online in 1989, through, initially, Prodigy and then Compuserve, both on dial-up connections, with the assistance of then-ISP owner Ray Dunn and his Maryland Heights company, First Class Solutions.

Shortly thereafter, Ray encouraged me to try my hand at building a "website" using software called HotDog from an Australian developer. Downloading software and uploading bank funds for the Windows 3.11 platform on a 14.4 modem took several shares of forever, but it got me going.

Not too long after that, after several conversations with old friend and former radio partner Frank O. Pinion, I finally convinced him that he needed to be part of this new-fangled thingie called the InterNet. I built a web page for him into my business domain and he would occasionally write a commentary or an update and mention it on the air.

I believe that the FOP area on that website was the very first appearance of a STL radio personality online, making the STLRadio.com Hall Of Famer a real STLRadio 'net pioneer. And, by extension, me too, if I may be so bold as to say so.

By 1997 Frank had become a true believer and in March of that year I registered, after a brief battle over his copyrighted name, the domain name www.frankopinion.com.

So Frank has had a domain all his own for at least twelve years (more likely, fifteen or more, including his pages on my business site) and I've been running it, in busy times and quiet times, for the whole run.

Yesterday I set the wheels in motion to turn the whole shebang over to Bill Clevlen.

Sure, I'm a little melancholy about it, and I hope Clevlen does right by the site I began all those years ago, when he was still a teenager. But I know Bill, I respect him and I bet he'll do just fine.

If he doesn't, well, I still know the user name and password...

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