full of questions here... i wanna do this right :). i am taking shep out every hour to his toilet and we are doing a lot of playing in the run where his bathroom is, both before and after he takes care of business. is this okay to be doing? not sure what lessons i am teaching him. should i keep his playing inside?

Hi!
I see you have had dozens of answers on other questions you posed. At the risk of confusing you I will give you the recipe that worked for me an KTthe dog when she was a puppy.
1. Select a day (preferably a Sunday?) when you have little else to do and hopefully someone to help you share the burden.
2. Remove newspaper or pads or whatever else Shep has been weeing on to date (message says no more peeing indoors)
3. Forget crating on thatday and the following couple of days (I see you have been trying to do that as well with extremely mixed results).
4. Take Shep out religiously every 30 mins. Sooner or later he will do his business (one or the other or both) on the pavement. If he DOES then immdediately praise him so that he associates the wee with the praise, give him a treat and play with him for 5 minutes outdoors. If he DOESN'T stay outside only 2 or 3 minutes and then go back indoors (message says if you don't pee we have no business outdoors but if you do we have some fun and some treats).
5. Conflicting messages do not work! If the following day you are busy for some reason and have to resort to crating or to newspaper in the corner you will have destryed all the hard work of the previous day. If you do find the time to give Shep consistent messages and rewards for 3 days on the trot you should have cracked it.
Naturally there might be 1 or 2 accidents in the following days. If thishappens, no hitting! Just a firm "NO" and a quick recap as to what you might have got wrong to cause him to pee in the wrong place.
Another very useful lesson I learnt years ago was to associate the "business dong" with a word or phrase. I started saying "chop chop" whenever KT was doing her thing. Now she knows that when I say "chop chop" I mean "let's have a wee and get on with more fun stuff". And you know what?........... She does!
Doesn't that sound worth the few days of torture you are going to have to put up with?
All the best!
Pia