The coordinated push to eliminate weather websites

[Andy Wehrle]

Great to hear, @Tony Laubach ! Yours was one of my go-to sites back in the '00s along with the others I mentioned.

 

[Dan Robinson]

@Tony Laubach, great to hear and hoping this inspires more to do the same!

It is definitely a labor of love type of thing. I'm not good at writing, but I enjoy it anyway. I make at least a one or two sentence summary of even the most mundane bust. I think it helps paint the picture of how chasing really is, including all of the failures and not just the highlights. I'm at 1,377 chases logged on my site to date.

 

[JamesCaruso]

Reddit is moving toward paywalling some of its forums. Not sure if Reddit is used much by chasers, but this type of thing (charging users to access content that is all user generated!) should bode well for a return to specialized niche forums like ST.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

Learning HTML is a thing of the past. I would have considered myself beyond expert level at one point but I rarely have to code anything by hand now.

The secret to having an extremely fast site is to use Amazon AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Amazon Cloudfront to host the site. To do so, I use a plugin called Simply Static to export my site to static HTML files. It takes about 15 minutes since my site is full of so much content, but then I just sync the changes to S3 and clear cloudfront cache. There are also other providers such as Cloudflare and Github pages that function similarly. I host the actual wordpress locally here at my house, then and don't have to have the scripts online, which also makes my site pretty impossible to 'hack' the original.

 

[Dave C]

I’ve been having similar thoughts today about starting my own project as well. I enjoy reading Dan’s blog and a few others that focus on the photographic, personal, and insightful journeys of storm chasers and photographers. If I find value in these stories, I’m sure others would appreciate them too.

I’ve seen your Flickr account and would love to hear your personal account of the events you’ve captured. There’s so much to learn from chasers like you and Dan.

I say go for it!
- Laney

Whenever I re(read) through one of the relatively few extant thorough, still-updated chaser websites such as OP @Dan Robinson's or @Skip Talbot's and am briefly inspired to create my own in order to have a "one-stop shop" for all my chases and what I've observed on them; instead of having my words and images scattered among, say, Reports threads here, captions on Flickr, and YouTube descriptions, it's Dan's original rationale for creating this thread that gives me pause. Would anyone actually see it, or would I basically just be doing it for myself?

Story telling is the main reason I think most people care about things, as it helps us relate or explore from others perspectives. I applaud all of you for getting inspired to launch new initiatives and you should! I am pushing myself in this direction also.

Any media such as images, video etc that is just dumped out randomly here or there is ok I guess, but gets kind of stale and does not stand out. If media tells a story on its own (like a great photo can) or better if a detailed story is crafted and presented with the media, that is where the big engagement and interest comes from it seems to me, and rightly so. Who doesn't love a good story or something crafted by effort to have a certain presentation? Most of the content I enjoy is storytelling, whether fiction or non, rather than just dumped out footage or photos set to the same old music or words. Tell me a unique story! Sell me a dream or teach me something I never knew! That is what good entertainment and learning is all about and it has become lost in the noise of social media idiocy, where 256 characters is all the thought in some people's brain.

I hope you all start these new projects. My own about to start youtube channel will be about night sky timelapse so I will have to post in bears cage or photography area or something probably. The most important thing is if its your passion, share it, someone out there would love to hear your story I have no doubt (just going by how my own curious content consumption goes).

The interwebs and socials are full of vapid trendism, AI, and regurgitated content that gets clicks from people who are equaly vapid robots. If we had higher signal to noise on good content with quality, I would think search algorithms and social algorithms will eventually shift to match if people like the deeper stories, which I know they do.

 

[JamesCaruso]

Not sure if this is the best place to post this; there have been several threads touching upon the migration of chasers to social media - but this one is the most-recently active of those, so figured I would post it here.

Read this blog post by author, computer scientist and thought leader Cal Newport, discussing what he believes is an inevitable trend away from global platforms and back to niche online communities (like ST!) Also check out his New Yorker article on the topic that he links to in the blog post.

Back to the (Internet) Future - Cal Newport

On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team played their first spring training game of the season. I was listening to the radio call in the ... Read more

calnewport.com