Who Here Still Has *ACTIVE* Websites?

Tony Laubach

Tony Laubach

EF5
Joined
Mar 2, 2004
Messages
2,388
Location
Northern Colorado
Been a weird week for me, as I've been very reminiscent of my chasing career and it began to seep into others as I was going through a few websites of chasers. What I found was most sites hadn't been updated in a year or more and many links were dead. I add to this as I buried my website a couple years ago, and after nearly two decades, even allowed my domain address to return to the land of the WWW. I, like many, have fallen into social media as my main outlet to post chase stuff. It's been very rare that I have done anything substantial with my chasing logs since then, only occasionally penning out some write-up if the inspiration hits.

For years, running my website was such a HUGE part of my chasing... I had a very detailed site, coded ways to update things from the road, and as technology allowed for more realtime updating, I went nuts trying to put that into my site. While I don't know where I turned the corner, or why, but the decline in updates started happening. For a couple years, I invested in new layouts, templates, and tried to inspire myself to get back into it. Eventually, I just found I was repeating the process every six months, and finally decided it was time to pull the covers over it.

I never had a high-traffic site, and it was mostly for me. I still have the backups someplace and could, in theory, resurrect a full site with chases up til about 2014ish... but I just don't have the time, energy, or desire to invest that kind of effort in keeping up an entire site. Alas, I mostly utilize my professional FB page with it's 14K followers. I get more interaction and traffic there than I ever could have imagined doing with my old site.

Recently, I tried to breath some new life into my YouTube channel with doing video chase logs. I produced a couple (most notable the February 28, 2017 Southern IL EF-4 Chase). I thought this was going to take off for me because it gave me an alternative to a website AND filled in my desire to do something video-related as the physical disc media had pretty much gone away. However I had some dramatic (and positive) changes going on in life that kinda put all that on the back-burner, and suddenly that, too, fell to the wayside.

The desire is still there, but the motivation, not so much. I haven't quite put my finger on exactly why I'm in the current state I am in. But alas, I don't do much beyond my social media, and when comparing myself to some of you, even that is very little.

So to go back to the question at hand, who here still has an ACTIVE website? What is it? And who still holds on to their website, but hasn't done anything with it in a year or more? I'm just curious where you all stand. It felt like I was in an internet small town that was heading into the ghost town category, mostly empty buildings, some that had evidence of busier times. Others empty, or just removed all together.
 
I still have wxdallas.com but it usually only gets reports for the previous year updated near the end of each year. I don't have much traffic there but it's nice to have a repository of sorts. Facebook and other social media is simply easier to update and by far reaches a larger audience. I've toyed with the idea of letting my site go at the end of this year but haven't gotten around to actually pulling the plug yet.
 
I have one. Does some live updating with position, temp, wind, etc. Just a lot trouble to put everything i want in it, so just haven't bothered with it in almost a year. I probably will let it go as don't really see any type of ROI from it, even if i get everything i want in it. Haven't really had time to do any updating to it, just lost interest in it.
 
I never had a website, but I'll post this anyway because what I can say is pretty relevent to Tony's question.

I never made a website I because I was never trying to generate income from my chasing, and I knew of no other motivation for having a website as far as I was concerned. I was content to post vids on YouTube and let people see my stuff there. A few got hits of about 15K to 35K.

Then, around 2006 or so, some of you may remember, Google changed how YouTube works, and funnelled channel views mostly through social media. At least, I THINK that's what they did. I actually don't know, but the url for my channel changed, and all of a sudden when I would post something instead of immediately getting thousands of hits I would get, like, 6. This despite the fact that to this day I have 257 subscribers.

I don't understand how I can have 257 subscribers and when I post a good video, like, say, Pilger, I get 6 hits, but whatever. I won't do social media. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, nothing, and I'm fine with hardly anyone seeing my videos. I do post in the storm reports on here when I catch something good so you guys can all see them.
 
I have an active website. Of course, I'm unique in that my full-time job is web development. I agree though that there aren't too many active storm chasing websites left out there.

Here is mine: severevideos.com

My goal really, is to add some other storm chasers to it. My thought is... I'll maintain the website. I'll promote other chaser's videos, and in turn, other chasers agree to re-tweet, share, etc anything that Severe Videos publishes. So basically, I envision Severe Videos being a marketing platform where we all help each other promote each other's videos.

The website has a memorable name, "Severe Videos". So it's easy to tell people about. If I didn't have the domain name, I would absolutely focus far more on social media than the website.

It's just the world that we live in. Everything tends to consolidate. So where 10 years ago there were a lot of individual storm chaser websites with videos and blogs, today everything has consolidated onto YouTube for videos and Facebook for blogs. It's much easier for a consumer to consume storm chasing content when it's all in one location than it is to have to visit 20 or 30 websites.

I think storm chasers have realized that nobody goes to websites to consume content anymore. Everything is on YouTube and social media. Since that's where all of the consumers all, it makes sense to focus our time and energy there.
 
I still keep mine, but only update parts of it. My chase reports is current, though I have discovered that stupid Facebook stopped giving me a way to link to my Facebook gallery (for non Facebook members) for a specific chase season as I had been doing the last couple of years. I might actually go back to updating my website thanks to Facebook being a pain in the ass. I also still update my comet/aurora/space photos and plan on updating my butterflies. I regularly update my weather links that I use personally for chasing.

harkphoto.com



Bill Hark
 
I touched on this in a previous thread about how an entire era of storm chasing has nearly vanished due to many chaser web sites going dead. I now think that this includes the modern era of chasing. In 10 years or more, anyone wanting to go back and see the photos, videos and chase accounts of times past will find almost nothing. The abandonment of web sites has nearly erased the 1990-2010 era of chasing from existence. The exclusive reliance on social media has done the same thing to the subsequent years right up until the present. Social media is a black hole for content - a largely unsearchable medium with no organized way to catalog and display photos nor a way for user looking to find them. Social media gives a photo a viral round for a few days, then it is lost into the abyss forever. Anyone - a new chaser, an enthusiast, historian, journalist, etc - simply will not be able to find any substantiative documentation of storm chasing's history, issues and notable events.

In the previous thread, I put forth the example of Mulvane. If you perform a Google search for the Mulvane tornado, you can see how few chase accounts, photos and videos remain online from an event that used be covered prominently by dozens of chaser sites.

I have always felt that it was important to document events for future generations, and I have more or less maintained a thorough documentation of my chases continuously since 1993. I am still using a catalogging format I started in 2001:


I will admit that putting together chase logs - especially with photos and videos - is a very time consuming task. A chase account from a big day like Dodge City can take three or four days of work: writing, photo and video editing, proofreading and corrections, etc. I can see why the quintessential "chase account" has fallen out of practice with the masses. Its main purpose is for historical documentation, and most just aren't going to see that as enough of a life priority to justify the time and/or expense.

Some of this may be due to chasing just not meaning that much to current generations. I started chasing in an era where seeing a memorable tornado was a major life highlight worthy of writing about. For many chasers, a big catch seems like more of a throwaway, and they just move on to the next fleeting event to similarly be consumed and cast aside in a day's time.

There are a lot of parallels to other eras gone by. Steam locomotives used to be everyday items, as common to see as an 18-wheeler is for us now. When steam was replaced by diesels in the 1950s, railroads promptly scrapped all of their old locomotives with no consideration for historical preservation. Today the value of the very few steam locomotives that have survived is apparent by the tens of millions of dollars spent restoring them to operation and the large crowds that gather trackside to see them.

Sadly, I don't see chaser sites or detailed accounts ever making a comeback. But for those of us who stay the course and keep a site going, like the few remaining steam engines that draw crowds, they will become one of very few ways to look back at the past by future generations.
 
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Very well said Dan. You are spot on, and it saddens me. As I grow older, I get more nostalgic, and become more appreciative of the value of legacy and documented history, both personal and of the world. I have been reading more biographies lately and marvel at the rich historical tapestries that can be assembled based upon original source material such as letters and correspondence. So much of that is no longer going to exist and be available for future historians - and it’s not just a problem affecting storm chasing. To paraphrase the author Nassim Taleb, our reliance upon digital mediums results in a “fragility” to historical documentation. In the Smithsonian, they have Roosevelt’s typed speech after Pearl Harbor, the one where he says the famous phrase, “a day that will live in infamy.” This was a written edit on a typed paper. It just would not have the same effect to see a similar edit today in a Microsoft Word document that had “track changes” turned on - if such a transitory version were even saved at all. The issue is not just storm chasing, it is an overall digital vs analog issue, and it’s made worse with social media vs a curated site like Stormtrack. I think the fragile and ephemeral nature of digital in general, and social media in particular, is what has made people spend less time on chase accounts; there is no tangible feel of good historical documentation for its own sake anymore. I really wish every chaser would get the hell off of Facebook and make Stormtrack the one curated repository for everything chasing related. I sure hope the owners and caretakers of this forum protect it forever.
 
I keep chase logs at NNWX.US since 2010 but don't really promote it or get a lot of traffic. It's mostly become a place for myself to log my chases for my own use, but if someone stumbles upon it and finds it interesting, cool! I do keep it updated, it has a live tracker for when I'm out and I know friends and family use that. I also keep track of my chase stats there with a custom wordpress plugin that integrates with the posts.

It's also a place where I keep side projects like my mesoanalysis viewer which downloads the SPC sector mesoanalysis graphics for every tornado watch. The GUI has work to be done, but that comes in really handy when I need to write a log and the national meso archive just doesn't cut it.

But yes, Dan is right, the motivation to keep it updated is a struggle, definitely a large time investment. I just tell myself future me will appreciate it. I usually write all the logs for a season in the summer/fall after utilizing GPS logs and video to refresh my memory on what I did that day.
 
Dan Robinson said:
I touched on this in a previous thread about how an entire era of storm chasing has nearly vanished due to many chaser web sites going dead. I now think that this includes the modern era of chasing. In 10 years or more, anyone wanting to go back and see the photos, videos and chase accounts of times past will find almost nothing. The abandonment of web sites has nearly erased the 1990-2010 era of chasing from existence. The exclusive reliance on social media has done the same thing to the subsequent years right up until the present. Social media is a black hole for content - a largely unsearchable medium with no organized way to catalog and display photos nor a way for user looking to find them. Social media gives a photo a viral round for a few days, then it is lost into the abyss forever. Anyone - a new chaser, an enthusiast, historian, journalist, etc - simply will not be able to find any substantiative documentation of storm chasing's history, issues and notable events.

In the previous thread, I put forth the example of Mulvane. If you perform a Google search for the Mulvane tornado, you can see how few chase accounts, photos and videos remain online from an event that used be covered prominently by dozens of chaser sites.

I have always felt that it was important to document events for future generations, and I have more or less maintained a thorough documentation of my chases continuously since 1993. I am still using a catalogging format I started in 2001:


I will admit that putting together chase logs - especially with photos and videos - is a very time consuming task. A chase account from a big day like Dodge City can take three or four days of work: writing, photo and video editing, proofreading and corrections, etc. I can see why the quintessential "chase account" has fallen out of practice with the masses. Its main purpose is for historical documentation, and most just aren't going to see that as enough of a life priority to justify the time and/or expense.

Some of this may be due to chasing just not meaning that much to current generations. I started chasing in an era where seeing a memorable tornado was a major life highlight worthy of writing about. For many chasers, a big catch seems like more of a throwaway, and they just move on to the next fleeting event to similarly be consumed and cast aside in a day's time.

There are a lot of parallels to other eras gone by. Steam locomotives used to be everyday items, as common to see as an 18-wheeler is for us now. When steam was replaced by diesels in the 1950s, railroads promptly scrapped all of their old locomotives with no consideration for historical preservation. Today the value of the very few steam locomotives that have survived is apparent by the tens of millions of dollars spent restoring them to operation and the large crowds that gather trackside to see them.

Sadly, I don't see chaser sites or detailed accounts ever making a comeback. But for those of us who stay the course and keep a site going, like the few remaining steam engines that draw crowds, they will become one of very few ways to look back at the past by future generations.
Click to expand...
Great post, and a very unfortunate circumstance.

Having now had a "real job" for a few years, I can empathize with others' reluctance to pour tens of hours per year into actively maintaining personal sites; my own eagerness to do so has certainly dropped off some, I admit.

On the other hand, I have every intention of keeping my existing chase logs and media available as long as I'm alive. I think I pay something like $3/mo. for hosting, which is well worth the historical value to other chasers/enthusiasts of the archive I've built up, in my eyes. I also plan to continue adding new logs to the extent of at least uploading photos, videos, and GPS tracks, when possible (even if there's now a 6-month latency in my actually posting some of that!).

It is deeply saddening to see how much information and media from banner days early in my career (e.g., 28 Mar 2007 or 23 May 2008) has already evaporated from cyberspace. It doesn't seem like that long ago! I'm guessing that the Wayback Machine can recover some of this, but that generally requires one to remember offhand which site(s) had the content to begin with.

Like you, I place a large share of the blame for this situation on social media. It's true that lots of hardcore chasers from 10 or 15 years ago have moved on in life, and some of them likely would've abandoned their personal sites anyway. But social media has served as a sort of placebo substituting for more robust, searchable archives, and the allure of instant gratification has captivated many who might otherwise have chosen the latter. I'm naively hopeful that between YouTube, ST report threads, and the dwindling ranks of personal sites, just enough descriptive data and media will survive from all the high-end days of our current era to be of use to future chasers.
 
Thank you all for your thoughts, its interesting to see the similarities and differences between you all and myself. Dan, as others have said, your post is very insightful and brings up many interesting and worthy points on the subject.

I touched on it in my original post, me trying to get my site back up and running a few times. I point I think I missed out on was where to start. When my website hit it's final stages, that was many years ago. Since then, I've had dozens of noteworthy chases that include events like Geneseo, Pilger, Dodge, Carpenter, Moore '13 (the day I did NOT chase)... it's hard to even know where to start. As Dan said, it takes a lot of work to put everything together. He, I know, has multiple cameras in the order of double what I have running in a day. There is also GPS logs, trying to get everything timed, etc. When you leave yourself a gap of time, you're not suddenly just creating a site, you're now trying to catch up. Clearly, an event like Pilger is PROBABLY a once-in-a-lifetime chase, and even those a step or two below are worth sharing. You'd be doing yourself a giant mis-service by NOT including such events on a website.

It is sad to see how many have fallen by the wayside, mine included. And Dan's right, being able to go and take in logs over the last decade is virtually impossible. Even as everyone has their own reasons, the end result is the same. I also agree that such things will not find a comeback anytime soon. Chris made a good point in that having a website does in a sense secure your history, as Facebook (or any social media platform) could go away in the future, and likely taking away your posting history with it. On your own site, you maintain a sense of control over that.

I still have archives of my site, multiple versions dating back to the late 90s, and with Wordpress, I could pretty easily resurrect my site with a small amount of work and at least bring the archives back. And again, I have tried a few times, just never got those wheels moving. It comes in phases, and maybe a new phase of motivation will come and I will do something with it. I don't really know. I want to, the desire is there, even if it's on a back-burner.

We'll see. But a good discussion, and I appreciate those of you that do maintain websites and give you immense kudos for continuing your passion projects beyond anything I have done. For what it is worth, I do visit! :)
 
I have a website, but in no way weather related. Its deff outdated, I've had great intentions of updating (even started working on it earlier this year, but never finished (the files are sitting on my other computer, waiting until I finish the rest)). What happened to the year? Where did it go?
I was even half tempted to not bother renewing my domain-name when it came due last month.

I don't do facebook or twitter (when MySpace was a thing years ago, that one I actually liked & wasted a fair bit of time on). I do have a YouTube (2 actually) My main one wasn't started as a storm/weather related channel, but rather I guess best word is "hobby-ish stuff". Lately its ended up just getting weather uploads - boring stuff like the little storms we get here.
I wish YouTube had a way to make subdirectories for uploads, then I could categorize my videos.
 
I still keep stormdude.com updated with chase logs after each season.

My website doesn't include a lot of tornado intercepts, so it's never had much of an audience. But I've always valued the season-spanning chase logs of others, with the full mix of hits and misses. I figure it gives a more realistic view of real-world chasing for those who take the old-school approach of self-reliant forecasting.

Not that I don't ever consider SPC and other forecasters, but there are many days I've ignored them completely. The result has been both big misses and incredible intercepts, plus many days when I end up on a secondary storm and avoid both chase crowds and tornadoes.

Recently, I've begun posting regularly on my storm-chase-only Instagram account @dchapmanphoto. (Still have @supercellseeker, but that's more for personal posts now.)
 
I still have my storm chasing website at:


I still post reports on every chase, along with some local outings for lightning, thundersnow. etc., and some documentation of unusual weather events. My site spans 2007 through 2019, and I have some older stuff on an older site I no longer maintain but most of it is still up, linked from my main storm chasing website. I very much agree with what Dan and others have said about the value of websites and the loss of documentation over time associated with the demise of Websites and the shift to social media. I have never been on Twitter and probably never will, but do participate fairly actively on Facebook. However, I do not find Facebook overly useful for storm chasing stuff (though I do post it) because of its inexplicable algorithms for who sees what and its uselessness after a few days. Websites and sites such as Stormtrack are much better for that. I don't keep track of how many people visit my website so I don't know, but suspect it is no longer very many. However, it is there for people who are interested in some event I chased or who just want to learn a little about chasing, and I find it a useful info source for myself to go back and refresh my memory on past chases. Comes in handy occasionally when some discussion of a past event comes up here or on Facebook, for example. So I will continue to maintain my Website and post material as long as I chase, which I hope will be for most of how ever many remaining years I have left at the age of 70.

Also, somebody earlier mentioned a drastic drop in views on YouTube around 2006 - I experienced much the same. Whatever they changed seems to have reduced that site's value for storm chasing, though I do still post videos there just so I can link them in my reports. At least there if you can find somebody's channel you can find their older stuff with relative ease, which does not seem to be the case with Facebook.
 
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