I formally stopped updating mine after the 2017 season. I even left a note:
Jeff Duda's Storm Chasing - 2017
FWIW, my stuff is hosted on Iowa State's student profile server, so it has been completely free and may stay up for a long time to come. However, I no longer remember the ssh address or password for my account on that machine, so I couldn't update it anymore if I wanted to.
But that's the thing...I don't have the same desire to put up web pages detailing my chase accounts that I once did. For one, the novelty has worn off. For two, social media has absolutely obliterated the world that these web sites once occupied. Social media has done some real damage to society, but so many of us are hooked on it and keep feeding the process. The effort vs. attention we get --
from posting a blurred or grainy pic of a distant tornado gets some people 100 likes/faves within minutes (which is something you can pretty much do nowadays while using the other hand to hold the wheel as you skid down that muddied up dirt road with the tornado still in progress.)
-- so overwhelms that from putting up a well-narrated webpage/blog, even if the grammar, photos, videos, and meteorological data are fitting for a production-value Blu-ray or textbook. All most of us care about are those like/fave numbers, because that's how we derive our value as a person, apparently.
Seriously, social media, especially everything owned by Facebook, is just the worst anymore. I never hear a news article about Facebook that has anything positive to say about the entity anymore. It's all about how they're sucking up all our data/info and using it against us, and how much horrible shit someone like Mark Zuckerberg is doing in his attempt to complete world domination. I'm not innocent of this, of course, as I have basically moved my social media existence from FB to Twitter, although I do appreciate the limits of what you can post on Twitter and how easy it is to filter what you see there. I also am guilty of posting stuff to get likes/faves on Twitter from time to time, and I also post weather content on there every so often, but most of that is just random/passing musings on what is currently going on rather than creating a record for posterity, as a blog or website serves to.
But I'd be willing to bet most of what I'm worth that social media is almost entirely the reason for the decline of activity on chaser web sites.
My final reason for posting less often lately is that the past few chasing years have been pretty awful for me, and my life is starting to move beyond chasing as the springtime priority it once was. I have moved away from the core of Tornado Alley, moved from being a grad student with too much free time to having a full-time job in a different culture, and seeing other life passions start to move in on the space occupied by chasing. During most of the chases I had in 2018 and 2019 I ended up turning around and driving home starting as early as 4:30 PM because it was clear to me that I was already so far out of position (or the scenario had so severely altered from what was forecast the day before) that I would have to make drastic and uncomfortable sacrifices in order to have any sort of play for the day, and considering my ongoing financial and temporal limitations, I deem it not worth it to continue chasing. On 95% of those such days, when I later examine chaser reports from others, I end up feeling vindicated in choosing to turn around. Thus my motivation and willingness to put in the extra effort for anything has become much more meticulous. It is also annoying that it feels like the past season or two has generally only featured one compressed outbreak sequence in mid-late May, and then that's just about it for the season. We don't seem to be getting the regular trough/one-two-day event sequences from mid-April to late May. Shit...
it snowed in Denver after my last May chase this year. If the meteorology would ever go back to being more friendly for those who can't afford to take three weeks straight for chase-cations and bigger events that are predictable more than 24 hours in advance (that also pan out), then I and my recently-purchased D750 would be out there more often for sure. Hopefully also I can store up more PTO and have some money laying around (and someone to watch my dog on short notice) so that I feel comfortable leaving home for more than 8 hours at a time, too.
