Who Here Still Has *ACTIVE* Websites?

[Nathan Parker]

I use WebMate.me. There's a link to it on my website at parkernathan.com. Been with them for years, and they're rock solid. I know the support team personally.

I do believe that we'll see more people start their own sites. I've done more with blogging now that I left all mainstream social media.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

I'm still doing my website, obviously. I'm using wordpress, personally. I wrote a plugin for wordpress to manage my chases, and really like how my site has turned out. With big tech censorship issues, I've been working on posting all of my original chase content on my website so that youtube isn't the only source for the content.

Currently I am using a wordpress plugin called Simply Static to generate static HTML files and then upload my site to Amazon S3 for hosting, which has CDN support with AWS CloudFront. I'm running wordpress locally on my server in my house so it just publishes when I want to. This allows me to keep costs very low, less than $10/month for a 100GB sized website including videos. I also would contend that my website is faster loading than pretty much any other chaser website due to this design.

I also wrote a bunch of scraper scripts to pull mesoanalysis, models, mesonet, and other data while chasing so that I can use the files later on for chase recaps. The thought is to have the site around for years longer than me. There's some documentation for tornadoes that people may be interested in 20-50 years down the road, and I hope they are able to find my information.

For those of you wanting to start webpages, I highly recommend using wordpress to manage your site. It's the most popular out there, and lots of extendibility with plugins to do pretty much anything you want to do.

 

[Drew Terril]

You can definitely do a lot with Wordpress. I unfortunately haven't kept mine up to date (I don't think I've done a chase log since 2016), but being OTR like I was limited my time to devote. Before chase season, I should bring mine up to date. Helps being on a "normal people" schedule where I actually have time for stuff.

 

[Ryan Schwartz]

I think if I was to get back into doing chase logs again, I would do it in vlog format to give it a more modern twist since photos/graphics/video play a big role in these logs. I think it would give a greater immersion experience for the viewer of what putting all the miles on is like, especially if someone watching isn't a chaser.

 

[Nathan Parker]

Update on my websites. I'm still blogging at WeatherTogether.net, but I'm shutting down my personal blog at parkernathan.com. My blog wasn't getting a lot of traffic, and the website was becoming difficult to maintain, so I decided it wasn't worth spending over $100/year for it.

I'm temporarily pointing parkernathan.com to my WeatherTogether blog. Next year, I plan to re-launch parkernathan.com with an online course I'm going to sell about PhD programs (now that I completed my PhD program, I've had students asking me to create an online course sharing my study habits with them). If I can sell enough a year to at least cover my hosting costs so the website is self-sustaining, I'll be happy. If it turns out to be a success and I make money off of it, I'll always take it.

Instead of a blog of "random topics" no one really cares about reading, I may launch a SubStack newsletter specifically focused on my PhD field. Write a couple of articles a month that are actually of substance.

 

[Shawn Camp]

I would LOVE..........LOVE to put up a WEBSITE.........something me and my crew are discussing......... and NO........... the name will NOT BE REVEILED until the site goes up..............and it will be copywrited and protected................ more details later on this....... but until then..................tune in to NBCDFW.COM FOR WEATHER IN DFW and around the area. NEWS 5............... THE BEST IN TEXAS ............NBC 5............... NBCDFW.COM

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